Reintroduced wolf brings challenges

By Christine Dell’Amore

Huddled along the road on a frigid November morning, visitors to Yellowstone National Park’s Lamar Valley are suddenly quieted by a deep, melancholy howl echoing across the landscape. A member of the Druid Peak wolf pack sings, nose to the sky, as the rest of his pack lounges on snowy banks a quarter-mile from the road.

Sandra Van Campen, who has come to the Lamar Valley the past three years from Helena, Montana, to watch the pack, positions her equipment on the road as she moves from foot to foot, fighting the cold.

“There’s something about seeing an animal that was almost extinct come back,” she says.

Background

Since its reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, the gray wolf has hit the ground running, establishing itself as top predator in the park and expanding its range throughout northwestern Wyoming, central Idaho, and northern Montana. And now, wolves are venturing far from their home territories, in some cases entering neighboring states of Utah and Oregon. Various wolf sightings in southern Wyoming, including one in Baggs, Wyoming, less than ten miles north of the Colorado border, have raised feverish speculation among landowners and government officials that the howl of the gray wolf may soon be heard in Colorado again.

“The issue we’re talking about is not man importing wolves, but how to react when wolves get here on their own,” says Jeffrey M. Ver Steeg, wildlife programs administrator for the Colorado Division of Wildlife. 

Silenced in most of the United States by the mid-twentieth century, the last wolf was killed in Colorado in 1943. In a state where reintroduction of federally protected species has been banned since 1999, both the political and ecological landscapes differ from states where wolves now roam.

“This is not Montana; this is not Idaho. The area of Colorado that wolves would tend to inhabit has a large mix of private property and agricultural interests, and there’s going to be pain with the arrival of the wolf,” says Rick Enstrom, chairman of the wildlife division’s eleven-member Wildlife Commission. 

Staying ahead of the curve

The possibility of wolves migrating into Colorado has sent state agencies scrambling to develop a management plan before their arrival. According to Gary Skiba, multi-species management officer for the wildlife division, a working group will design a draft plan, which is then to be finalized by the end of 2004.

The working group will consist of livestock associations, wolf advocacy groups such as Boulder-based Sinapu, and public opinion. According to Kim Burgess, manager of policy and regulation for the wildlife division, “scoping” meetings took place in February and March of this year; residents gave input on the issue of wolf management. The public was notified of the meetings through press releases in newspapers and information on the wildlife division’s Web site, Burgess said. The wildlife division has not played a role in wolf-related legislation for nearly fifteen years.

The management plan will coincide with the expected removal from the Endangered Species Act of some gray wolf populations in regions including Wyoming and the northern half of Colorado next year. And once that federal protection is gone, the wolf’s management will fall on the shoulders of the state.

The possibility of state control of the carnivore has already polarized groups, who disagree whether Colorado will be an effective steward of the wolf. The wildlife division hopes to find some middle ground, says Ver Steeg, although he acknowledges that in this case, the middle is far from clear.

“If the debate is controlled from the get-go by the two poles, the wolf-huggers and the livestock lobby, then reason kind of goes out the window,” says Rob Edward, director of the Carnivore Restoration Program for Sinapu.

Isolated in pockets of northern Minnesota, Alaska, and Canada in less than one percent of their historic domain, wolves reclaimed part of their native habitat following the release of thirty-one Canadian wolves into Yellowstone in 1995. Doug Smith, the National Park Service’s project leader for the reintroduction, says wolves were brought back to Yellowstone in conjunction with park policy of restoring the naturalÑor pre-EuropeanÑconditions to the park.

“It’s questionable if an ecosystem can function properly when you don’t have all the parts,” Smith says. “And arguably, wolves are a major part.”

More than 216 wolves in fourteen packs now reside in Yellowstone, and population estimates for Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho at the end of 2002 totaled over 660 animals, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Highly migratory, wolves leave their home pack by age three to seek a mate and their own territory, Smith explains. Wolves travel an average of fifty miles per day, and longer trips are not unusual. In fact, a wolf of the Druid Peak pack was known to have made a 210-mile journey from Yellowstone to Morgan, Utah.

As wolves continue to search for unoccupied landÑpossibly in ColoradoÑthe debate over what to do with the large carnivore has intensified.

“We could have wolves in Colorado with the prey base we have,” says Ver Steeg of the Division of Wildlife. “The real issue is a social one: do people want wolves in Colorado, and to what extent are they willing to accept the consequences that come with that?”

Steve Raftopoulos, a sheep and cattle rancher in Craig, Colorado, says that wolves not only kill livestock, but cause stress to herds and increase the need for added vigilance by landowners.

According to the Colorado Wildlife Division, from 1987 to 2001, wolves killed 188 cattle and 481 sheep in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

In 2001, an independent polling firm commissioned by the Southern Rockies Wolf Restoration Project, the Turner Endangered Species Fund, Sinapu, Wild Futures, Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, and Defenders of Wildlife polled five hundred Colorado voters on the issue of wolf restoration. The results indicated that sixty-eight percent of respondents favored the return of the wolf to Colorado. Skiba of the wildlife division says that with recent urbanization trends in the nation’s third fastest-growing state, Coloradans’ support for the wolf likely will increase.

“What we see in terms of public opinion is that the more people know about wolves, the more favorable they look upon them,” says Edward of Sinapu.

But Raftopoulos, whose ranch sits roughly forty miles from Baggs, Wyoming, where a wolf has been spotted, says urbanites hoping to restore the wolf show a lack of appreciation for farmers and ranchers. “People who live in sidewalk canyons of Denver see beautiful pictures of wolves howling, and they want to see that here. But they don’t know the impact,” he says.

Nevertheless, despite wolves’ detrimental effects on livestock, Smith says that the animals create positive effects in ecosystems.

“There’s no doubt wildlife diversity is higher and that there are a lot more niches available. In [Yellowstone], that’s a pretty substantial effect,” says Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Before the wolf returned to Yellowstone, booming, sedentary elk populations trampled and ate shoots of the aspen tree. Since that time, aspen stands have regenerated in areas of the park where wolves prey on elk. To research this phenomenon for the first time, in 2001 Smith took part in a joint study with the Yellowstone Center for Resources and Oregon State University. Although the link between wolves and healthier aspen is still tentative, Smith and his colleagues concluded that aspen were taller and stronger where elk were kept on the move by wolves.

Elk, which make up over eighty percent of the wolf’s diet, have also declined in population since the wolf’s return to Yellowstone. Bangs emphasizes it’s not entirely clear how much of a role wolves play in the reduction, because a five-year drought, severe winters, and human hunting are all factors that lower elk populations.

The return of wolves has also impacted non-prey species in Yellowstone. A study conducted by the Yellowstone Center for Resources and the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center observed 240 wolf-kills between 1997 and 2001. Findings indicated that scavengers such as the grizzly bear, bald eagle, and wolverine benefit from wolf-kills by consuming up to half of the carcasses. Because the wolves kill elk year-round, they provide much-needed sustenance for scavengers in the winter months.

An ongoing coyote ecology study by Bob Crabtree and Jennifer Sheldon of the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center found that coyote populations had fallen fifty percent because of wolves, who kill the animals as displays of dominance. Such a drop in coyote numbers may also spur a rise in smaller carnivores like the red fox, according to Smith.

“I would qualify all of this by saying we’re seeing this right now, but long-term ecological changes take a long time to develop,” Bangs says.

While some wolf proponents point to the ecological benefits of wolves in Yellowstone, opponents of the wolf’s return to Colorado believe that the circumstances here are different. Bonnie Kline, executive director of the Colorado Woolgrower’s Association, says that although wolves fit in some ecosystems, Colorado’s large tracts of private land and dense residential areas aren’t the right fit for wolves.

“Most of the critical winter habitat for big game is on private land,” Kline said. “What’s easier to attack: deer or lamb?”

However, Smith of the park service says wolves would stabilize ecosystems in Colorado by filling the absence of a top predator and controlling an excess of elk.

“From an ecosystem perspective, wolves would bring about the desired change for Rocky Mountain National Park. There’s no question,” he says.

Only time will tell if wolves can establish packs in Colorado on their own. Edward of Sinapu is doubtful, believing that the humans the wolf encounters in its journey south won’t hesitate to kill the carnivores on sight.

Wolves would cross through southern Wyoming, or “red desert country,” to get to Colorado, he says, which is “big, wide open, full of roads and livestock and not much native prey.”

Smith agrees that many animals would be shot en route, so a constant flow of wolves would need to be pumped out of Yellowstone into Colorado in order to form new packs.

“Some of the people I deal with are very resistant to change, very against the New West. The Old West is what they wantÑand that’s predator control,” Smith says.  However, he believes wolves will eventually triumph in Colorado. Natural recolonization is preferable to reintroduction, he says, since wolves will search for the eco-nooks and crannies of least human resistance.

And both Smith and Edward agree that wolves can successfully live on the fringe of human settlement, as they do now in Yellowstone.

Regardless of their ultimate place in the West, wolves, “the epitome of the wild,” as Smith calls them, continue to hold a fascination for humans. For instance, wolf-watching has generated millions of dollars in profit for Yellowstone. A study on the amount is under way, but an estimate before the wolves were reintroduced was $23 million a year, Smith says. “This is the cheetah and lion of North America. You’ve got people from all around the world getting this tremendous joy and putting their money where their mouth is,” Smith says.

Looking across the Lamar Valley, Van Campen says that observing wolves is a spiritual experience. “I feel like I have a kinship with the wolves,” she adds, peering into her scope to watch the pack playing in the morning sun, unaware of the challenges that lie ahead.  P