By ERIC BARKER of the Tribune
The Idaho Department of Fish and Game announced Monday that it killed 17 wolves in the state’s remote Lolo Zone last month as part of a long-running effort to help struggling elk herds there.
The agency has carried out wolf control operations there for eight of the last nine years. This year, like last, the agency used a private contractor to kill the wolves by shooting them from helicopters. In previous years, the agency partnered with the U.S. Wildlife Services agency to carry out the work.
In a news release, the agency said the wolf control operation was carried out under the agency’s Elk Management Plan and its Lolo Predation Management Plan and is consistent with the state’s federally approved 2002 Wolf Conservation and Management Plan
The state plans allow the agency to kill wolves or other predators when they are “causing conflicts with people, or domestic animals, or are a significant, measured factor in deer and elk population declines,” according to the news release.
The agency did not immediately say how much the control effort cost but said it was paid for with funds generated by the sale of hunting licenses and tags and transferred to the Idaho Wolf Depredation Control Board.
The state began culling wolves in the Lolo Zone in 2011 and since then has killed an average of 14 wolves per year there. In addition, hunters and trappers have killed an average of 21 wolves per year there, including 24 this year.
Elk in the Lolo Zone have been struggling for about three decades. The herd there peaked with a population of about 16,000 animals in 1989 but has plunged since then. In 2017, the last time the elk herd was surveyed, the agency estimated its population at 2,000 animals.
Much of the decline occurred before wolves were reintroduced into Idaho and was blamed on habitat degradation and harsh winters. The area was altered by massive wildfires in the early 20th century that created ideal elk habitat. But since then the open brush fields created by the fire have grown old and dense and trees have encroached on the open areas.
Over the years, the department has scaled back on elk hunting seasons there. Cow elk hunts were eliminated and the number of bull elk tags was cut by half. At the same time, the agency liberalized its hunting regulations and bag limits for black bears and mountain lions.
“Restoring the Lolo elk population will require continued harvest of black bears, mountain lions and wolves along with wolf control actions,” the agency said in its news release. “The overall objective is not to eliminate wolves but to maintain a smaller, but self-sustaining wolf population in the Lolo Zone to allow the elk population to recover.”
Environmental groups slammed the wolf cull as unethical, unjustified and ineffective.
“The whole idea that killing wolves in the Lolo Zone is going to bring back elk populations to levels that were probably historic highs since the retreat of the glaciers I think is ludicrous from a scientific perspective,” said Gary Macfarlane, executive director of the Friends of the Clearwater at Moscow. “The conditions that created all that elk forage in the early 1900s, I don’t think can be replicated, and if they were replicated I don’t think it would be good for the health of everything else on the landscape.”
He said the formerly high elk numbers in the mid-20th century happened not only because of ideal habitat but also an intensive predator control program.