LAURA LUNDQUIST, ?Chronicle Staff Writer
People are now allowed to trap Montana’s wolves, but at least one group wants to create a trap-free zone around Yellowstone National Park.
Two weeks ago, Montana’s Fish, Wildlife & Parks Commission approved trapping throughout the state as a method for killing wolves during the 2012-2013 hunting season.
The trapping season will run Dec. 15 to Feb. 28. Snares are prohibited, and trappers are required to take a certification course. Trappers may take up to three wolves.
That’s three wolves too many in areas that border Yellowstone National Park, said Chris Colligan, Wyoming wildlife advocate for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.
“It’s disappointing, because up until this year, Montana’s plan to deal with wolves has been the model to point to,” Colligan said. “Trapping is a blanket approach to managing wolves, and it needs to be more of a targeted approach.”
Wolves were reintroduced in the park starting in 1995, and enough time has passed for the population around the park to stabilize. The wolf population in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem has hovered around 130 wolves for the past four to five years, Colligan said.
“Managing numbers isn’t an issue in the Yellowstone area,” said coalition spokesman Jeff Welsch.
The commission eliminated quotas and allowed trapping in order to reduce the state wolf population by 60 percent. Wildlife managers estimated around 650 wolves were in Montana at the end of 2011.
With no area quotas, Colligan worried that trapping to kill 60 percent could decimate the greater Yellowstone population, possibly replicating the 2009 elimination of the Cottonwood Pack.
In 2009, the first year of wolf hunting in Montana, hunters shot four members, including the alpha male and female, of the 10-member Cottonwood Pack that wandered between the park and the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. Two of the wolves had been collared in the park, and their death eliminated the ability to track the remaining pups, which weren’t seen again.
In response, FWP created management units 313 and 316 north of Yellowstone to better monitor wolf hunting near the park.
For the 2012-2013 season, the commission did set quotas of two and three wolves for units 110 and 316, respectively.
Unit 110 sits west of Glacier National Park, extending only as far south as Whitefish. Unit 316 is a sliver of land bordering Yellowstone National Park, extending a short way into Carbon and Sweetgrass counties.
The coalition asserts that doesn’t go far enough.
It wants a trap-free buffer to surround the park, specifically in management units 310, 320 and 390. Those units account for a large area of southern Montana from the Absaroka Mountains to the Madison Range and north as far as Great Falls and Lewistown.
It wouldn’t be the first time such a buffer was proposed around a national park. In 2002, conservationists persuaded the Alaska Board of Game to establish a no-hunting buffer zone around Denali National Park. But eight years later, the Board of Game eliminated the zone, even though the wolf population in the park has dropped to a 20-year low.
“We submitted comments outlining the buffer zone after the season was proposed,” Colligan said. “We’ll propose it again when the commission meets on Dec. 3 to review the status of the hunt.”
Chairman Bob Ream said the FWP Commission considered the coalition’s comments, which is why they set the quota for unit 316.
“(The coalition) is just one of hundreds of groups whose comments we had to consider,” Ream said. “We said that we’d look at it at the December meeting, and if we think too many wolves have been killed, then we may shut some areas down.”
Ream said the commission has received more than 7,000 comments on the wolf season and another 500 have been received in the past week.