More wolves roam Upper Midwest
Tom Meersman, Star Tribune
Wolf numbers in the Upper Midwest are increasing, and packs may be getting larger and more numerous, according to new research.
Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan now have an estimated 3,800 gray wolves, experts said at a two-day conference last week in Hinckley, Minn. The populations increased in all three states, although the preliminary data for Wisconsin and Michigan suggest dramatic change in those states — 14 percent more wolves last winter than a year earlier.
Those states still have far fewer wolves than Minnesota, which has about 3,020 of them, up 23 percent since the last major survey in the winter of 1997-98, said John Erb, wolf biologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
Because large populations of wildlife are difficult to estimate, biologists can’t say how much Minnesota’s wolf population has increased from year to year — or whether it is leveling off.
The latest estimate, though presented as a single figure, could be somewhere between 2,301 and 3,708 animals, Erb said.
He said that most of Minnesota’s wolves live in about 485 packs averaging between five and six wolves each. Their range in central and northeastern Minnesota hasn’t expanded in the past few years, he said, although there have been occasional sightings of lone wolves as far south in Minnesota as Rochester and Albert Lea.
The wolves’ main prey, deer, has been abundant, which may explain why more wolves can survive in the same range. “Just over the past five years, our deer population was estimated to be 70 percent higher in the overall forested wolf range in Minnesota,” Erb said. “So it stands to reason that wolves don’t need as much real estate to survive.”
In Wisconsin, according to conservation biologist Adrian Wydeven, the unofficial estimate for the 2004-05 winter is 425 wolves, 52 more than the previous year. Wydeven said that the main surprise is that the number of wolf packs — about 109 — did not increase and that several packs now have seven to 10 members each, almost twice the typical size.
Conflict with farms
Some benefits of larger packs are that they tend to remain in the same area, and that not as many individuals are forming new packs and moving into agricultural areas, Wydeven said.
That would be a welcome change, he said, because wolf depredation on livestock or pets has been an increasing problem in Wisconsin. The number of farms with confirmed cases of livestock killed by wolves increased from eight in 2002 to 14 in 2003 to 22 last year.
“We could probably hold 500 wolves in Wisconsin, and if they’re distributed in the right places we would have almost no [livestock] depredation,” Wydeven said. “But it’s animals in the wrong place at the wrong time that we get these depredation problems.”
Dean Beyer, wildlife biologist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, said the preliminary estimate for wolves in the state’s Upper Peninsula in 2004-05 is 408 animals in 86 packs. Researchers also found a wolf in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula last year for the first time since 1910. It was fitted with a radio collar and monitored for several months before a coyote trapper mistakenly killed it, Beyer said.
Wolves once roamed over most of the United States. But by 1960 they were nearly eliminated from Wisconsin, Michigan — except Isle Royale — and most of Minnesota. No other eastern state has witnessed a similar revival of the species.
Less protection?
The success of the wolf’s recovery in the Upper Midwest is a major reason the federal government seeks to reduce the protection of the animals under the Endangered Species Act.
Wolves for decades had been listed as “threatened” in Minnesota and as “endangered” in all other states except for Alaska. In 2003, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reclassified all wolves in the eastern half of the United States as “threatened” because their populations had recovered sufficiently in the Great Lakes area.
Last July, the Wildlife Service proposed to remove gray wolves in the eastern United States from the threatened species list, allowing states and tribes with wolf populations on their lands to manage the wolves. This proposal would not affect protections for wolves in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho or in the Southwest, nor would it affect red wolves, a separate species found in the Southeast.
Environmental groups, including Defenders of Wildlife, are challenging the Wildlife Service in two lawsuits. One of their concerns is that federal officials didn’t follow proper procedures when changing the wolf’s status in 2003. The environmental groups also fear that the changes could affect wolves’ chances of recovering in other areas where they once roamed, such as the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast.
In January, a federal judge in Oregon agreed with the environmentalists and threw out the 2003 status change. The long-term status of the animals is uncertain because the federal agency has not determined whether it will appeal.