Record number of lobos in turn have been authorized to be killed.
By Mike Koshmrl
With months of the grazing season to go, federal wildlife managers say they have already encountered unprecedented levels of conflict between livestock and wolves in Wyoming.
Wolf-killed sheep and cattle have been confirmed recently in the Upper Gros Ventre area, near Bondurant, northwest of Dubois, in the Salt and Wyoming ranges and elsewhere in the Equality State. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Wyoming office hasn’t yet totaled the number of confirmed depredations or wolves authorized to be killed, but one agency official said it’s been a challenging year for conflict.
“All I can tell you is that as of last week we had surpassed the authorizations for wolves to control for all of last year,” said Tyler Abbott, Fish and Wildlife’s deputy field supervisor for Wyoming.
Wildlife managers’ 2015 kill total, 54 wolves, was the second highest in the state since the large carnivores were reintroduced to the Northern Rockies 21 years ago.
Could get worse
“Between now and the next couple of months it’s just going to get worse,” Abbott said. “Every day something happens.”
Late summer and fall, he said, is a time of year when pups have grown large enough that they demand lots of food and when wolves are trying to put on fat for the winter.
“That is traditionally a heavy depredation time for wolves,” Abbott said. “It ain’t going to get any easier.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services, which takes out suspected livestock-killing wolves on behalf of Fish and Wildlife, has recently been flying to try to find the large Lava Mountain and Warm Springs wolf packs, which together accounted for 32 animals at the end of the year.
Abbott approved killing four wolves from those packs. It’s unconfirmed, he said, which pack is responsible for killing calf cattle in the Warm Springs area.
“They’re just moving too much,” he said. “As we are finding this summer, there are individuals moving from one pack to another and not in a direction you’d be suspecting.”
The aerial operations have been stymied by the now-simmering Lava Mountain Fire, which charred 23 square miles near the packs’ home ranges.
The outcome of the flights will have bearing on whether two more wolves will be killed from packs in the Gros Ventre River drainage, Abbott said. It’s unclear, he said, if resident Gros Ventre wolves, like animals from the Slate Creek Pack, killed three calves last week or if the culprits were members of Lava Mountain and Warm Springs.
Wolf-cattle conflict in the Gros Ventre started in June, was followed by a lull and then picked up again last week.
The Taylor family, which grazes the area, reported no recent conflicts. The Robinsons did not return phone calls.
Further south, in the Wyoming and Salt ranges, Abbott received reports last week of five sheep that fell to the jaws of Canis lupus. He’s authorized Wildlife Services to kill two wolves in the area.
Bret Selman, who grazes 1,300 ewe-lamb pairs in the Wyoming Range south of the Snake River canyon, said he had lost 38 to 40 sheep in confirmed wolf kills since June.
“I don’t like wolves,” Selman. “I don’t like them at all.”
Between 1986 and 2011 the Tremonton, Utah, rancher had never encountered wolves on his Bridger-Teton National Forest allotments, but the next year he was hit hard.
“I think 2012 was probably worse than this year so far,” Selman said, “but we’re not done.”
Wyoming reimburses ranchers like Selman for livestock lost to wolves inside a now-defunct trophy game area, where wolves were managed when the state had jurisdiction over the large carnivore. A law passed last legislative session extended the payments to the more expansive and also defunct predator zone, where rules on killing wolves were few.
In 2015 ranchers raked in $330,668 in Wyoming payments for wolf depredations, a state record and a total that surpassed compensation paid out in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington combined. Wyoming compensates sheep ranchers who lose animals to wolves seven times the market rate. Calves and sheep killed by bears and mountain lions are reimbursed at 3.5 times the market rate. Year-to-date 2016 compensation information is not yet available.
Abbott said he has noticed an uptick in conflict on the fringes of wolves’ normal territory this year. There have been repeated depredations near Bondurant, Lander and northwest of Cody where the Absaroka Pack once roamed.
“They’re moving so far and wide this year compared to previous years,” he said.
Step wise
Fish and Wildlife uses what Abbott described as a “step wise” approach to responding to livestock depredation. The Absaroka Pack, which numbered seven animals at the beginning of the year, is an example of where the wolves didn’t break their cattle-killing behavior after being cut down in numbers.
“They killed five calves and then another three calves and then another three calves,” Abbott said. “Each step of the way, the service actually authorized the taking of more wolves.
“If those initial wolf removals resulted in stopping the depredation, we would have to quit and moved on,” he said. “Ultimately, after several depredations, we had to remove the whole pack.”