Feds: Delist wolves

By JIM MANN

The Daily Inter Lake

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials on Monday announced a formal proposal to remove legal protections for wolves in the Northern Rockies, a change that will proceed with or without Wyoming.

Deputy Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett and Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, announced the Northern Rockies proposal as well as a final decision to delist wolves in the Western Great Lakes region in a teleconference Monday morning.

The plan is to remove the animals from the endangered and threatened species list.

"We believe this is a major success story," Scarlett said, describing how the wolf population in the Western Great Lakes had reached 4,000 and the combined population of 1,200 in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana had exceeded recovery goals.

But the original conditions for delisting wolves in the Northern Rockies required that all three states have acceptable wolf management plans. Because Wyoming has yet to do so, Montana and Idaho could not proceed with delisting.

Monday's announcement set the stage for Montana and Idaho to proceed with delisting without Wyoming.

Hall said the proposal will be published in the Federal Register, kicking off a 60-day public comment period.

"We'll proceed under the normal process of delisting for all of the states that have met those requirements," Hall said. "We hope to do that before the end of the calendar year."

He said Wyoming's Legislature is currently in session, and could feasibly pass laws that would produce a management plan that is satisfactory to the federal government.

"I want to be clear about one thing: Our essential position … is unchanged," he said. "We have rejected Wyoming's proposed strategy for wolf management."

If the state does not change its wolf management plan, he said, wolves in Wyoming would remain under Endangered Species Act protection and delisting will proceed for Idaho and Montana.

"Montana wants to move on, and this will let us move on," said Caroline Sime, wolf management coordinator for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Montana has assumed nearly all wolf management duties, including monitoring programs and lethal control decisions. But the state has been restrained in significant ways by the ongoing protected status of wolves.

Once the "endangered" population in Northwest Montana is delisted, livestock owners will have the ability to harass and haze wolves away from their animals, and they will be able to shoot and kill wolves that are caught attacking livestock, Sime explained.

That flexibility is already allowed around the "experimental" populations in the southern part of the state.

Most significantly, delisting will allow the state to manage wolves as a trophy game species and implement legal hunts for them.

"We're going to begin thinking about how to design a wolf harvest in Montana," Sime said.

Over the next year, the state will begin a public involvement process of its own to determine how that system would work, she said.

Will wolves be managed by permits? And if so, how many would be issued and how would they be distributed geographically? Or will wolf hunting be determined by quotas? How will hunting districts be defined?

"We've got some homework to do in Montana over the next year," Sime said.

Several wildlife conservation groups sounded off against Monday's proposal for wolves in the Northern Rockies.

The National Wildlife Federation praised the Great Lakes wolf delisting as "one of the most remarkable turnarounds in the annals of wildlife conservation," but the vitality of wolves in the Northern Rockies is not ensured "because some states have not put adequate safeguards in place for continued protection."

Defenders of Wildlife, meanwhile, said the proposal will "jeopardize continued recovery" of wolves because the federal government intends to "hand over management of gray wolves to states whose main goal is to exterminate wolves."

The group cited recent comments from Idaho's new governor, C.L. "Butch" Otter.

"At a recent rally, Gov. Otter declared that once wolves are delisted, Idaho will kill more than 80 percent of the 650 wolves that live in the state today. Otter has proposed leaving just 10 packs, which is even less than the state's plan mandates, and the bare minimum required to keep wolves from being federally re-listed on the endangered species list."

Hall was asked whether Idaho's direction reflects the spirit of recovery. "The bottom line is that we are dealing with a legal and regulatory process," he said, referring to the formal delisting proposal and public comment period.

He added that each state must maintain 10 breeding pairs and 100 wolves, and that he believes state wildlife agencies "will be responsible" in managing wolf populations.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com