Gray wolf could be coming off of Oregon’s protected species list
By Dylan J. Darling / The Bulletin
As their population grows and their territory expands, wolves might be coming off the list of protected animals in Oregon.
The state’s wolf program coordinator, Russ Morgan with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, plans to present the findings of a status review for the gray wolf at a Friday meeting in Bend. In the status review, posted online last week, the department recommends the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission delist the wolf.
“Factors related to wolf health, habitat, dispersal, habitat connectivity, and wolf survival all indicate a healthy and growing population that is unlikely to decline in the near-term,” reads the status review.
Because of overlapping jurisdictions of federal and state wildlife oversight, however, even if the state commission delists the wolf, it would have minimal impact in Central Oregon, where the species would still be under federal protection.
“Even if the state delisted (the gray wolf) it would still be federally protected,” said John Stephenson, Oregon wolf coordinator for the federal U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Bend. “It wouldn’t be that much of a change” for Central Oregon.
If the commission moves to delist, the department would likely come back in June with a draft proposal and then the commission would make a final decision in August, wrote Michelle Dennehy, spokeswoman for the department, in an email.
The commission sets policy for ODFW, which manages wildlife in Oregon. The wolf has been on the state’s protected species list since 1987, the year the Oregon Endangered Species Act was enacted.
In the past decade, wolves have returned to Oregon. The first traveled into the state from the east, coming from wolves released in 1995 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Idaho and Yellowstone National Park. Now there are at least 77 wolves in the state, according to the status review, with nine known packs.
While conservation groups have cheered the wolf revival, ranchers and others in the livestock industry have raised concerns about wolf attacks on their animals and what the state is doing about them.
The potential change to wolf status would have the biggest impact where wolves are found the most in Oregon, the state’s northeast corner. There, wolves are off the federal endangered species list, and the state is in complete control of managing the animals, Stephenson said.
In Central Oregon and the western two-thirds of Oregon, it is a different story. Although wolves have wandered into this part of the state, no packs have established territory here, and they remain on the federal endangered species list and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service guides wolf management.
A change in status for the wolf by the state would not change that.
OR-7, perhaps Oregon’s most famous wolf, would still be protected due to where his Rogue Pack roams. Born into the Imnaha Pack in northeast Oregon in 2009, OR-7 left as a lone wolf in 2011 and crossed over hundreds of miles as he passed through Central Oregon and ventured into Northern California. Along the way, the wolf — called OR-7 because of his GPS collar — drew national media attention.
Since May 2013, OR-7 has prowled the woods between Klamath Falls and Medford, has found a mate and has fathered at least three pups. Trail camera photos of the wolves taken late last spring proved OR-7 and his mate were the first breeding pair since the mid-1940s in Oregon’s Cascades.
The battery on OR-7’s collar isrunning low, and efforts to recapture him to replace it, or capture another member of his pack, have been unsuccessful. Stephenson said he plans to try to re-collar OR-7 or collar another member of the pack this spring or early this summer.
He said there have not been other wolves tracked into Central Oregon since OR-7, but there could be more.
“It is very possible that there are other lone dispersers in Central Oregon …,” Stephenson said. “But we don’t have anything confirmed.”
Timeline
Northwest wolves: their fall and re-emergence
1843: Oregon’s first “wolf meeting” takes place in what is now Salem to discuss wolf attacks on livestock. Participants suggest forming a provisional government. (Oregon became a state in 1859.) In the meantime, bounties are placed on wolves in the Oregon Territory.
Into the 1900s: Wolves become scarce across the Northwest. Other wildlife, including game animals, also decline. By 1913, hunters could collect wolf bounties of up to $25.
1930s: The last consistent reports of wolves in Oregon document them on the west slope of the Cascades.
1946: The last wolf bounty is paid, for one killed in the Umpqua National Forest in Southern Oregon.
1950-70s: Wolf populations are widely considered extinct or near-extinct in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana — in parts of British Columbia, too, though wolves begin re-establishing themselves in the Rockies on the Canadian side.
1978: Wolves are listed as an endangered species and receive federal protection across the Lower 48 states.
1986: Wolves cross the Canadian border into Montana and establish the first documented breeding pack to return to the Northwest.
1987: Oregon enacts its own Endangered Species Act, and wolves are on the list.
1995: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reintroduces wolves, from Canada, in Yellowstone National Park and in Idaho.
1999: The first confirmed wolf in Oregon, an adult female from Idaho, meanders around Baker and Grant counties for weeks before being trapped by Fish and Wildlife and returned unharmed to Idaho.
2000: Two more wolves from Idaho are found dead in northeast Oregon, one of them hit by a car on Interstate 84 and the other killed by a gunshot.
2005: The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission adopts a statewide wolf management plan.
2007: Another wolf is found dead in the northeast, also shot.
2008: The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife confirms wolf pups in a pack in Wallowa County, the first confirmed case of reproduction in an Oregon wolf pack since wolves returned to the state.
2009: Two Idaho wolves establish Oregon’s first modern wolf pack — the Imnaha pack — in the Wallowa Mountains. Wolves are downgraded on the federal endangered species list for the first time, though “endangered” status continues in the western two-thirds of Oregon and Washington.
Mid-2009: Two wolves kill 24 lambs and one calf on a ranch outside Baker City — the first confirmed case of wolves killing livestock in Oregon since the animals’ return to the state. Later in the year, federal agents kill the two wolves responsible.
2011: The Oregon Department of Agriculture establishes a legislatively approved wolf depredation fund to compensate ranchers for loss or injury to their livestock, as well as assist those who implement nonlethal techniques to deter wolf depredation of livestock. Two wolves are killed in Wallowa County after attacks on cattle.
2011-12: Oregon and Washington state estimate wolf populations at about 30 animals in each state. Idaho launches a wolf hunting and trapping season, cutting that state’s wolf population in half. In Oregon, OR-7, the “wandering wolf,” makes his journey west and through Central Oregon.
2015: The state reports that wolf numbers continue to grow, while livestock-attack cases are down, in Oregon. Biologists find 77 wolves, compared with 64 the year before, and for the first time there is a pack in the southern Cascades. The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission considers taking wolves off the state endangered species list.
Sources: Staff research, “Wolves in the Land of Salmon,” Timber Press, Oregon.gov, The Associated Press, Oregon Wild
Wolves in Oregon: their history and management
Historically, wolves are thought to have inhabited most of Oregon, but they were gone from the state for more than half a century, after early Oregonians’ concerns of livestock depredation.
In that time, humans significantly altered the landscape through development, fragmenting the wolves’ natural habitat. However, at least in theory, most wolves — especially gray wolves — are able to survive in all sorts of ecosystems.
wolf management: east and west
In general, Oregon hasn’t actively managed or restricted wolf distribution; the objective of the state’s wolf program has been to allow a naturally reproducing population to establish itself in Oregon from adjacent states, not through reintroduction. The program has, however, divided the state into east and west conservation zones (whose boundary is partially defined by U.S. highways 97 and 20) to better measure its goals, which include supporting packs that occupy large, contiguous blocks of public land with minimal human activity and enough natural prey.
Establishing wolf packs
It was expected that wolves would form packs in Eastern Oregon before reaching the west side. It will likely take years for wolves to establish packs in Western Oregon through natural dispersal, though packs are taking root in the southern Cascades. The wolf program includes ways to transport wolves — only those that aren’t suspected of killing livestock — within the state if it’s deemed necessary for conservation efforts.
Federal layer of protections
Apart from the state, the federal government lists wolves as protected in the western two-thirds of Oregon, including all of Central Oregon. They are delisted in the far east, including the northeast region, where wolf packs are flourishing.
Wolf status report
The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission, which oversees the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, is to meet at 8 a.m. Friday in the Ponderosa Room at the Deschutes National Forest Headquarters at 63095 Deschutes Market Road in Bend. The agenda includes a presentation about the protection status of the gray wolf in Oregon, a sage grouse update and potential ocean fishing rule adoption. For more information go to j.mp/BendWolfMtg.