Wolf advocates argue against delisting
By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer
CHICO HOT SPRINGS — There is excellent wolf habitat all over the nation, from Maine to California, enough to support thousands of the big predators, scientists and wolf advocates said here Wednesday
Plus, there is broad public support for returning the wolf to many places.
However, there are myriad legal and political hurdles to leap before wolf populations can be established, speakers noted at a conference here.
And the federal government’s position — that restoring wolf populations in the northern Rockies is enough to take the species off the list of endangered species across most of the West — is one of the biggest problem, according to wolf advocates.
That position is “absolutely” a problem that “raises the bar” for bringing wolves back to Oregon and California, said Nancy Weiss, Western director of the pro-wolf group, Defenders of Wildlife.
For wolf populations to grow in those and other states where they don’t live now, strong federal protections are needed, “particularly with some of the hostile legislation we’re seeing.”
For example, Oregon protects wolves under a state endangered species law, she said, but there are nine “anti-wolf bills pending” in the Legislature there. A few wolves have wandered into that state from Idaho.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on April 1 “downlisted” wolves from endangered to threatened and called it a step toward full delisting in a year or two.
Delisting would apply to all or parts of nine states, although six of them have no resident wolves.
Wolf advocates fear that, without the teeth of the federal ESA, state governments wouldn’t do much to protect wolves, let alone import them.
In California, counties have passed or are considering ordinances against wolf or grizzly bear reintroduction, Weiss said. And there is plenty of anti-federal and anti-Endangered Species Act sentiment because of water disputes that pitted irrigators against endangered fish.
In the southern Rockies, a population of about 1,000 wolves could earn a living among the abundant elk and deer herds of Colorado, southern Wyoming, Arizona and New Mexico, said Mike Phillips, director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund in Bozeman.
He said wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming should be delisted immediately, but recovery to the south “is far from complete.”
Several environmental groups are working to research wolf issues in that part of the country and educate the public, he said.
He cited polls that found “chronic and bipartisan public support” for wolves in the southern Rockies. Only among livestock producers did a majority oppose restoring wolves.
In Oregon, 70 percent of respondents in one poll support wolf restoration there, Weiss said.
Wolf restoration needs to be a national project and it needs the federal government behind it, Phillips said, but “it’s not likely the Fish and Wildlife Service is going to move quickly or certainly.”
Ed Bangs, wolf recovery leader for the FWS, maintains the ESA does not require wolves be returned to all of their historic range, which would include most of the country.
Rather, the ESA requires only that they be at no foreseeable risk of extinction.
With about 4,000 wolves on the ground in the upper Midwest and the northern Rockies it is time to delist wolves, Bangs said.
Steve Nadeau, a biologist with Idaho Fish and Game, said some lawmakers in that state don’t like it, but his agency is committed to assuring viable populations of wolves there.
Allowing the population to become endangered again “means a failure, pure and simple,” he said.