By KARL HOLAPPA
staff writer
Ranchers, conservationists, government representatives and wildlife biologists met at Hal Holmes Community Center in Ellensburg on Wednesday and Thursday for Wolf Advisory Group meetings.
The group was created by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in 2013 to provide input and recommend strategies on topics such as working with ranchers to take preventative measures to decrease risk of livestock loss due to wolves, providing compensation when losses do occur, monitoring wolf recovery populations, and providing information to the public on wolf recovery in the state.
The group meets regularly at various locations throughout the state. The group last met in Ellensburg in May 2016. About 50 people attended the meetings this week.
Donny Martorello, wolf policy lead for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the largest challenge the advisory group faces is the very subject it is focusing on.
“Wolf conservation management has been one of the most polarized issues within the state,” Martorello said. “Earlier attempts to implement the wolf conservation management plan and a citizen group like the Wolf Advisory Group to implement that, we saw a tremendous amount of conflict within the group and we weren’t able to work in a collaborative process together.”
Martorello said the group has made great strides over the years. With the help of an individual brought in who specializes in conflict management, people on both sides of the issue are beginning to come together, working to come up with solutions that benefit both wolves and humans.
“What’s unique about this group is we’re taking some of the tools and strategies and approaches out of the peace-building field and applying that to our process in this group,” Martorello said. “It’s helping bring those walls down so that folks that have not been typically in the same room talking about this subject can build relationships and have very candid conversations in a positive way.”
LOCAL WOLVES
The Teanaway wolf pack has grown over the last couple years. It currently stands at eight known members, with one breeding pair.
State wolf biologist Trent Roussin said one breeding pair is normal per each pack.
“They were a breeding pair last year and then they’re a breeding pair again this year,” Roussin said.
Roussin said both the growth and health of the Teanaway pack are normal compared to other packs within the state.
“You see packs from one year to the next, they’ll grow and shrink as litters of pups are born and those members become pack members and older pack members might disperse and die for different reasons,” Roussin said. “The pack size will fluctuate throughout the year, some years will be eight, some years will be six, but over a long period of time, you’ll have an average pack size of five or six animals.”
Roussin said two of the eight wolves within the pack are fitted with radio collars to track their movements.
“They seem pretty healthy,” Roussin said. “The only things we can look at are their growth rate and the fact that they’re producing pups. We don’t really go in and do a fine-scale analysis of their health unless we catch an animal. But when we do catch one, they’re healthy wolves.”
STATE NUMBERS
The meeting took place shortly after the WDFW released the results of its annual survey on wolf populations within the state.
According to a news release from the department, the survey showed wolf populations have grown within the state for the ninth consecutive year. The state has at least 122 wolves, 22 packs, and 14 successful breeding pairs, the highest numbers recorded since the department began the survey in 2009. The majority of the population is centered in Ferry, Stevens and Pend Oreille counties in northeast Washington.
The survey, conducted over the winter by state, tribal, and federal wildlife managers, is conducted using aerial surveys, remote cameras, wolf tracks and signals from radio-collared wolves.
“Here and in other states, wolf demographics are highly dynamic from year to year,” WDFW statewide wolf specialist Ben Maletzke said in the release. “The real value of these surveys is the information they provide about long-term trends, which show that our state’s wolf population has grown by an annual average of 31 percent over the past decade.”
The release said WDFW investigations confirmed that wolves killed at least eight cattle and injured five others in 2017. The department processed two claims totaling $3,700 to compensate livestock producers for their losses.
The survey documented 11 wolf mortalities within the state in 2017. Three of these were a result of legal tribal harvest, two were due to vehicle collisions, four involved humans and are still under investigation, and two were legal “caught-in-the-act” shootings.
Although “caught-in-the-act” shootings generally operate on a permit-based system, state regulation permits owners of domestic animals to kill up to one wolf without a permit if the wolf is attacking their animal. This only applies to the eastern third of Washington, where wolves are not listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. They are listed under the act as endangered for the rest of the state.
“We know that some level of conflict is inevitable between wolves and livestock sharing the landscape,” Maletzke said in the news release. “Our goal is to minimize that conflict as the gray wolf population continues to recover.”