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Email: timberwolfinfonetwork@gmail.com

MI: Wolf management a back-and-forth battle

Steve Griffin, for the Daily News

In the serve-and-volley process of managing wolves in Michigan and the Western Great Lakes region, the ball is once again in a federal court.

Last week, according to the Sportsmen’s Alliance, its lawyers and those of the Michigan DNR, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies and groups presented oral arguments in an appeal of an earlier ruling on Great Lakes wolf management.

The December 2014 decision in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., in a suit brought by the Humane Society of the United States, found that until wolves were deemed recovered throughout their entire historic range, virtually the entire United States, they could not be removed from national Endangered Species Act listing.

FWS had found wolves no longer endangered or threatened in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and delisted them in 2012, placing their management in state hands. The federal court ruled that delisting in error and returned management to the federal government.

Once Michigan natives, wolves had practically vanished by the early 1960s, the DNR said, battered by bounties, food shortages and other pressures.

Reintroduction failed, but by the 1980s a few animals wandered into the Upper Peninsula from Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ontario.

A couple of decades later the population eclipsed the FWS-established combined goal for Michigan and Wisconsin of 100 animals. Michigan managers had set their own goal of 200 wolves — a mark met for five straight years and now tripled. Almost all are in the UP, a few in the Lower Peninsula.

The reestablished wolves alarmed UP residents, killed pets and farm livestock, and are blamed by hunters and others for heavy predation of wildlife, especially white-tailed deer. The FWS de-listing seemed to offer management options.

Then came the federal court ruling.

State officials, a revised wolf management plan on their desks and a first-and-only successful wolf hunt in the books, found their hands once again tied.

They and other agencies and groups sought to have the district court ruling overturned.

(Meanwhile, between the FWS de-listing in 2012 and the U.S. District Court ruling, Michigan voters removed wolves from the game species list and withdrew Michigan Natural Resources Commission power to designate game species and hunting seasons — both measures rendered moot by a citizen ballot issue vesting those authorities in the NRC, passed by the Legislature. The federal court decision trumped all those measures.)

That ruling, said Sportsmen’s Alliance president Evan Heusinkveld in a news release last week, means, “it doesn’t matter that wolf numbers in the Great Lakes states are two or three times higher than the recovery goals adopted by the federal government in the 1990s.”

“The ruling by the lower court means that until wolves are found in Chicago, Seattle and New York, (they) cannot be managed appropriately by state wildlife experts in the Great Lakes states.”

Besides state and federal officials and the Sportsmen’s Alliance, groups joining the appeal included the Michigan United Conservation Clubs, Upper Peninsula Bear Houndsmen Association, the Michigan Hunting Dog Federation, Safari Club International, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Wisconsin Bear Hunters Association, National Rifle Association, and Wisconsin Bowhunters Association.

Wolf numbers changed little across the last two years, the DNR’s wildlife division reported, with at least 618 in the UP this year, Kevin Swanson, with the DNR’s Bear and Wolf Program, said in a news release last summer. That’s despite tumbling numbers there of deer, a main wolf food source.

Michigan’s 2008 wolf management plan, updated in 2015, would allow use of lethal means — killing wolves — to control a limited number of the animals each year where conflicts had occurred. Michigan law had also allowed citizens to kill wolves actively preying on their hunting dogs or livestock.

There have been legislative efforts to delist the wolf in the Great Lakes region, and DNR wildlife chief Russ Mason said in a news release earlier this year he’d welcome either legislative or judicial delisting of wolves, Otherwise, “We have limited (wolf) management options available to us at this time.”

A ruling in the appeal could come as early as the end of the year, the Sportsmen’s Alliance said.

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