Impacts have hunters howling

Rapid growth of packs, observers say, mirror decline in deer numbers

By JIM MANN/Daily Inter Lake

Paul Charbonneau fired across the ravine, dropping a 5-by-6 bull elk, but then he had nearly an hourlong walk around the ravine to reach his kill.

"I got within 100 to 150 yards and I could hear them [wolves]," said Charbonneau, an animal warden with the Flathead County Sheriff's Office. "They were on the elk. That's as close as I got, because they were pretty darn loud and they were tearing into it and I could see them."

Just like that, a group of three to five wolves took his kill.

Charbonneau directly witnessed what a rising number of hunters perceive to be happening - a growing number of predators, particularly wolves, on the landscape having an increasing impact on big-game populations.

Charbonneau said he has been hunting in the same area south of Darby for years, and it's only been in the past few years that the presence of wolves has become increasingly obvious.

"You'll hear wolves every morning and every night," he said, noting that he heard and saw the wolves at a distance before he shot the elk.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials in Northwest Montana are hearing from many hunters concerned about the rapid growth of packs and wolf numbers and an obvious decline in white-tailed deer populations.

Regional Wildlife Manager Jim Williams said staffers at six game check stations heard plenty about wolves, particularly from hunters who were passing through the "no game" lanes.

"One of the primary benefits of having check stations is we get to hear from hunters," Williams said. "And what we heard loud and clear is that people were seeing wolves, hearing them, seeing their tracks."

When the five-week hunting season concluded at the end of November, Williams said he received at least 50 calls on wolves, "easily the most I've ever gotten in my career."

The department's game wardens, biologists and front desk clerks have been getting similar calls.

The reason, Williams said, is that the number of wolf packs has grown from 12 to 28 in Northwest Montana since 2005. And the number of packs throughout the broader Northwest Montana Recovery Area grew from 19 in 2005 to 36 in 2007.

Meanwhile, a decline in the white-tailed deer population has likely been under way for the past two years, according to Alan Wood, a regional wildlife researcher based in Kalispell.

The most telling sign has been a drop in the number of white-tailed bucks harvested during the past two years, Wood said.

Check stations counted 1,068 bucks in 2006 and 1,064 in 2007. However, far more accurate follow-up telephone surveys of hunters found that the overall buck harvest actually dropped 17 percent from 2006 to 2007.

That, said Wood, indicates that the decline in the deer population probably started last year. And it continued this year, with only 876 bucks counted at check stations and the overall whitetail harvest dropping by 20 percent, from 1,961 in 2007 to 1,532 in 2008.

According to Williams and Wood, the region's whitetail population tends to rise and fall on a cyclical basis, with reproduction dropping off as the populations peak for the carrying capacity of their range. Weather can be a major driver, as was seen after the brutal winter of 1996-97 that accelerated mortality for a deer population that already was in decline.

Predators have additive impacts that can accelerate a decline in game populations: bears and coyotes on vulnerable fawns in the spring, mountain lions and wolves year-round, and hunters for five straight weeks in the fall. This year, there were more than 5,000 "B" tags issued in Northwest Montana, a number that is sure to be scaled back next year, Williams said.

What's new in the mix is the growing number of wolves in Region One and other parts of Western Montana.

"It appears that in Northwest Montana we are still in an expanding wolf population and obviously that's what people are seeing on the landscape," said Kent Laudon, the state's regional wolf management specialist. "All of a sudden, there are more wolves and more packs … filling in areas that used to be unoccupied."

Robin Swimley, a lifelong hunter from Libby, has seen wolves in action on several occasions since moving to a home on Middle Thompson Lake west of Kalispell several years ago.

He recalls driving with his wife on a forest road in the McGinnis Meadows area when they saw two or three wolves chasing a cow and calf moose. The chase went out of sight, but the next day Swimley said he saw the cow moose in the same general area. Not far away, he saw wolves feeding on the calf.

He said his neighbors witnessed a deer being killed by wolves right in front of his house on the ice of Middle Thompson Lake several winters ago. Last year, he saw a black wolf feeding on road kill. And while out hunting this year near Happy's Inn, he saw two wolves moving into one side of a forested area, with mule deer running out of the other side.

"My personal opinion is that they are having a huge impact," Swimley said. "They are totally out of control in our area."

Swimley is well aware of the likelihood that hunting opportunities will be reduced, with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks already announcing plans to cut back on "B" tags issued for doe harvest. And that strikes him as backwards, considering that hunting-license dollars have paid for restoring and maintaining big-game populations for decades.

"They're going to reduce permits, possibly shorten the hunting season someday," he said. "That's the reality we're facing here."

Swimley isn't alone. Those are the types of comments Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials have been hearing in recent weeks.

Wood, Williams and others in the department ponder the psychology of how predators are perceived differently by the public. Wolves, they say, carry a far greater public stigma with the public than mountain lions, even though mountain lions are more widely distributed and numerous.

Wolves are obviously having an impact, they say.

"Are they the driver for the deer population? We would say no," Wood said.

Williams believes that lions are more tolerated partly because they are a legal game species themselves, with the state having an ability to increase or decrease lion permits.

Lions are secretive, solitary stalkers, but wolves hunt in packs and use roads and trails also used by humans. Even if they aren't seen, their tracks can be seen and their howls can be heard.

And wolves in Northwest Montana - a population that recovered naturally through migration from Canada - have fully "endangered" status, the highest form of protection under the Endangered Species Act.

The wolf populations in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming temporarily were delisted this year, and a state management plan that allowed for a managed, quota-based wolf hunt went into effect. But a lawsuit was filed to block the delisting and the state management plans were halted by U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy of Missoula. Since then, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has withdrawn its rule for delisting and is drafting a new rule that will attempt to address issues raised in the lawsuit.

"People are feeling frustrated," Wood said. "It would be interesting to see what their attitudes would be if they could have a wolf tag in their pocket."

Tim Thier, a state biologist who heard from hunters at the Olney check station throughout the hunting season, also wonders how attitudes might change if the state's management plan was implemented.

"I think it would have done a lot to reduce the animosity that people have toward wolves," Thier said. "It would have gone a long way toward reasonable management. As it sits right now, with them as fully endangered, if they are observed attacking livestock, technically it's illegal to even shoot over their heads because that's considered harassment."

The perception that wolves are out of control, for some, comes with a perception that they will decimate game populations.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks biologists do not believe that will be the case. They believe that as deer populations decline, the numbers of wolves and other predators will follow.

Laudon has a copy of the Hungry Horse News from 1986 with articles on the first documented reproduction of wolves in Montana since they were eradicated decades ago.

The article quotes locals making dire predictions, with one man saying that the presence of wolves in the North Fork Flathead drainage would spell an end to the big-game population there within five years.

That didn't turn out to be the case. The number of wolf packs ended up growing to four in the North Fork, but a few years after the deadly winter of 1996-97, only one pack remained.

Laudon cites the cyclical interactions between wolves and moose on Lake Superior's Isle Royale.

"It's a fixed, simple system and it has been studied for decades and they have watched both the moose and wolf populations go up and down," he said.

But Laudon notes that people often don't view a landscape, with its predators and prey, through the lens of even a decade or two.

"The problem is that if it's a problem in your lifetime now and it's in your back yard, it's a problem," he said.

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