District Judge Jeffrey Sherlock issued an temporary restraining order against the state's wildlife management agency until a hearing on the merits of the lawsuit is held Jan. 10, 2013.
"There's a state law that says the state wildlife agency has to take action to prevent candidate species from being harmed," Matthew Bishop, a lawyer for Western Environmental Law Center who represents the environmentalists, said. "We're arguing that, by allowing trapping, they're making the situation worse, not better."
Bishop was referring to the wolverine's status as a species eligible for inclusion on the federal list of threatened and endangered species, but not included due to administrative concerns.
"The warranted piece of that is the science, the precluded part is more of an administrative decision that 'we're too busy,'" Bishop said.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's decision to classify Gulo gulo luscus as a candidate species was announced in Dec. 2010.
A federal judge in Montana has ordered FWS to announce by Friday when it will decide whether to list the wolverine under the ESA. The order sets a Jan. 18, 2013 deadline.
Leith Edgar, a spokesperson for FWS' regional office in Lakewood, Colo., said that he is not currently aware of any reason that the agency would miss the January decision deadline.
There are 300 or fewer wolverines in the entire nation, according to FWS, while about 400 breeding pairs are needed to assure continued genetic viability.
"No one knows how many wolverines there are in Montana," Bishop said. He explained that his clients are concerned that the state of Montana is authorizing trapping without any understanding of how the decision will affect the species.
"The state doesn't have any population data or any surveys to monitor the wolverine," he said.
One 2009 study indicated that there may be as few as 35 breeding wolverine individuals in the region that includes Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.
Dr. Kevin McKelvey, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service at its Rocky Mountain Research Station, explained that counting wolverines in the wild is a difficult logistical and financial challenge.
"It would be probably several million bucks to do it," he said.
McKelvey said that an alternative approach to counting individuals that involves assessing the extent of habitat available to the species is not likely to be a reliable method of obtaining an accurate census.
"I wouldn’t do that myself because those numbers tend to be really errant," he said. " One problem is the area might be different from what you thought it was. Another one is they’re not everywhere where there’s habitat."
George Pauley, the wildlife management section chief for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, rejected a request for FWP data on wolverine numbers in the state and declined to comment on the method by which the agency counts them.
Aside from the species' population numbers, several studies indicate that the animal will be significantly affected as climate change proceeds. A 2010 paper showed that, as the snow upon which wolverines depend for dens melts earlier in the spring, the extent of the species' range will decline throughout the contiguous United States. The study projected that the animal would lose about a quarter of its range by mid-century.
Another study from 2011 indicates that climate change will cause fragmentation of the wolverine's populations and reduce available habitat by as much as two-thirds by the latter part of the century.
The problem, according to McKelvey, is that,while it's clear that ongoing climate change may harm the species, researchers have a difficult time figuring out the appropriate baseline against which to measure current climate change impacts on the wolverine.
"Thirty or fifty years out, significant declines in snow pack in these areas and, presumably, a decline in wolverines is likely," he explained. "The issue is muddled by the fact that we either wiped out, or came close to wiping out, wolverines in the lower 48 [states] by about 1930. Since that time, their population has generally expanded and, as far as we can tell, it’s still expanding."
Given the uncertainty about the extent of the population of wolverines in Montana, the impact of trapping on the species is not easy to determine.
“I really do think our game management agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and folks like that who have to make those calls, there's still uncertainty out there," McKelvey said.
The Treasure State had set an annual trapping quota of five wolverines, according to a FWP webpage. The season was to run until Feb. 15.
Montana is the only U.S. state that permits hunters to trap wolverines.
Environmentalists filed the lawsuit in October after a previous petition aimed at convincing FWP to hold off on a trapping season failed.
Photo courtesy National Park Service.
NOTE: This story also appears on the Examiner.com website. Here is a link to it.
