Montana wolf death toll: 225

The rate at which gray wolves are dying in Montana took a big jump during the state's second hunting season since a rider to federal budget law cost the species Endangered Species Act protection.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks announced Monday that 225 gray wolves were killed in the state during the recently-closed hunting season, a 36 percent increase over the 2011-2012 seasonal total.

"We're generally pleased with these results," Jeff Hagener, MFWP's director, said in a statement. "The overall harvest of 225 wolves this season is higher than last year and reflects the more liberal harvest opportunities that were added for 2012. The effectiveness of hunters and now trappers together continues to grow."

Hunters accounted for 128 deaths, the agency said, while trappers killed 97 more.

The toll does not indicate a high likelihood of success for individual hunters. According to data released by MFWP, 18,642 permits to hunt wolves were issued during the 2012-2013 hunting season.

Next year's total might be even higher. The Montana legislature recently enacted, and the state's governor signed into law, a bill that increases the number of wolf hunting licenses that any individual can hold and lowers the price of an out-of-state resident's license to shoot a wolf from $350 to $50.

That said, the number of living wolves within the state likely exceeds this year's death toll. At the end of 2011 there were more than 600 wolves in the state, according to MFWP.

Montana governor signs bill banning hunting buffer zones for wolves around national parks

There will be no buffer zone around Yellowstone National Park in which wolves cannot be hunted, at least not if Montana has anything to say about it.

A bill that forbids Montana's wildlife management agency from establishing such zones for the Rocky Mountain gray wolf was signed into law Wednesday by Gov. Steve Bullock.

The legislation takes away a tool that Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks considered using to limit the killing of wolves that were collared as part of a federal study. At least nine individual collared wolves that either lived in Yellowstone or recently migrated out of the park were killed in 2012.

The director of Yellowstone National Park had sought the buffer zone to assure the stability of packs that reside primarily in the federal preserve.

A state court judge had refused to allow the Montana Wildlife Commission to impose a wolf hunting buffer zone, enjoining such a step in an order issued last month.

Wolf populations inside Yellowstone have declined by about 25 percent since hunting of the iconic animal resumed in the northern Rockies several years ago.

HB 73 will continue to allow MFWP to close areas to wolf hunting if a quota has been met.

The bill also lowers the cost of a wolf hunting permit from $350 to $50 and allows hunters to obtain more than one wolf permit. It also opens the door to the use of simulated wolf calls as a way to lure the animals closer to a shooter.

HB 73 goes into effect immediately, which means it will likely have a quick impact on the number of Rocky Mountain gray wolves killed in Montana. The wolf hunting season in the Treasure State is underway now.

Hunting of the wolf in Montana became legal in 2011 after President Barack Obama signed legislation that included a provision removing the individuals of the species in Montana, Idaho, and portions of Oregon, Utah, and Washington from the Endangered Species List.

According to the environmental protection advocacy group Predator Defense, at least 1,000 individual wolves in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming have been killed since that decision.

Of that number, 582 wolves have been killed in Idaho, 346 have been killed in Montana, and at least 74 have died at hunters' hands in Wyoming.

The Obama administration acted on its own to remove ESA protection from Wyoming gray wolves last year.

That total does not include several hundred more wolves killed in the northern Rockies, along with Wisconsin and Minnesota, by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services branch and other government predator killing programs.

Montana judge ends wolverine trapping

A judge entered an order Monday that effectively ended any possibility of wolverine trapping occurring in Montana this year.

Broadwater and Lewis & Clark County district judge Jeffrey Sherlock extended a temporary restraining order entered last month after the parties asked that a Jan. 10 hearing to decide whether to grant a preliminary injunction be rescheduled.

He set the expiration of the temporary restraining order after the end of the proposed trapping season on Feb. 15.

"Basically, the injunction is in effect and we're going to report back to the judge on March 1 whether we still need it," Matt Bishop, an attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, said.

By then, the fate of next year's trapping season may be known. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is scheduled to decide by Jan. 18 whether to add the wolverine to the list of endangered and threatened species.

"We're going to have to wait to see what the feds do," Bishop explained. "If they decide to list the wolverine, trapping won't be allowed in Montana."

According to a Dec. 19, 2012 report in Greenwire, the Obama administration is expected to propose Endangered Species Act protection for Gulo gulo luscus before the mid-January deadline.

The animal was designated a candidate for inclusion on the list of threatened and endangered species in  2010.

Montana is the only one of the lower 48 states to allow trapping of wolverines. The state had proposed to allow five of the rare and elusive animals to be killed that way during a season that it planned to start last Dec. 1.

The environmental group plaintiffs in the Montana anti-trapping case include Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Friends of the Wild Swan, Montana Ecosystem Defense Council, Native Ecosystems Council, Swan View Coalition, WildEarth Guardians, and Footloose Montana.

Photo of wolverine (Gulo gulo luscus) courtesy U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, photo by Steve Kroschel.

Montana judge halts wolverine trapping

A judge in Montana has blocked the trapping of wolverines in the Treasure State after environmentalists argued that allowing it would further imperil a species already at risk from climate change.

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.

Lawsuits challenging Wyoming wolf management pile up

Another lawsuit attacking the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's decision to grant Wyoming essentially unrestricted discretion in the way it manages the state's gray wolf population has been filed.

The complaint was filed Friday in federal court in Washington, D.C. by the Humane Society of the United States and the Fund for Animals. It follows a lawsuit filed Nov. 26 by a coalition of environmental groups in the U.S. district court in Denver and another case, also filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, by four prominent national environmental advocacy organizations.

"The agency's decision to strip Wyoming wolves of federal protection is biologically reckless and contrary to the requirements of the Endangered Species Act," Jonathan Loworn, an in-house lawyer for HSUS, said in a statement. "Wyoming's regressive wolf management plan is reminiscent of a time when bounties paid by state and federal governments triggered mass killings that nearly exterminated wolves from the lower 48 states."

FWS announced on Aug. 31 that gray wolf populations in Wyoming had fully recovered. The agency removed all gray wolves in the state from the list of endangered and threatened species and approved a management plan that commits Wyoming to maintaining 150 individuals and 15 breeding pairs within its borders.

Environmentalists were harshly critical of the agency's decision, predicting that it could lead to the extirpation of the wolf in Wyoming.

"Wyoming's anti-wolf policies take the state backward, to the days when wolf massacres nearly wiped out wolves in the lower 48 states," Jenny Harbine, an attorney at Earthjustice, a public interest law firm that frequently represents environmental and animal welfare advocacy organizations, said in a statement. "Our nation rejected such predator extermination efforts when we adopted the Endangered Species Act."

Harbine was referring to policies that overtly encouraged the mass slaughter of wolves and extirpated them from all of the nation except Alaska and parts of Minnesota.

The northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf was included on the list of threatened and endangered species in 1974.

FWS' decision to remove the gray wolf population in Wyoming from that list, and to delegate management authority to the state, followed the removal of gray wolf populations in Idaho and Montana from the list of endangered and threatened species via a "rider" to a budget bill enacted by Congress in 2011.

That legislation followed a court decision that negated a Bush administration effort to remove ESA protection from gray wolves in the northern Rockies.

A website maintained by the state's Department of Game & Fish says that there were more than 300 wolves in the state at the time its management plan went into effect. At least 50 of those wolves have been killed since then.

They include one female who was the leader of a pack that frequented Yellowstone National Park's Lamar Valley and a common sight to tourists. She was killed by a hunter outside of the national park on Thursday.

U.S. Department of Justice lawyers have asked the federal district courts in Denver and Washington, D.C. to transfer the first two challenges to FWS' decision to approve Wyoming's wolf management plan to a federal court in Cheyenne.

Photo courtesy U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service; photo by Tracy Brooks.