Final federal reintroduction rules satisfy state, upset conservation groups
By Pete Aleshire
The federal government this week finalized a plan to increase the range of endangered Mexican gray wolves tenfold, a shift that could bring the beleaguered predators to Rim Country.
The rule change won praise from the Arizona Game and Fish Department, but spurred criticism by environmentalists, hunters and ranchers.
Environmentalists objected to a plan to cap the number of wolves at 325 and recapture and remove wolves that wander into areas north of Interstate 40, like the Grand Canyon.
Some hunters and ranchers objected to any expansion of the range, given the wolves’ reliance on elk for most of their food in addition to sometimes killing cattle. The federal government has a program to compensate ranchers for cattle killed by the wolves, but many ranchers say the program doesn’t cover their losses.
The new rules for the 83 Mexican gray wolves now living in portions of far eastern Arizona and western New Mexico will allow for the introduction of new wolf packs in a vast sprawl of central Arizona, which includes all of Rim Country. The introductions locally would most likely occur in remote, unpopulated areas like the Hellsgate Wilderness.
The rules call for the eventual establishment of up to 325 wolves roaming wild in that Arizona and New Mexico. If the wolf populations grow above that number, biologists may trap and move them — most likely down into Mexico, which is just beginning reintroduction efforts of its own, with a single breeding pair and several pups.
The rule change will list the Mexican gray wolves as an endangered subspecies, but continue its listing as an “experimental, non-essential” population. The “nonessential” designation gives wildlife managers more flexibility to kill or remove wolves that pose a problem by threatening people, pets, cattle or even the stability of local elk populations.
“Successfully establishing a larger population of Mexican wolves in a wider working landscape requires striking an appropriate balance between enabling wolf population growth and minimizing impacts on livestock operators, local communities and wild ungulates (elk, deer and bighorn sheep). This new rule achieves that balance,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Southwestern Region Director Benjamin Tuttle.
Arizona Game and Fish Assistant Director Jim deVos hailed the new rules, which included a cap on the number of wolves and a smaller reintroduction area than previously proposed.
“No one in a negotiation gets everything they would have liked,” said deVos. “We believe what the service announced is a sound, science-based contribution to the recovery of the Mexican wolf.”
Game and Fish still wants the federal government to develop an overall plan that includes a target population for both the U.S. and Mexico, but the USFWS studies have already conceded the need for such a plan. deVos said the USFWS will never know whether the reintroduction has succeeded if it doesn’t have a goal for a healthy, sustainable population in both the U.S. and Mexico.
deVos strongly supported new rules that would allow the USFWS to capture and relocate wolves if monitoring efforts showed they had reduced local elk populations by more than 15 percent.
Arizona has about 50,000 elk, which form the basis of the hunting industry that largely sustains the Arizona Game and Fish budget. deVos said that although wolves will hunt deer, javelina, rabbits, bighorn sheep and other game, the reintroduced wolves in Arizona have relied mostly on elk. A wolf consumes about one elk per week, which means 300 wolves would eat about 15,000 elk per year if they lived only on elk. That amounts to about 30 percent of the existing elk herd in the state annually.
On the other hand, some environmental groups said that although the new rules represent an improvement, the limits on the total number of wolves and the range means the wolves will never establish a stable, self-sustaining population in the United States.
“The Mexican gray wolf recovery program has been hamstrung from the start and this new management rule doesn’t go nearly far enough to fix the problem,” said Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Capping the population and keeping them out of the Grand Canyon and northern New Mexico will keep the lobo on the brink of extinction.”
Eva Sargent of Defenders of Wildlife said, “The rule is a classic ‘one step forward, one or two steps back’ and will ultimately hinder the recovery of these iconic and imperiled wolves. Allowing Mexican gray wolves to disperse over a broader area is a positive, but that positive is negated by an unfounded population cap and increased authorized killing — neither of which is based in the science that says what’s best for lobos.”
The final rule ran counter to a recommendation by the USFWS recovery team’s recommendation, which would have allowed the wolves to disperse more widely to seek good habitat. The recovery team initially recommended establishing populations in the Grand Canyon and perhaps northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. The study said the wolves needed three different, connected populations of about 250 wolves each to provide a stable, separate populations to reduce the chance some disaster like a massive fire, drought or other shift could cause an extinction. That recommendation would have resulted in a target of 750 wolves in the U.S.
However, deVos said the USFWS rules appropriately limited the wolf recovery area mostly to areas with sizable elk populations, while still providing a connection to Mexico — which once provided the vast majority of the Mexican gray wolves’ range.
“The recovery cannot occur in the United States alone and we need more than one population,” said deVos. “Mexico has 90 percent of the historic range of the wolves. We think a population of 325 (in the U.S.) is an ecologically based number. Get more wolves than that and you start having an adverse impact on other wildlife species.”
deVos noted that Game and Fish already has a complicated, ongoing process for tracking elk populations in order to decide how many hunting tags to give out in each game management area. “We would have a complicated process for determining whether wolves are having an adverse impact (on the elk herds). For instance, if we’d had a Wallow Fire in a given area we would expect that to impact the elk numbers — in the short term down, in the long term up. So we develop a report as to what we believe is occurring and submit that to scientific peer review and then go to the wildlife service to possibly issue a permit to actively manage wolves. The goal is to not hunt wolves until we have a fully recovered population — if you have 325 in the U.S. and 18 in Old Mexico, that’s not fully recovered.”
The federal government recently took the northern gray wolf off the endangered species list, which essentially turned over management of the recovered wolf populations to the states. Several states immediately adopted hunting seasons on the wolves, which began to sharply reduce their numbers.
Currently, the USFWS says there are about 1,700 northern gray wolves in the Rocky Mountain states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, broken into 320 packs and 78 breeding pairs.
In addition, Canada and Alaska have about 65,000 northern gray wolves.
The smaller, Mexican gray wolves remained on the endangered species list as an endangered subpopulation when the USFWS delisted the northern gray wolf.
The new rules would expand the area in which new packs can be introduced from 1,100 square miles top 12,500 square miles. It expanded the area in which the wolves could roam without being recaptured from 7,200 square miles to 154,000 square miles.
The 12,500-square-mile reintroduction area would include the Apache, Gila and Sitgreaves national forests plus the Payson and Pleasant Valley and Tonto Basin ranger districts of the Tonto National Forest and the Magdalena Ranger District of the Cibola National Forest in New Mexico.
The study predicts that most of the wolves in Arizona would remain in an area bounded by I-40 in the north, State Highway 93 on the west, the New Mexico border on the east and the Mexico border on the south.