Agency re-collars OR-4, but resources too tight to continue texting ranchers
By Joseph Ditzler
East Oregonian Publishing Group
The leader of the Imnaha wolf pack, the pack responsible for nearly all the livestock kills in Eastern Oregon, is once more wearing a GPS collar and under tight government surveillance.
But Wallowa County ranchers are unhappy that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is curtailing, temporarily, its text-message alerts that give them heads up when wolves are near.
“It took us by surprise,” said Rod Childers of Enterprise, chairman of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association wolf committee, Thursday. “That’s what I was told this morning.”
Wildlife division administrator Ron Anglin said Thursday the department in the past year spent 800 hours preparing and sending 5,000 text messages. He said the failure in January of the alpha male’s second GPS collar, which provides location data, presented a chance to rethink the project. He said the department is configuring a computer program to automatically download the GPS data, format it and post it on the Internet.
“Before the collar went off the air for a while, it turned into this huge time drain that prevented staff from doing anything else,” Anglin said. “The expectation was created that our people would be up at 5:30 in the morning, downloading to the computer and sending text messages out to a broad range of people, and again at 6 at night.”
In January alone the department provided 920 text alerts to Wallowa ranchers based on data downloaded from the GPS collar via satellite.
State wolf coordinator Russ Morgan of La Grande said the staff commitment became unsustainable. The information must be collected, sorted and interpreted before it’s forwarded as text messages, he said. Anglin said the department has no authority or money to hire someone to do just that job.
Anglin could not say when the automated system would come online. The technician assigned to it was pulled away to fix a bug in the department accounting system.
Childers said Anglin suspended the text service Thursday, a day after a three-person team captured the alpha male on the Zumwalt Prairie and replaced its failed GPS collar. Ranchers urged the department to replace the collar, a $3,500 item, to keep them apprised of the wolf’s whereabouts. Anglin said the Imnaha wolf was recaptured because the weather and opportunity were right, not because ranchers specifically asked for it.
Childers and Anglin discussed a temporary alert system until the automatic system becomes available.
“I?asked him if at least they could notify a couple of us in the county and we would take it upon ourselves to notify the rest of the people in the area. He said he would look into that,” Childers said.
As ranchers turn their cattle, including new calves, onto spring ranges, the text alerts provide important information, said Todd Nash, president of the Wallowa County Stockgrowers Association. Knowing where the wolves may be, or where they’re not, helps ranchers manage their herds.
“The text alert is good information,”?Nash said. “But it’s a bitter pill. There’s no rest for you if you know they’re in the area. There are 20 other things to do but you can’t bring yourself to not go out and check on those cattle.”
The text messages were sporadic since January, when the department fielded a range rider to track the wolf via VHF radio signals. The ranger rider program is curtailed, as well, partly because the wolves retreated into a remote area.
Morgan said the capture team employed an airplane to locate the wolf by its less sophisticated radio, a motor vehicle to track it and a helicopter to chase and dart it with a sedative. The animal, designated OR-4, is about 6 years old and weighs 115 pounds
“He’s perfectly healthy, not a thing wrong with him,”?Morgan said.
The animal has been captured three times and is savvy to aerial capture techniques, Morgan said. He said the team would have failed had it not located the animal in the open.
The pack was deemed responsible for bite wounds on three cows discovered March 8 on private property near Threebuck Creek. One was euthanized. The pack has killed more than 20 livestock animals since spring 2010.
Wolves are a protected species in Oregon.