Northwest Montana wolves well-behaved
By JIM MANN
The Daily Inter Lake
The Cessna 185 banks hard, turning tightly with a wing pointed down toward the signal emanating from a radio collar on one of the wolves in Northwest Montana’s Hog Heaven Pack.
The wolf is hidden in a thicket of timber far west of Polson, and no more than 200 yards away is a mother bison with a calf. The bison are not wild — they are livestock. Within a radius of no more than two miles is another collared wolf, two large clusters of bison and a single elk.
The collared wolves of the Hog Heaven Pack, and all other wolves located on a recent morning flight, have obvious choices in front of them: livestock or wild game.
And for several years now, the packs of Western Montana have shown a strong preference for fleet white-tailed deer over plodding cattle or bison.
Compared to the far more numerous and often-reported livestock depredations carried out by wolves in the Greater Yellowstone Area and Idaho, Western Montana wolves have been keeping a low profile.
“It’s kind of surprising to people that most wolves are around livestock every day of their lives and they kind of choose not to attack them,” said Ed Bangs, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s gray wolf recovery coordinator. “Given the unlimited opportunities for wolves to chase
livestock, it’s kind of surprising, even to us who work with them, that there’s as few conflicts as there are.”
That observation holds true particularly in Western Montana, where only six cows and one sheep were confirmed as being killed by wolves in 2004. The Cook Pack of Idaho, by contrast, killed 85 sheep last year, an offense so severe that all nine wolves in the pack were destroyed by federal trappers in a helicopter hunt. And just two weeks ago, 11 sheep were confirmed as being killed by wolves in the Paradise Valley north of Yellowstone National Park.
Kent Laudon, the new wolf management specialist for Northwest Montana, recalls working with the Cook Pack when he worked for the Nez Perce Tribe. His job for a while involved keeping tabs on the pack and hazing the wolves whenever it appeared they were getting close to livestock.
But there’s nothing easy about keeping up with a wolf pack, even when one or more of the animals are wearing radio collars. Laudon says he couldn’t keep up with the wolves and they eventually got into the sheep.
Since being hired by Fish, Wildlife and Parks last fall, Laudon has been trying to keep up with more than a dozen wolf packs with home ranges spread across the western part of the state.
A big part of the job is conducting regular monitoring flights with Dave Hoerner, a veteran contract pilot based out of Kalispell who makes the majority of wildlife monitoring flights in Western Montana.
After tracking down the Hog Heaven Pack, Hoerner and Laudon travel northwest to an area south of the Thompson Chain of Lakes, looking for the Fishtrap Pack. It doesn’t take long to dial in on collar signals and see a gray wolf and two black wolves in plain view. Laudon is fairly certain the wolves are at their denning site. At one point, he catches a glimpse of what he thinks might be a pup.
Last year, there were no confirmed livestock kills attributed to the Fishtrap Pack, but one of their own was found dead, with suspicions pointing toward people as the cause.
The Wolf Prairie Pack is next on the list, with signals emerging north of Pleasant Valley. The first wolf can’t be spotted. So Hoerner tries to locate the second.
As Hoerner approaches the signal, flying low over patchy ponderosa pine, three white-tailed deer pop out of the trees in full flight.
“He probably jumped those deer and missed. He’s out hunting,” Hoerner says of the wolf. Two passes later and the wolf comes into view, loping down a logging road.
Once again, there are cattle less than a couple miles away. The Wolf Prairie Pack is believed to be responsible for the loss of two calves last year, and possibly one so far this year.
The “probable” calf kill raises a simmering issue regarding wolves and livestock depredation statistics.
Many ranchers contend the statistics don’t match reality.
For Elmer “Mick” Sieler, the official stats on the Wolf Prairie pack in “no way, no shape, no form” represent the pack’s impacts on his herd in the Wolf Creek area north of Pleasant Valley.
“You’ve got to have solid evidence that they did the killing,” he said. “But when everything gets eaten, like wolves usually do, there’s no evidence left.”
A U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services agent investigated the probable calf kill earlier this year on Sieler’s ranch. The veteran agent determined that there was no way to confirm what had killed the calf, Sieler said.
After he turned his cattle out to graze last fall, his head count came up six short. “I feel I lost six calves last fall after I turned them out,” he said. “I had an old cow they killed and ate, but that’s just impossible to prove.”
The burden of proof can be stiff, but Laudon says that suspicions aren’t ignored. If it there is circumstantial evidence that a pack is getting into livestock, the suspect pack is watched closely, which is the case with the Wolf Prairie Pack.
Laudon set up Sieler with a noise-making “raid box” that is triggered by the approach of wolves that are wearing radio collars.
“This raid box sounds like a helicopter in Vietnam with a bunch of shotguns going off,” Sieler said.
Laudon, he said, “has tried to work with me. He’s been the best of the bunch.”
But the constant presence of wolves has Sieler, who is semi-retired and running a relatively small herd, considering getting out of cattle altogether.
“Baby-sitting a cow is bad enough without having to baby-sit wolves,” he said.
The flight proceeds to extreme Northwest Montana, where one wolf has been collared in the Candy Mountain Pack, which had three animals as of last December. On this flight, however, the signal can’t be picked up, demonstrating the often sketchy nature of keeping up with wolves.
With special clearance, Hoerner crosses 20 miles north of the Canadian border, looking for the Kootenai Pack, which denned in Montana last year and was therefore included in the Western Montana wolf count. Hoerner homes in on a signal coming from a treeline next to a meadow where there are frolicking deer and, not too far away, more cattle.
If it appears the transboundary pack dens in Canada this year, its members won’t be counted as Western Montana wolves. Laudon has already notified a Canadian biologist of their whereabouts.
Last on the flight are the Lazy Creek and Murphy Lake packs north of Whitefish. It’s after noon and the collared wolves are bedded down in the shade, out of sight from the circling airplane.
But Laudon studies their locations. In less than a week, he goes on to trap two wolves in the Murphy Lake Pack, fitting them with radio collars.
The first wolf to be captured already had a collar that Laudon replaced.
“I was a couple hundred yards from the den, and I’m kicking up whitetails,” Laudon said. “If anything, I think right around the den area the deer would be dispersed somewhat.”
Laudon and other wolf watchers say the abundance of whitetails has played a huge role in the relatively low incidences of livestock kills.
But that comes as no comfort to many hunters who contend that wolves have put a big dent in game populations.
Jim Williams, wildlife manager for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks in the northwestern part of the state, says he hears plenty of complaints from hunters. But all of his game check station and aerial survey numbers point to strong whitetail populations, largely because of six straight mild winters. Whitetails are far and away the main prey for wolves and other predators in Northwest Montana, Williams said.
“Frankly, it’s a whitetail system, and that’s the biggest difference between here and those other areas,” Williams said, referring to the Greater Yellowstone and Idaho wildlands populated by wolves.
Wolves do have impacts on whitetail populations, usually in specific areas, but they do not drive whitetail population trends.
“Typically, predators don’t drive prey species. It’s typically the other way around,” he said.
But Williams said he and the state’s biologists do have concerns about potential impacts of wolves on moose, which have smaller populations in more concentrated areas.
While livestock depredations attributed to wolves have been relatively scarce in recent years, there is a substantial history of cattle-killing wolf packs in Northwest Montana. Most notably, wolves took out 17 head of cattle and 30 sheep during the months that followed the severe winter of 1996-97.
Deep and long-lasting snow was devastating to wildlife, wiping out an estimated 50 percent of the whitetail population across Northwest Montana.
The wolves had a “textbook” reaction to the sudden decline in available game, Laudon says. As a result of the depredation incidents, seven wolves were relocated that year and 13 were destroyed.
But even after several years of relatively light depredation problems, Laudon says packs in close proximity to livestock are always cause for questions and concerns.
That’s especially true when summer comes and cattle are turned out onto large grazing leases, raising the potential for unconfirmed wolf kills.
“All you are left with is a question mark,” Laudon said.
Wolves in Idaho and the Greater Yellowstone inhabit much larger swaths of remote areas, but there is also a good mix of open prairie that is suitable for large livestock operations, Bangs said. Western Montana, by contrast, has rugged country with thick vegetation and considerably less livestock.
And there are far fewer sheep grazing in Northwest Montana.
Sheep, Bangs said, are extremely easy prey not only for wolves, but also for coyotes, mountain lions, even eagles.
Despite the abundant populations of white-tailed deer in Northwest Montana, the region’s wolf populations have remained relatively low for years,
“This year, our estimate of wolves was 835 wolves (throughout Idaho, Wyoming and Montana) and only 59 of those are in Western Montana,” Bangs said. “The vast majority of wolves are in Yellowstone and western Idaho, where there are huge blocks of contiguous public land.”
Western Montana wolf populations have remained relatively small and highly dynamic, fluctuating from year to year. Some years packs don’t den and there aren’t pups, and when there are pups some leave the pack.
Sieler said he and other ranchers he knows are certain there are more wolves than are reflected in the official counts.
“I know what I see and I know what other ranchers are seeing,” he said. “I’ve taken a snowcat out in the hills and just about anywhere you can find tracks.”
Laudon says that is a common perception, and he readily concedes that his efforts certainly don’t account for every wolf on the landscape.
“We just try not to get into guessing” about wolf populations, he said. “And we try to stick with what we know.”
Counts are based on observations, either from telemetry flights or from reliable eyewitness accounts on the ground.
Laudon says new packs do not escape detection for long, and people commonly underestimate how far wolves can range.
“People can see tracks all over the place, but they’re not used to the fact of how much wolves travel and how big their home ranges are,” Laudon said.
Some packs are cohesive, but others can routinely fragment and later regroup. The numbers in a pack can be highly fluid. The Fishtrap Pack’s official population estimate as of last December, for example, was five animals. But in February, the pack was estimated at eight or nine animals.
Some packs can be extremely elusive, even if they have wolves wearing radio collars.
Radio collars in two packs — the Red Shale and Great Bear packs — that were roaming in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex have not been heard since the end of March 2004. Both packs had enormous home ranges and Laudon believes that’s played a part in problems locating them.