By Joseph Ditzler
East Oregonian Publishing Group
The text-alert system designed by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to give livestock producers a digital heads-up whenever wolves are near is online again in Eastern Oregon.
Ron Anglin, the department Wildlife Division administrator, said the new system automatically downloads from satellites the location data gathered from a GPS collar on OR-4, the alpha male in the Imnaha pack.
The location data is automatically formatted and sent via text message to livestock producers who register for alerts whenever the wolf is in the vicinity. The system came back into service three weeks ago, according to Oregon wolf coordinator Russ Morgan.
“We developed it ourselves,”?Anglin said recently. “We’re not aware of anybody else within the wildlife world having a similar text-alert type system or anything like this.”
A spokesman for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Niels Nokkentved, said that state does nothing similar. A representative of the Wyoming department was unavailable Monday. A spokesman for the Minnesota department said he was unaware of any alert system there. The chief of the Montana fish and wildlife technology services bureau, Barney Benkelman, said that state provides information online regarding relocation of problem wolves, mountain lions and bears. But the state does not track problem predators for landowners via GPS.
“I’m sure Oregon’s found the same thing we have in terms of technology in fish and wildlife,”?Benkelman said. “There’s an insatiable desire for information. For those of us in the technology field, there’s not a chance of keeping up.”
Especially, he added, in a day of shrinking public budgets, which is one driver behind the Oregon system, according to Anglin and Morgan. The text service proved popular and time consuming when it first became available. A department employee spent hours twice a day downloading, formatting and directing individual alerts to livestock producers in Wallowa County.
The new system operates according to software written by a department computer engineer. The cost is absorbed by the department and no further staff time is expended administering the alerts, Anglin said.
Only livestock producers are eligible to register for the system online, he said. The information is not available publicly, he said, and ranchers who receive the information may not share it. Anglin said the department considers withholding that information acceptable under its mandate to manage Oregon’s wolves under the state Endangered Species Act.
The system routes downloaded location data to registered producers who locate themselves on a digital map subdivided into specific blocks. If OR-4 traverses a producer’s block, that producer receives an alert, Anglin said. He said he met recently with Wallowa County ranchers to talk wolves, among other topics.
“I’m sure this is a lot more hoops than they’d like to jump through in having to sign up and get this information,” Anglin said. “We felt it was pretty important to have a good record of who was requesting the information and using it.”
The system could expand to include the wolf state biologists believe has killed five sheep and fatally injured two others on separate properties east of Weston. State wildlife biologists set rubber-lined traps in the Mount Emily Wildlife Management Unit in the Blue Mountains. That wolf, sighted last year with another wolf, possibly a female, is only seen by himself, biologists said. So far, traps set for him stand empty, said the man who checks them daily.
“We seem to be having some famously bad luck with him,” said Umatilla District wildlife biologist Mark Kirsch of Pendleton. “The good new is he hasn’t caught on to us. He’s gone for long periods of time and then we’ll see him run through the sets.”
Wolves are protected by state law east of highways U.S. 395 and 95 and state Highway 78 and by federal and state law to the west of those routes. Wolves have killed at least 58 livestock animals since 2009, according to the fish and wildlife department.