Hunt season validates state management

For Bob Ream, this year’s wolf hunt in Montana represents a full circle of success.

It was Ream, a professor of biology at the University of Montana from 1969 to 1997, who led the effort to detect and monitor the first wolves to recolonize in Montana in the 1980s.

And as a sitting member of the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission, Ream has been overseeing the first regulated wolf hunt in the state.

“I think we are breaking new ground. It’s never been done before in the lower 48 states, ever, where we’ve had a regulated harvest,” Ream said in an interview Wednesday. “I think all in all, it went very well ... I think we’ve proved through this hunting season that the state can do a good job of management.”

Ream recalls coming to Montana in 1969 and soon after seeing “a few specimens” of wolf skulls at a wildlife museum at the University of Montana.

He wondered about the potential for wolves to migrate back into the state from Canada.

“I started collecting reports in 1973,” he said. “For the next few years, we were going around looking for a needle in a haystack.”

In 1979, Ream and his assistants captured and collared a female wolf in the North Fork Flathead drainage just north of the border and Glacier National Park. A male wolf joined her within a couple of years, and the first litter of pups was born in 1982.

“That started the population in the North Fork, what we called the Magic Pack,” Ream said. “In 1985, we had our first den actually in Glacier Park. That was the first documented wolf reproduction in the West in 50 years.”

The fabled Magic Pack produced dispersers that led to two, then four packs in the North Fork in just a few years. Their progeny led to a rapid proliferation of wolves throughout Northwest Montana.

“The rate of [population] increase surprised us all,” Ream said.

But the long-distance dispersals were not a surprise to Ream, who was familiar with research on dispersals from Minnesota. Northwest Montana wolves have traveled huge distances, one going 450 miles north into Canada, others moving into Colorado, Washington, Idaho and Oregon.

For that reason, Ream said he believes the state of Montana should prevail in its fight against a lawsuit aimed at putting wolves back under the protection of the Endangered Species Act.

The plaintiffs, a coalition of environmental groups, largely argue that the delisting of wolves early this year violated the species law because Wyoming was excluded from the delisting, and because there is not enough genetic connectivity in the overall Northern Rockies wolf population.

“I think the connectivity issue is a bogus issue,” Ream said. “The longer we’re working on this, the more dispersals they are finding. You don’t need a lot of dispersals to keep genetic diversity.”

Ream noted that the Northern Rockies has nearly six times the 300 wolves that were called for in a wolf recovery plan. Even with the 72 wolves that were taken by hunters in Montana, the population will still increase, with Ream predicting it will approach 2,000 wolves in the coming year.

Some believe the state’s wolf quota is too low, but Ream noted that the state’s wolf management program will be closely monitored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for five years.

“We have to be prudent in our management. I think we have to be careful,” he said. “This was the first year in a five-year period we have to prove ourselves, and I think we have to prove ourselves well.”

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