Wolves return to Sawtooth Valley
SNRA, Clayton packs bring new hope, tensions
“We’re very excited to have wolves back in the SNRA. But we need to make sure they’re here to stay.”
— Lynne Stone, executive director, Boulder-White Clouds Council
First in a series of two
By GREGORY FOLEY
Express Staff Writer
On a clear, spring day this month in the
Sawtooth Valley north of Ketchum, Curt Mack, gray wolf project leader for
Idaho’s Nez Perce Tribe, surveyed the foothills of the White Cloud Mountains for
signs of wolf activity.
“This is good wolf country,” he said.
“They can den in the hills and then come down to hunt. There’s plenty of
territory and plenty of food along the edges.”
He pulled off state Highway 75 and into a
lightly vegetated pasture, where he soon began to talk about the 19-or-so packs
of wolves that inhabit Idaho lands, including one small group that has settled
amid the forested hills near Champion Creek.
“It’s an alpha female and an alpha male,”
he noted. “They just had their first litter with five new pups.”
Indeed, gray wolves have returned to the
Sawtooth Valley, filling a void left last year by two erstwhile wolf packs.
Members of the Wildhorse pack disbanded and left the region after the alpha
female died of natural causes, while the Whitehawk pack was killed by federal
officials in a so-called “control” measure, after the wolves were implicated in
repeated attacks on livestock.
The discovery this spring that a new wolf
pack had established itself in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area has renewed
an ongoing debate over how Idaho’s wolves—and the public lands they inhabit—should be managed.
The pastures ranging across the Sawtooth
Valley floor by early June will be teeming with livestock brought to summer in
the alpine meadows, leaving some wolf proponents to wonder if the still-unnamed
pack will meet the same fate as the Whitehawk Pack.
However, after federal Judge B. Lynn
Winmill last month renewed an injunction that prohibits killing wolves in the
SNRA—even those that prey on livestock—the new pack currently has an extra
measure of protection over that provided by its status as a “threatened” species
under the Endangered Species Act.
Carter Niemeyer, wolf recovery coordinator
for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency currently charged with
managing reintroduced wolf populations in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, said that
the court order essentially bans the USFWS from “managing” wolves that kill
livestock.
“In the SNRA, I’ve been advised that if
there is depredation, we cannot do any lethal or non-lethal wolf management,” he
said.
Yet, two other groups of wolves outside
the SNRA boundaries are not afforded the extra protection of Judge Winmill’s
order. One—the Buffalo Ridge pack located south of Clayton—is in increasing
danger of having to be eliminated. The second, a mating pair that inhabits the
East Fork of the Salmon River area, has yet to be confirmed by management
officials as a viable pack.
The Buffalo Ridge pack inhabits an area
surrounding the confluence of Squaw Creek and the Salmon River. The pack started
as a mating pair composed of a male from the former Moyer pack and a female from
the former Stanley pack. The pair had its first litter of six pups in the spring
of 2002.
“It appears that all six pups and all the
adults survived the year,” Niemeyer said.
The alpha male and alpha female had a
second litter of pups last month. But, with more mouths to feed the pack is
highly active, feeding locally on deer, elk, and, federal officials believe,
young cattle.
Residents of the area have reportedly seen
the wolves taking down an adult deer in the middle of a public road and feasting
on young steelhead smolts taken from an irrigation stream near the May Family
Ranch Bed and Breakfast.
Niemeyer said the health of the pack
indicates that Clayton residents “are not poaching wolves,” but noted that the
probability that the pack has taken calves in the area has put them at risk of intervention by USFWS.
“This pack is on the ragged edge of having
to be controlled,” Niemeyer said.
With the recent arrival of spring in the
area, ranchers are planning to soon install cows and their calves on nearby
pastures, only a short distance from the pack’s den above Squaw Creek. Niemeyer said he has been actively negotiating with local ranchers to delay the
installation of cow-calf pairs on private pastures in the area until July, when
the wolves will likely follow elk to higher grounds.
Typically, Niemeyer noted, when USFWS
determines it needs to control a pack of wolves, agency officials start by
employing non-lethal control measures to discourage the animals from taking livestock. If those measures fail, lethal measures are taken against individuals
in the pack, with entire packs sometimes destroyed if livestock predation
persists.
Niemeyer, who oversees the federal
government’s wolf recovery program in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, works to
oversee and manage an estimated 1,000 wolves in the tri-state region, including approximately 300 in Idaho.
Idaho’s wolves are almost exclusively
descendants of 35 Canadian gray wolves released in the state in 1995 and 1996.
Mack said such successful recoveries of
endangered species are rare. “Wolves have obviously done really well in the
state of Idaho,” he said. “The reason is that we have really good wolf habitat.”
Employed by the Nez Perce tribe, Mack
coordinates wolf-management efforts in the state with Niemeyer. The Nez Perce Tribe in 1995 essentially volunteered to assist the federal government in wolf
management in Idaho after the state declined to do so. (The state’s official
position on wolf recovery is that it does not want wolves within its
boundaries.)
Mack said the Wood River Valley might also
become home to a new wolf pack in the near future. “It won’t be long until
they’re back in there,” he said. He noted that numerous sightings in the area
last year—particularly north and east of Sun Valley—were likely wandering
members of the disbanded Wildhorse pack.
Despite the success of wolves in central
Idaho, Mack said, populations that live outside of established wilderness areas
remain especially vulnerable to lethal-control measures. “There’s less pressure
now from livestock producers to kill wolves,” he said. “But the Fish and
Wildlife Service is now more intent on using lethal control because the wolves
are now well established.”
With the Buffalo Ridge pack already facing
control measures, environmental activists are alarmed that some 4,470 sheep and 2,500 cattle will be allowed to graze in the SNRA this summer—many in pastures
immediately adjacent to the den of the Champion Creek wolves.
“We’re very excited to have wolves back in
the SNRA,” said Lynne Stone, executive director of the Boulder-White Clouds
Council. “But we need to make sure they’re here to stay.”