Earth & Sky

The following individuals were interviewed for today’s show. Our thanks to:

Ed Bangs
Wolf Recovery Coordinator
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Helena, MT

Curt Mack
Lead Field Biologist
Gray Wolf Recovery Project
Nez Perce Tribe
Lapwai, ID

Joe Fontaine
Wolf Recovery Specialist
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

A very special thank you to the good people at Mission: Wolf for lending us permission to use wolf songs on today’s show from wolves being cared for at their sanctuary. For more information about Mission Wolf, please visit their website at
http://www.missionwolf.com/

Tracy Brooks
Kent Weber
Mission: Wolf
Silver Cliff, CO

Brad DeVries
Defenders of Wildlife
Washington, DC
http:\\www.defenders.org

Interview with Ed Bangs:

ES: Please tell me a little about the wolf relocation program.

EB: Well, basically the program has been a lot more successful than we ever could have hoped. We’ve got a lot of wolves in a lot more places than we thought, a lot of breeding pairs, the reproductions been very good, survival’s been very good. We’ve had fewer livestock problems than we predicted. So overall the program’s been wonderful. I think we’re in year two of a two year countdown of being able to declare wolves being recovered and possibly delisting them from the endangered species act. So everthing’s been going really well. That being said, there’s still instances where wolves do attack livestock, and we try a whole host of things to minimize those types of conflicts, or when they do occur, to resolve them. And one of the things we have done in the past is we’ve actually relocated wolves that have attacked livestock. What we do is that we take them from the problem area and put them somewhere else where hopefully there aren’t livestock, and then see if that takes care of the problem. In a lot of the cases it certainly takes care of the conflict of where we remove the wolves from. But overall, a lot of those places haven’t been that successful in keeping the wolves alive, keeping them out of further trouble or having them contribute to recovery. So what we’re doing now is we actually modify their relocation techniques to where we actually hold wolves in a pen for a short period of time, for a couple of months or so, and then move them in areas without livestock. And the idea is to try to break the tendency of those wolves to try and get back where they came from. And one of the really fascinating things about wolves is that they’re so much like us. And so if a wolf is raised around livestock and roads and people in its home range, which can be around three hundred square miles, they get used to those types of surroundings. And so when that wolf gets in trouble, then we catch it. Out there in the wilderness, the only thing that it’s thinking is: man, I need to get near something that’s more familiar than this. I don’t like it out hear. This is strange. And so we’ll actually see that these wolves move extensibly. And they typically end up in the same type of situation that they left because they’re more comfortable in those surroundings. And so a problem wolf tends to end up back around livestock, back around private property and people, in area with a lot of roads, and that can tend to essentially cause trouble. They end up in the same environment that caused them to have problems in the first place. And so a consequence of that is that we’re going to do fewer and fewer relocations, and more and more we’ll be resolving these wolf-livestock conflicts by lethally controlling the problem wolves. And the reason for that is: one, we have a lot of wolves now so each individual wolf isn’t as important to wolf restoration. And secondly the relocations haven’t really been that successful once a wolf gets in trouble.

ES: So even though wolf relocations were, in the beginning of restoration efforts, crucial for their survival, now they’re being phased out?

EB: Exactly. In the early phases, the life of one wolf was important in the success of the program. Now we have probably close to 600 wolves in Montana-Idaho-Wyoming, distributed from the Canadian border. There’s a lot of lone wolves that are bouncing around and looking for an empty spot to go in to. So these occasional problem wolves, that’s less than 5% of the population, in the past we’d be relocating them. Those relocations really didn’t result in those wolves being incorporated into the population somewhere else and successfully breeding and contributing to even more wolves in population recovery. Typically they ended up getting in trouble again, getting hit on the highway or illegally killed, or whatever. So yeah, with more wolves, we’re going to to fewer relocations because they aren’t as necessary as they once were.

ES: Can you tell me a little bit about the relationship shared by people involved in wolf management: environmentalists, land owners, and the government?

EB: The most fascinating thing about wolves is that wolves and wolf management have nothing to do with reality. It all has to do with human values and symbolism. And people use wolves for very powerful symbols, just like the fairy tales, and the story of how rome was founded, and native american tribes have wolf clans. And so for thousands of years wolves have been very powerful symbols for people. Everybody talks about wolves, not in the sense of what a wolf actually is, which is just another animal, but in terms if what it means to them as a very powerful symbol. So, anything to do with wolves is highly contentious, extremely emotional, much more controversial and expensive than it ever need be in the real world, because people just go nuts over wolves. Either you love them or you hate them. There’s not many people in the middle ground. And so that is the crux of the issue. And so environmentalists, if you lump everybody in one category, there’s everything there from people who want every wolf absolutely protected , people who want all livestock removed, to some people who just want control of some problem animals. And of course there’s the other side that doesn’t want any wolves at all, that it’s a bad idea and we should have never brought them back and that our forefathers were right to get rid of them, to people who think you can have some wolves in National Parks only, or some wolves in public lands only, or some wolves on private land if you manage them. And so you have this whole range of values about wolves, but most of it has to do with peoples values about wildness and wildlife in wild areas, private property, all these other things, and it has very little to do with wolves. I mean the one thing we do know is you can have a lot of wolves in a lot of places. But to have those people tolerate those wolves you have to get rid of the few that do the behavior that people won’t tolerate, such as killing domestic animals, domestic pets. So the whole issue really has nothing to do with wolves. They’re a piece of cake to manage. It has to do with people, and how emotional they get over wolves as a symbol of other human values.

ES: It seems like over time, by taking away the wolf’s natural prey, that we have taught wolves these unacceptable behaviors.

EB: That’s not really true. If you think about how a wolf thinks about things, just think about how you as a person thinks about things. And so a wolf is raised in a family group that attacks deer. And that’s what it’s familiar with, That’s what it knows how to hunt, that’s what it’s been taught with how to hunt. They know what they smell like, how to find them, how to kill them, all that kind of stuff. So when they come across a cow, they’re just like: holy buckets, what is that thing? They don’t even try to attack it. Most of them are near livestock every day. And they don’t attack them simply because they’re not familiar with them. But once they learn: oh, man those things are tasty and that you can kill them, they begin to hunt them more and more, just like they were normal prey. So, attacking livestock, or any kind of different prey, is a perfectly natural behavior to wolves, and it isn’t something they learn to do through bad management practices. Maybe once in a while you get a wolf that tries something new. If it works out, let’s say killing livestock, other wolves can quickly be thought these things are edible and are a prey. And so what we do, we quickly jump on a situation where wolves have learned to attack livestock, either remove the wolf form that environment by moving it or killing it or disrupting its behavior by aversive conditions, cracker shells, that kind of thing, so that pattern doesn’t become established in the pack. Because wolves have, kind of a tradition in their pack, and if it’s avoiding livestock, they learn to just not pay any attention to them. If they learn to kill them, then they hunt them more, they kill them more, and the level of problem goes up and up. But it’s really not a behavior that we have to do something for wolves to pick it up. They always, to a certain percentage, experiment a little bit, but most don’t.

ES: The gray wolves that were relocated recently ( from Big Hole Valley, Montana to Selway-Bitterroot Mountains) weren’t actually engaging in this type of unacceptable behavior.

EB: That’s absolutely true. And that’s one of the things that we’re trying with the relocations. We know moving wolves with an established problem is not very successful. In fact it’s amazingly unsuccessful. We’ve only had a couple, out of around a hundred, that we’ve moved that have really become established in the population, raised young, and all that kind of stuff. The others, we either had killed or attack livestock, or that kind of thing. So actually, the new wolves that end up in a place where we know there are going to be problems, we try and get them out of there before we know there is another problem. Now the Big Hole relocation from Montana into Idaho didn’t go that well. We didn’t move the wolves far enough. Now, three of the four are back right where they were. Now, we did a similar thing to a pack of wolves just outside of Helena, Montana about a year ago, and those wolves were moved up into Northwestern Montana, and those have not caused any further problems. They kind of drifted south. They haven’t made it home, well one may have, but the others are still kind of out there in different places in the woods. And the pack that we moved them from hasn’t caused any livestock depredation either. So reducing the pack size reduced the amount of conflict in the traditional territory, and moving those wolves, they’re actually still out in the woods looking for a mate to replace the wolves. And so that worked pretty successfully. And I think we’ll still use relocations, but they’ll be in pretty specific situations. I think that the days of moving a problem wolf are pretty much over.

ES: Does it matter also whether a “hard release” or a “soft release” is used?

EB: A soft release tends to keep wolves where you release them. The big problem with soft releases is you’ve got to build a facility, you’ve got to have security and somebody there to feed and care for the wolves. Wild wolves that are put into a pen that isn’t constructed with an electric fence can damage their teeth. And so what we’ve been doing is using a modified soft release, where we actually have a facility to keep wolves in. We keep them there for several months, which tends to break the homing strategy. Then we take them to the release sight and release them. The idea of building pens around Montana or Idaho or something just gets to be prohibitively expensive, and it apparently doesn’t really work that well, especially if you have a problem wolf. So what we’ll be doing from now on is probably be holding wolves for a short time that haven’t been causing a problem with livestock but we need to move, and just put them in a good spot and let them act like naturally dispersing wolves and wander around and find their own place.

ES: So what kind of future do you see for gray wolves in North America?

EB: Well, it’s certainly much better than it was fifty years ago. I the average wolf pack territory is on average three hundred square miles for every ten wolves, And so they need huge expanses of places. Wolves tend to be very susceptible to human persecution. So, I think with changing value systems about how important wildlife is to the people today, how important it is to know that there’s natural ecosystems out there in our country. It’s very important, and I think that all of those things are going to lead to more wolves in more places. I think that the drive to put wolves under the endangered species act is almost done, there’s like 3500 wolves in the Midwest now, we have 600 or so wolves in the Rocky Mountains, the Southwest has 30 or 40 wolves in the wild, and that program will continue to expand and grow. And the Service (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) is even considering the potential for wolf restoration in the New England states. But once we’re through with that, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s job for endangered species in wolves is essentially done. So I think the next big leaps in carnivore management are going to occur under the state fish and game agencies, and under the state and local governments.

ES: Thank you so much for your time in speaking with me today. Is there anything else you’d like to share with the listeners of Earth & Sky?

EB: Well, I guess the main thing is enjoy wolves when you can. Yellowstone Park right now is probably the best place to see wildlife in North America. A hundred thousand people have gotten to experience wolves first-hand. It’s one of the truly outstanding experiences an outdoors person can have. As Americans, I think that we should be proud that the wolves first national park has all the animals that were there when Columbus first stepped ashore. And as a nation, I think that’s something to be proud of.

Email correspondence with Curt Mack:

ES: What exactly is involved with wolf relocation?

Curt Mack: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is attempting to restore self sustaining populations of endangered gray wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains of the U.S., including the western states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. The wolf population recovery goal is to maintain 30 breeding wolf packs equitably distributed across the three state region for 3 years. The ultimate goal of the program is to delist, or remove, the wolf from the list of endangered species. The Nez Perce Tribe works under a Cooperative Agreement with the USFWS to recover wolves in Idaho, as part of this larger Northern Rocky Mountain restoration effort. All wolf recovery actions are taken to further wolf recovery and minimize conflicts between wolves and human activities.

Wolves are relocated for several reasons including: reducing wolf related conflicts, minimizing economic losses to livestock producers, decreasing the need for lethal control of wolves, and maximizing numbers of breeding packs in the population to insure timely achievement of the recovery goals and initiation of the delisting process.

Wolves are transported to their relocation site by either vehicle or fixed winged aircraft, depending on access to the relocation site. Relocation sites are chosen to provide suitable habitat for wolves, reduce conflicts with human activities such as livestock grazing, and to provide additional potential breeding packs in the recovery area with the greatest need. Release sites are typically large blocks of undeveloped public lands (national forest land or Wilderness Areas) that are without livestock grazing allotments and are removed from human habitation centers.

ES: What are the pluses and minuses associated with wolf relocation?

Curt Mack: As indicated above, the benefits of wolf relocation include: reducing wolf related conflicts, minimizing economic losses to livestock producers, decreasing the need for lethal control of wolves, and maximizing numbers of breeding packs in the population to insure timely achievement of the recovery goals and initiation of the delisting process. As with all management actions involving wolves, wolf relocations are a concerns among some members of the public. It is important to communicate clearly and coordinate closely with resource managers, elected officials, and communities surrounding potential relocation sites.

ES: How long has this program been going on?

Curt Mack: Wolves have been relocated within and between Northern Rocky Mountain Recovery areas since wolves were first translocated to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in 1995 and 1996. Relocating wolves is a routine management tool that has been used frequently over the past several years of the restoration effort.

ES: Is it successful?

Curt Mack: In general, success of wolf relocation efforts has been greatest early in the recovery effort. As habitats become occupied with resident wolf packs, the number of suitable release sites and opportunities for wolf relocations wane. In Idaho wolf relocations have been successful in reducing losses to livestock producers, and for the most part. successful in providing wolves at risk of being lethally controlled, with renewed opportunities to contribute to recovery after relocation. The majority of wolves relocated for depredating on livestock, have not been involved in subsequent livestock depredations. To date, relocated wolves from the Idaho Experimental Population Area have been successful at forming or joining at least nine (9) wolf packs and pairs.

ES: How are the pairs of gray wolves that were relocated in August of 2001 from Big Hole Valley to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness doing now?

Curt Mack: As of our latest flight information, one pair of wolves has returned to the Big Hole, the other has moved south of the release site into the upper Selway River and surrounding drainages. It is our hope that the pair in the Big Hole will not linger long. Wolves are great dispersers and tend to move extensively after relocation. Because of this great dispersal capability, we do not anticipate wolves establishing in the immediate area surrounding the relocation site. Release sites are selected to provide wolves with a secure place to “recover” from the stress of the relocation operation with suitable habitat, low probability of conflicts with human activity, and the best prospects of successfully exploring and establishing a territory in the surrounding landscape. On the other hand this great dispersal capability also means wolves have great homing abilities. We try to select release sites that are far enough away from the relocation area to discourage homing tendencies. In the past, we have had very few wolves return to the relocation area.

ES: What kind of future do you see for wolves in North America?

Curt Mack: Wolf recovery across the United States has been one of the most successful restoration efforts in the history of the Endangered Species Act. I do believe viable wolf populations will be restored in the Great Lake states and the northern Rocky Mountain areas.

Supplementary Web Sites:

International Wolf Center – For a global view of wolf conservation

for a wolf status report, try this link.