Officials investigate local wolf sightings
Fish and Game: Two cases were false alarms, third case still under investigation
By Chris Hunt - Assistant Managing Editor
POCATELLO - Local wildlife officers received three calls this week claiming wolves are roaming the fringes of the city.
According to Harry Morse, state Fish and Game information officer, biologists responded to all three calls. Two of them, Morse said, turned out to be false alarms - in both cases, he said, dogs were mistaken for wolves, which have not been sighted near Pocatello in decades.
The third call, made by a motorist driving home from work along Chubbuck Road, has not been discounted, Morse said. A Fish and Game biologists responded to the call at the intersection of Chubbuck Road and Olympus in Pocatello, where the reporting party said he saw four animals that looked a lot like wolves in a Conservation Reserve Program field. The animals had moved on by the time the officer arrived.
"No one with Fish and Game saw the animals," Morse said Friday. "The caller identified the animals as wolf-like, but there's no way for us to know for sure what kind of animals they were."
Morse said every year about this time, roaming packs of dogs are reported chasing deer, especially in rural areas of the city and along the boundary of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation.
This year, Morse said, the public might be a bit more apprehensive concerning wolves. Earlier this week, a pair of wolves were shot and killed in southwest Wyoming about 20 miles east of Bear Lake, and last week, a coyote hunter near Weston killed what was likely a wolf, apparently by mistake.
"People see this in the news," Morse said. "It's pretty common for them to call these kinds of reports in."
Several years ago, when a group of lions and lion-tiger hybrids - ligers - escaped from the Ligertown enclosure near Lava Hot Springs, Fish and Game got dozens of calls about big cats roaming the area near the resort community, even after all the cats were accounted for.
"We got one call during the Ligertown debacle that ended up being a Guernsey cow," Morse said. "Someone drove by and was absolutely convinced a liger was standing next to the highway. It was a cow. I'm not kidding."
Wolves are clearly returning to southeast Idaho after a decades-long hiatus. The large canines were reviled as predators and hunted to extinction across the Rocky Mountain West, largely because they posed a threat to livestock.
Today, wolves are back. Efforts to reintroduce them to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho have been very successful. In all, it's believed that as many as 600 wolves now inhabit the northern Rockies.
Anyone who sees what might be a wolf can call the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, but that agency has no jurisdiction over wolves in Idaho. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the lead wolf management agency.
The Boise office of the USFWS can be reached by calling (208) 378-5243.