Wolves on the prowl

With almost 40 packs in Northwest Montana, a hunting season may not be far off

Advanced planning for a legal wolf hunt in Montana is under way, with a dramatic increase in the number of packs in Northwest Montana and a pending decision to delist wolves.

By the end of 2005, there officially were 19 packs in Northwest Montana. By the end of 2006 there were 31, and five or six more will be added to the count by the end of this year, predicted Kent Laudon, a regional wolf management specialist for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

"We definitely have more wolf packs in livestock areas than has been the case in Northwest Montana" for decades, said Laudon, who is based out of Kalispell. "Northwest Montana has been the slow-growing population, but now it appears it is starting to resemble the population growth we've seen in other areas."

Jim Williams, the department's regional wildlife manager, agrees.

"They are starting to fill in the blank spots on the map," Williams said. "They are territorial animals. Topography and the amount of prey and the presence or absence of another pack will determine whether they will establish themselves in an area."

Part of the increase in wolf counts over the last two years can be attributed to a more aggressive monitoring effort led by Laudon, Williams said.

That effort has involved a campaign urging the public to report wolf sightings, which frequently prompts efforts to trap and radio-collar wolves. Laudon has made a priority out of chasing "clusters" of reports to improve monitoring. Without radio collars, a pack can be impossible to track, and it can be difficult to sort out where one pack's territory ends and another territory begins, Laudon said.

Caroline Sime, the state's wolf recovery coordinator, said new packs in the region over the last couple of years can be partly attributed to wolves that have dispersed from other packs. Dispersers from Idaho and Canada are now part of Montana packs, and new packs have been formed by Montana dispersers.

She cites a lone female wolf that was trapped and radio-collared near Avon that is now part of the Nyack Pack, discovered last year in the Middle Fork Flathead drainage. A female that originated in the Candy Mountain Pack in the extreme northwest corner of Montana is now part of the Ashley Pack, another new group of wolves that roams near Ashley Lake.

Sime said Northwest Montana - a wolf recovery region that actually encompasses the entire western half of the state - tends to have smaller packs than those in the Idaho and Greater Yellowstone wolf populations.

"You have new packs in new places instead of bigger packs," she said.

Laudon has picked up packs in places where wolves have long been absent.

With the help of a bear hunter, he located a pack in the Swan Valley last year.

This year, he has found new packs near Firefighter Mountain (on the northern end of Hungry Horse Reservoir), near St. Regis, in the Salish mountains west of Flathead Lake, and near the Idaho border west of Trout Creek.

The Northwest Montana recovery area has accounted for 80 to 90 percent of the state's new packs in the last couple of years, Sime said, with an official count of 171 wolves at the end of 2006. By comparison, the Central Idaho recovery area had an official count of 739 wolves and the Greater Yellowstone recovery area had 390 at the end of last year.

Partly because of the steady expansion of wolves in Montana, Sime said, the state has been doing "advanced planning" for regulations that would govern sanctioned hunting and trapping of wolves once they are removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act.

A tentative framework for a fall and winter hunt will be proposed to the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission at its Dec. 20 meeting, Sime said. The commission may make amendments and then put the proposal forward for public comment.

If that's the case, it likely will be a major topic early next year at regulation meetings across the state, including a traditionally large gathering held in Kalispell every February.

Williams said the proposal likely would involve a quota for hunting and trapping - hunters who purchase permits will be able to harvest a wolf until a certain point when quotas are met in particular hunting districts.

Developing a regulation proposal has been an intricate task, "basically starting from scratch" for a new big-game species, Sime said.

Determing how many wolves can be harvested from one area to the next and even defining hunting districts are among the many issues that are being considered by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks staff with help from the University of Montana.

It is a process that is and will continue to be driven by wolf numbers and other considerations such as their impacts on livestock and big-game populations.

Sime and Williams said an obvious goal is to enlist hunters to help in management and control of wolf numbers, in addition to the state and federal governments' "lethal control" of packs that are responsible for livestock depredation.

The hunt, however, must be managed in a way that doesn't cause a severe decline in the population. Montana must maintain a certain number of wolves after delisting, a change that requires a minimum of 15 breeding pairs.

"We really don't want to find ourselves in the jeopardy zone," Sime said. "We want to do it right and we want to do it responsibly."

For that reason, developing proposed regulations has "been a very strategic, thoughtful, data-driven process," she added.

Williams predicts there will be considerable interest in a wolf hunt, partly among hunters who are concerned about wolf impacts to deer, elk and moose populations.

"Whether at check stations or in one-on-one visits, we are hearing from people who are noticing wolves in their hunting districts," Williams said. "And they are right on the mark. There are more wolves in Northwest Montana than there has been in 50 years."

But wolf hunting in Montana is entirely predicated on the species being delisted, a complicated process that could drag well into next year if not longer.

Last February, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed two options for delisting wolves.

The original approach required that Montana, Idaho and Wyoming adopt approved wolf management plans, a task that was completed by Idaho and Montana but not Wyoming, a state that has taken legal action against the federal agency to defend its plans for managing wolves.

Because the three-state delisting has been held up by the dispute with Wyoming, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed an alternative of delisting wolves in Idaho and Montana. A delisting decision that excludes Wyoming is expected sometime in February 2008, because the Endangered Species Act requires the federal government to act on its proposals within 12 months, Sime said.

Such a decision would dovetail with Montana's wolf hunting proposal, because the state Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission is likely to take final action in late February.

"It's conceivable that we could a [hunting] season as early as the fall of 2008," Sime said.

But the matter is complicated by a near certainty that the federal government's delisting decision will be challenged in court by wildlife advocacy groups. That challenge might include a request for an injunction that would effectively stop a wolf hunt until the larger issues of the case are resolved in court.

So far, groups such as Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council seem poised to be the most likely litigants, Sime said.

Despite the potential for a legal tangle, Montana is planning for an eventual hunt, "because a lot of the work we're doing is work that will eventually need to be done anyway."

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