Wolf defenders threaten to halt delisting
By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer
There are about 4,000 wolves in the contiguous 48 states, including about 700 in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, where the population is growing by 26 percent a year.
That isn’t enough, according to a national environmental group that threatened on Tuesday to sue the federal government and try to halt plans to remove wolves from the list of species protected under the Endangered Species Act.
In fact, saying the wolf population “has recovered or is likely to anytime in the near future is patently absurd,” Defenders of Wildlife lawyers said Tuesday in a formal notice of intent to sue. Such notices are required in some legal cases against the United States.
“Gray wolves in the coterminous 48 states are far from recovered,” the notice continues. “The Bush administration’s wolf conservation policy … has grave implications for this species’ continued existence in the lower 48 states.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced March 18 that it had “downlisted” the wolf from endangered status to threatened. FWS hopes to fully delist the wolf within two years, officials said at the time.
This legal flareup, essentially the first shot over the government’s bow, is not unexpected.
“They’ve been rattling their saber for some time over this” said Todd O’Hair, natural resources advisor for Gov. Judy Martz. “We’re disappointed, but not surprised.”
The March 18 downlisting applies to nine states in the West, although six of them have no resident wolves.
That means that, while delisted wolves would have some legal protections in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming — where the states are working on their own plans that call for continued wolf populations about the same size they are now — if a wolf wanders into Oregon, Nevada, Washington, California or northern Utah or Colorado, it has no federal protections.
Some states, notably Washington and Oregon, also consider the wolf a protected species.
Few people dispute that wolf recovery has been successful in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, at least from the wolf’s point of view.
“Defenders of Wildlife ought to be celebrating,” O’Hair said.
Since 1995 and 1996, when about three-dozen animals were released in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho, wolf numbers have ballooned to about 700 animals, running in dozens of packs and groups.
Ed Bangs, FWS wolf recovery coordinator in Helena, said Tuesday the ESA does not stipulate that wolves must be returned to everywhere they once roamed, territory that includes about 40 states.
“A lot of groups and a lot of people want more wolves in more places,” Bangs said.
But that’s not what the ESA requires, he said. Its goal is “to get species where they aren’t threatened with extinction. The point the FWS takes is we did our job.”
Defenders, a well-heeled, well-organized group with 430,000 members, doesn’t see it that way.
“Much more needs to be accomplished before the wolf can be considered recovered in the lower 48 states, where, today, it is still absent from much of its historic range,” the notice says.