Management plans vary by state
By BRODIE FARQUHAR
Star-Tribune correspondent
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working to remove the gray wolf from protection of the Endangered Species Act in both the Great Lakes and Northern Rockies states.
Of the six states involved, all have wolf management plans that have either been approved by the federal agency or are on the way to being approve.
The last state plan to be approved — Wyomings — had long been on the outs with the federal agency, because the state defined the wolf as a predator outside national parks and adjacent wilderness areas. That means that outside that zone, wolves could be killed at any time for any reason.
Last month, elements of the Wyoming plan were accepted by the Fish and Wildlife Service, in exchange for a bigger zone in the northwest part of the state where the wolves would be managed as trophy animals.
The agreement leaves some conservationists with highly mixed feelings about delisting wolves — optimistic about wolves in the Great Lakes states and worried about how theyll fare in Wyoming and Idaho.
“The Great Lakes wolves are a classic Endangered Species Act success story, said Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife. The remarkable recovery efforts to restore the wolf have paid off, and the states are ready to assume the responsibilities of managing their own wolf populations. The states have demonstrated their commitment to wolf recovery while under federal protection, and we look forward to a continued commitment from these states to wolf conservation.
State by state
Amaroq Weiss, Western species conservation director for Defenders of Wildlife, said the six plans have a lot of variation.
I think the most comprehensive plan, the one we would hold out as a model, is Montanas plan, he said.
Montana’s plan, for example, regards wolves as just another natural predator, to be managed like bears and mountain lions.
Michigan and Wisconsin have just completed revisions to their plans.
Weiss said he believes the Minnesota wolf plan is flawed, because it contains a de facto bounty, in which the state reimburses hunters $150 a head for dead wolves.
Idaho and Wyoming are running neck and neck for worst state plans, from Weiss’s point of view. The Idaho plan pays lip service to managing wolves as big game, Weiss said, but both the governor and Legislature are on record that wolves should be removed from the state by any means necessary.
Weiss noted that Idahos big game plans call for 100,000 elk, 20,000 black bear and 100 wolves.
Defenders of Wildlife and other conservation groups are still troubled by the dual classification for wolves in Wyoming — as a trophy animal in northwest Wyoming and as a predator everywhere else.
Both Idaho and Wyoming are going for the smallest population possible of wolves, Weiss said.
Ag views
A senior manager of the Department of Interior, Paul Hoffman, said in an interview several years ago that the sticking point on the original Wyoming wolf plan is that it wasnt a regulated approach to managing wolves. Hoffman said Wyoming could set very high hunter bag limits for wolves outside the northwest corner of the state, which would effectively prevent the wolf from expanding farther into the state — the same goal as declaring the species a predator which can be shot on sight.
Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, acknowledged that he debated that very point with Hoffman and other Interior officials in the Bush administration.
Magagna defended the Wyoming plan as a regulated take and not a free-for-all because if the wolf population in Wyoming drops below a certain threshold, then the trophy area would be expanded and the predator status would be suspended until the wolf population recovered and rose above that threshold.
Wont work?
Thats factually true, but pragmatically wrong, said Jason Marsden, director of Wyoming Conservation Voters. The lack of a statewide regulated trophy animal hunting run by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department means that it is difficult to monitor what is happening out in the field, he said. There could easily be a significant gap between what happens in the field and the analysis of that data that would lead to suspending the predator rule.
According to Game and Fish spokesman Eric Keszler, notification must be within 72 hours for a trophy wolf kill, or 10 days for a predator wolf kill.
A lot of wolves could be killed very quickly before anyone realized it, Marsden warned.