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.

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.

Concern rises over killing of Yellowstone wolves

The apparent targeting of seven wolves from Yellowstone National Park packs as they roamed outside the park boundaries is raising concern that liberal hunting rules in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho are putting the National Park Service's effort to restore wolves to the Yellowstone ecosystem at risk.

National Parks Traveler has the story.

Yellowstone's famed Druid Peak pack of gray wolves almost gone

Yellowstone's pioneering wolf family, the Druid Peak pack, is down to its last member.

That lone survivor of the famous group of gray wolves, which has been a draw to tourists worldwide and a subject of consistent interest to scientists since re-introduction of the animals to the national park in 1996, might not survive this winter.

“The Druid pack is kaput,” Doug Smith, Yellowstone’s wolf biologist, told the Billings Gazette.

There were still 11 wolves in the pack as late as January.

Then the alpha female was killed in a fight with another pack and the alpha male disappeared. Before doing so, he contracted mange, a disease that can kill animals with compromised immune systems.

Seven other females in the pack have died from mange or after being injured in fights.

When introduced to the nation's oldest national park on Apr. 14, 1996, the Druid Peak pack had five members. It grew to 37 members by 2001, sustained by the ample quantity of elk in its home area on the northwest corner of the park.

By the next year the pack had split up, and by 2005 the number of wolves was down to four adults.

The Druid Peak pack would not be the first to disappear from the Yellowstone ecosystem since re-introduction. At least six others have died out.

But the Druid Peak pack may be one of a kind.

In a first, some of its members were filmed in 2001 in the act of killing a grizzly bear cub.

Then, in 2003, researchers recorded the pack welcoming a new male member, an event never before documented by humans.

Perhaps that illustrious history is a reason that some observers continue to be optimistic about the pack's future.

"I would say they are down and out, but not done yet,” Rick McIntyre, a Yellowstone Wolf Project technician who has worked with the Druid Peak pack since before they were released from cages nearly fifteen years ago, told the Gazette.

The gray wolf was first listed as an endangered species in the United States in 1967. Restoration of the species to its historic range in Yellowstone National Park was mandated by the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

In May 2009 the Fish and Wildlife Service removed the Yellowstone wolves, along with others that made up a distinct group called the Northern Rocky Mountains Distinct Population Segment, from the endangered species list.