by Heath Heggem/KRTV
There are 100 packs of wolves that den in Montana, but that number doesn’t include the packs from Idaho, Wyoming, and Canada that spend some of their time in the Treasure State.
So how do we know the number of packs in the state? According to Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks, it’s through a lot of legwork put in over a great deal of time.
All of the information about Montana’s wolf population is kept in a corner cubicle in a state building in Helena. The number of packs, their size, and their location can all be found at the Department of Justice.
To actually find the packs and gather the information, officials have to head outside. “It’s a lot of driving, a lot of hiking, on ATV’s and literally you are looking for patterns,” explained Gray Wolf Program Coordinator Carolyn Sime. “Patterns on the landscape, patterns of public reports, tracks that you find, scat you find to try and get a hand on how that pack or new pair of wolves is moving around the landscape.”
Once the wolves are located in an area, attempts are made to trap a pack member, and then, if possible, fit it with a radio collar. But the state can’t afford to collar every wolf, so a majority of the work is done on the ground and in the air.
Sime said, “The monitoring goes on year-long and it is one of the most important nuts and bolts things that FWP does. Not only for wolves, but for any wildlife species. Once you have that information, we’re going to report a minimum number in our state and each hunting unit. We know there’s at least that many.”
The estimate is that Montana has 500 wolves spread out in more than 100 packs. Both numbers are much higher than the target number for de-listing. But having a healthy population is only half the battle.
In order to keep wolves off the endangered list, the state must continually prove it can manage that population. “There’s two parts to that,” Sime said. “One is the long term future of the wolf and showing that it’s doing fine, that’s monitoring. But also to demonstrate to the satisfaction of a federal judge that state management is not going to decimate the population the way some people have feared.”
The full implementation of Montana’s wolf management plan didn’t take effect until May of last year, and in the months since then, Montana’s wolf population has increased slightly.
A big part of the state management plan is hunting, which is very unpopular with some conservation groups. We’ll hear their side of the story in part 3 of our Living With Wolves series.