by Scott Sandsberry
YAKIMA, Wash. — The first wolves Jay Kehne ever saw in the wild might as well have been phantoms.
Kehne, who lives in Omak, was hunting four Novembers ago with three buddies in Idaho’s Gospel-Hump Wilderness. One of the hunters had taken a deer just at dusk, so each of the four was packing out a quarter of the deer through two or three miles of thick forest in the darkness.
The scent of the meat brought the wolves.
“They just followed us out,” recalls Kehne, retired after a three-decade career with USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. “They’d definitely been following us for a while.
“They weren’t howling, just barking, and we could see their eyes in the headlights — little flashes. We were in this really thick brush, bushwhacking down a ridge. You’d shine the light and get flashes of green eyes.
“And then they were gone.”
Kehne says none of the four were nervous about the wolves’ presence. Had it been cougars, he says, that would have been a different story. But not wolves.
“You’re much more likely to be attacked by a cougar than wolves,” he says. “I’ve never had a fear of wolves, in any of the times I’ve been out there. Maybe it’s because I know enough about wolves, their habits, their hunting habits. Most of the stories (about wolves) you see on hunters’ websites are just crazy talk.
“People have a very unnatural fear of wolves. Me, I have a very natural fear of grizzly bears.”
Kehne, who will provide one of the prospectives in tonight’s “Living With Wolves” panel discussion at Yakima Valley Community College, says of the four hunters in that eerie 2007 experience are split right down the middle on wolves: two pretty much anti-wolf, because of their potential impacts on ungulate populations and livestock, and two on the other side.
That kind of polarity is typical, says another of tonight’s panelists, wildlife author/photographer David Moskowitz.
He says that wolves are in some ways like humans — species with the ability to bend their livelihood to the landscape around them, with the ability to learn from experience and adapt.
“I think there’s a little bit of a mirror there for us that creates strong feelings either way — love them or hate them,” says Moskowitz, a onetime Cliffdell resident who is near completion on a book, “Wolves in the Land of Salmon,” due for release in the fall of 2012 by Portland-based Timber Press.
“There’s all these stories about wolves, these cultural myths — on the one side that they’re going to eat all of the elk or, on the other, that they’re totally benign, almost like this magical creature,” he says. “And the reality is they’re just another large carnivore, doing the same thing other wild animals do, making a living for themselves in the woods and raising young, just like anything else.”
That Washington’s hunters largely object to an increasing population of wolves in the state is “a natural response,” Moskowitz says. “This is classic biology: Competitive carnivores in any ecosystem are never particularly happy with one another.
“It’s the same response a wolf has when a cougar comes into the landscape. But we need to recognize that we can objectively look at that and ask whether the reestablishment of wolves in this area is actually going to get rid of our hunting opportunities. And the answer to that is almost unequivocally no. It’s not.”
Tonight’s panel discussion will be the first of two Yakima events designed to educate people in the region about how an increasing number of wolves in Washington will and won’t affect them.
The next one will be a Jan. 17 presentation by the Yakima Environmental Learning Foundation — one of the sponsors of tonight’s panel discussion — of the film, “Lords of Nature,” exploring the role that apex predators such as wolves and cougars play in the ecosystem. It also looks at how livestock producers in other wolf-populated states have adjusted their management practices to minimize conflicts with predators.