PREDATORS – U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists confirmed Friday that the Northern Rockies gray wolf population has remained sustainable two years after wolves lost their endangered-species protections in most of the region.
The latest wolf status updates in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming found that aggressive hunting, and some trapping, in the three states lowered the overall number of wolves in 2012 for the first time in years.
Biologists tallied a minimum of 1,674 wolves across the five states at the end of 2012, a 6 percent decline.
However, the wolf population that burgeoned under protections for more than a decade are still five times higher than the federal government’s original recovery goal, set in the 1990s, of at least 300 wolves in the region.
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