By ANNA WILLARD
He’s a black-haired male, with yellow eyes and a GPS collar.
His name is OR-4 and he’s the top wolf in the Imnaha pack, a band of wolves notorious for killing livestock in Wallowa County.
He was among the first wolves of his pack to be fitted with a collar the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife uses to track his nearly every move. His taste for beef continues attracting unwanted attention.
Wildlife authorities put him at the scene when wolves killed five livestock animals in the county since May. All told, the Imnaha pack has killed 20 livestock animals, mostly calves, since spring 2010, all the Oregon livestock lost to wolves in that period, according to the department.
“He’s been near or at a lot of these kills over the last year and we’ve suffered enough here,” said Rod Childers of Enterprise, chairman of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association wolf task force.
As much as any human involved in the wolf debate in Oregon, OR-4 plays a central role. He and his pack continue to prey upon livestock, adding a measure of frustration and anger to ranchers’ daily lives with each calf they kill and eat. With each dead calf, conservationists must justify the wolves’ continued existence in the Wallowa Valley as part of the Wolf Conservation and Management Plan. Other wolf packs in Oregon are relatively anonymous in comparison to the Imnaha group.
The wildlife department Oct. 5 ordered OR-4 and a yearling wolf of the same pack killed after the pack on Sept. 22 killed a calf east of Joseph. Three conservation groups within two weeks filed suit challenging state authority to kill wolves. The Oregon Court of Appeals stopped the kill order while the suit is pending.
“There needs to be time and human tolerance for wolves to establish themselves,” said Josh Laughlin, campaign director for Cascadia Wildlands, one of the three groups.
Meanwhile, the pack continued to kill. The state confirmed five livestock lost to the Imnaha pack since the court order.
OR-4, 115 pounds and about 5 years old, travels with his mate, OR-2, which also wears a tracking collar. OR-2 arrived in Oregon from Idaho in 2008, the fifth wolf in Oregon in 65 years and of the five the only one still in the state.
The pack, numbering five wolves today, according to the wildlife department, in November moved to a forested area bordered by the Imnaha and Snake rivers and Chesnimnus and Joseph creeks. In warmer seasons, ranchers report them frequently on the Zumwalt prairie, grazing lands to the south, an area known locally as the “wolf highway.”
The wolf pair have raised as many as 12 pups over the past three years — five in 2009, six in 2010 and one this year. One offspring, OR-7, born in 2009, continues to attract media attention for his statewide jaunt to the Wood River Valley around Fort Klamath and Crater Lake.
Under the state wolf plan, the animals receive a high level of protection until they establish four breeding pairs east of the Cascade Range for three consecutive years. Only one other pack, the Walla Walla, has produced any pups this year, according to data the state has collected.
Since the Imnaha pack established itself in 2009, the department has put radio collars on seven of its members, said Russ Morgan, the state wolf coordinator. OR-4, the alpha male, was first collared Feb. 12, 2010. The collar malfunctioned in May 2010. A year later, he was captured and recollared.
Normally, the state avoids killing wolves that wear tracking collars in order to continue collecting data. Also, the department tries to spare breeding pairs from elimination when possible.
“The change this year, the data showed that OR-4 was directly involved with the depredations,” Morgan said. “We have always said the radio collar does not provide an extra level of protection.”
Conservationists argued in October that killing OR-4 would deprive the pack of its primary provider, spelling its doom. According to the state wolf plan, wolves that chronically prey on livestock must be eliminated.
At the time of the kill order, elimination of the alpha male and the yearling would have reduced the pack to two, the alpha female and a pup.
“The female and the pup may not make it through the winter,” said Oregon Wild communications director Sean Stevens in September.
But if the alpha male were killed, OR-2, the alpha female, would probably find a replacement, said Morgan.
“Biologically, it is very common for wolves to find another mate,” he said. “Natural mortality is not uncommon. Any mated wolf can and will find a new mate if there’s one available.”