Ranchers learn to live with wolves in the area
By Scott Sandsberry
CLE ELUM — The bull elk was a celebrity of sorts — the very rare elk wearing a radio collar in the Teanaway, where state wildlife biologists don’t collar elk.
How the elk died was a mystery. What happened when a wildlife biologist tried to solve it was, in a way, a telling portrait of the newest neighbors in that wooded, rolling-hill country northeast of Cle Elum.
Though they came in with a bit of an unsavory reputation, in their four years of existence the wolves in Teanaway Pack have been — with a couple of notable exceptions — fairly unobtrusive.
In August 2011, they injured a border collie protecting the carcass of a cougar-killed sheep near a Kittitas County bluff known as Red Top. And just last month Ellensburg cattleman Sam Kayser lost a yearling steer to the Teanaway Pack.
But last summer’s death of that collared bull elk in the Teanaway — and what happened when state wildlife biologist Will Moore found its radio collar lying near what remained of the carcass — may paint the most telling portrait yet of Central Washington’s resident wolves.
“Usually when we find (the collar separated from the body), it means people were involved. Those collars don’t fall off very well,” said Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife regional wildlife program manager Scott McCorquodale. “So (Moore) is thinking somebody must have shot this thing.
“He’s pondering that when all of a sudden he hears this kind of grumbling sound from the trees. He looks over into the trees and the (Teanaway Pack’s) alpha male, with his (radio) collar), is sitting there looking at him.”
Moore and the male wolf eyed each other for a few minutes, during which the pack’s breeding female also showed up in the tees. Neither wolf did anything threatening toward the biologist. They simply watched him, while making sure he could see them.
They were, said McCorquodale, “just sort of indicating, ‘This is our spot. We’d like it back.’”
‘It was like a ghost’
There’s more than 200 square miles in the Teanaway, roughly a third of it in the Teanaway State Forest, and all of it serving — through decades-old grazing leases — as temporary summer home to roughly 1,500 sheep from the Moxee-based Martinez sheep operation and some 200 Kayser-owned cows and their calves.
The region is punctuated with remote ranching and farming operations. Horse pens are prevalent. So, too, are muledeer and elk, and it’s within those natural prey bases that the five still-surviving members of the Teanaway Pack must be focusing their attention.
Because, for the most part, the Teanaway wolves have been neighbors keeping to themselves.
“We get a lot of calls from people who’ve seen them, but most of the time (the callers) weren’t nervous or afraid” about the encounter, said Steve Wetzel, the WDFW’s wildlife conflict specialist for Kittitas and Yakima counties.
“A lot of times they’re residents or hikers or people out with their dogs, and they’ll say, ‘Hey, I was up in the Teanaway and saw this wolf, and it just walked across the road and left. Or, ‘It was sitting down, got up and looked at me and then kind of loped off.”
Some people, Wetzel said — often people riding horses — report that they’ve been followed by wolves. “They don’t understand that wolves don’t do that,” he said. “(The wolves) are not stalking you or chasing you; they’re just going the same way as you are.”
And wolves do often travel the same routes people do, said the WDFW’s statewide wolf biologist, Scott Becker.
“They’ll run randomly through the forest on occasion,” Becker said, “but they like to use roads and trails just like humans do, for the most part.”
Not surprisingly, then, they’re occasionally seen near those rural ranches — almost always in passing, as was the case with the Teanaway resident who went out to feed her horses and watched a wolf stroll past.
“It was walking up the road right past the pen across from my horses. At first I thought it was a coyote, but it was too big,” said the resident, who asked to remain anonymous to keep curiosity-seekers from pouring into her neighborhood in hopes of seeing wolves.
“He didn’t show any interest in my horses. He was just moseying up the road. And I’m sure he had been there before.”
The resident was able to snap three photos before deciding to try for a better angle. “When I moved he saw me,” she said. “He just kind of turned and stared at me for a few seconds, and then he just melted into the trees beside the road.
“It was like a ghost.”
The human presence
Coexisting with resident wolves, though, is a balancing act. Like the cougars who inhabited these eastern Cascade foothills long before the Teanaway Pack was verified in 2011, wolves are predatory carnivores.
And even though cougars are far more effective and dangerous hunters — one disperser from the Teanaway Pack two winters ago was later killed by a cougar near Ellensburg — wolves can pose additional problems.
“Cougars kill livestock every once in a while, but you don’t have the same issues come up with cougar predation — like repeated events — that you can with wolves if you don’t manage it,” McCorquodale said. “You don’t have cougars that will eventually decide, ehh, I think eating livestock is a pretty good way to make a living.
“The magnitude of the problem you’re trying to prevent generally doesn’t occur with cougars like it can with wolves. It doesn’t always (occur) and doesn’t even usually, but we try really hard as much as we can to keep wolves from getting a taste for cows or sheep.”
To that end, some four dozen ranchers around the state are receiving financial subsidies from the state to employ a variety of nonlethal measures — such as flagging, fencing, sanitation (removal of dead or sick animals) and automated alarms — to deter wolves from preying on their livestock.
But the most effective deterrent is a persistent human presence.
Both Kayser and the Martinez sheep operation employ “range riders,” largely paid for by WDFW and Conservation Northwest and equipped with radio receivers to them apprised of the radio-collared wolves’ whereabouts.
“I get the beeps on my receiver and know that the wolves are over here, and the sheep are over there,” said Niki McBride, the Martinez sheep range rider hired by WDFW’s Wetzel prior to the 2014 grazing season. “What I try to do is stay between them, and just be a presence.
“We haven’t had any issues (with wolves) at all. Not last year, not this year.”
With Kayser cattle sometimes sprawled across 30,000 acres, range rider Bill Johnson is constantly on the move, monitoring the wolves’ movements.
“I try not to move cattle into an area where there are wolves, but as we found out (last week), Mark Martinez moved sheep into the Iron Mountain Area and the wolves went from Story Creek — 32 miles and probably 3,000 vertical feet away — to where the sheep are,” Johnson said.
“They smelled the sheep, they heard the sheep, they got an email that the sheep were coming, who knows? But they showed up. So it doesn’t really matter where we move cattle. The wolves have a way of knowing, and I think it’s a lot out of curiosity.
“It’s like the grocery store. You always want to look at the next aisle over. It’s not that you’re going to buy anything, but it’s nice to look.”
Death of an alpha
But they’re also looking for food — whether living, like Kayser’s yearling steer the wolves killed late last month, or already conveniently dead, like the bull elk carcass they found last August.
Biologists still aren’t sure what killed the elk, since so much of it had been consumed by the time Moore found the carcass. But the radio-collar data from both the elk and the key wolf pack members tell them the wolves were nowhere near the elk when it was killed.
And finding already-killed meat is easy eating for a wolf, as opposed to having to take down a large animal that can fight, bite or kick back.
“Being a predator in the wild is not an easy life,” said the WDFW’s Becker. “A lot of the wolves we see have chipped teeth. The animals they latch onto don’t want to die, and they get kicked in the face a lot. Sometimes they die.”
The wolf skull Becker keeps for demonstration purposes is a perfect example of this: There’s an area where a broken tooth clearly became infected and caused the gums and bone to recede beneath it. That may ultimately have caused the wolf’s death.
The alpha female watching Moore survey the carcass of the dead collared elk, meanwhile, is also dead — shot by a poacher.
Biologists can’t be sure, but it’s possible that death is related to the death of Kayser’s yearling steer. According to a recent Washington State University study, killing wolves to keep them from killing livestock actually have the opposite effect, upsetting the pack social heirarchy and possibly producing additional breeders.
More breeders mean more pups, which in turn will mean more young adults dispersing to new territories looking for mates and easy meals. Without the benefit of a pack to hunt with, those young dispersers will more quickly turn to what might seem like an easier target, such as livestock.
That, Kayser said, isn’t particularly wise for the wolves.
“They may stay around the cows,” he said, “and I’m no wolf expert, but I’d rather chase a bunch of elk than 10 black angus cows coming at me, bellowing and protecting their calves. It wouldn’t take too many of those experiences before I’d go looking for easier prey.”
There’s enough prey in the Teanaway, which routinely has the strongest deer-hunting harvest of any game management unit in this part of the state. That means one thing.
The neighbors are here to stay.