ReSTORING THE GRAY WOLF

Few animals evoke the wild like wolves. Majestic, rangy and highly social, wolves play a crucial role in driving evolution and calibrating nature’s complex set of relationships.

Once — before bounties, a federal extermination program and expansive human settlement — wolves freely roamed most of the United States. Scientists estimate there were once some 2 million wolves in North America.

By the 1960s, when wolves were finally protected under a precursor to the Endangered Species Act, they had been exterminated from all of the contiguous United States except a portion of Minnesota and Isle Royale National Park — victims of an unwillingness, primarily on the part of the livestock industry, to coexist with a predator so wild and complex and uncontrolled.

Protection under the Endangered Species Act has helped wolves tremendously. In the Great Lakes, wolves have grown in numbers and expanded their range from Minnesota to Wisconsin and Michigan. In the northern Rocky Mountains, a combination of natural migration from Canada and reintroduction has created a robust population of wolves in Idaho, Montana and a portion of Wyoming that’s beginning to spread to Washington, Oregon and other states. In the Southwest, just five surviving Mexican gray wolves were saved between 1977 and 1980 and bred in captivity; some of their progeny were reintroduced and are struggling to survive against lethal livestock-industry opposition and government mismanagement.

OUR CAMPAIGN 

Although there have been substantial gains, the job of wolf recovery is far from over. A mere 5,000 to 6,000 wolves occupy only about 5 percent of the animals’ historic range. Establishing wolf populations in remaining habitat in the Northeast, southern Rocky Mountains, Pacific Northwest and elsewhere would secure a future for wolves and allow wolves to play their tremendous ecological role in greater proportion of their former range.

So we’re fighting to make sure all U.S. gray wolves have the federal protections they need to recover — not only as isolated populations, but one day as a more continuous population serving its natural role in ecosystems across the country. To that end, the Center filed a petition to compel the Fish and Wildlife Service to develop a national recovery plan for wolves, a much-needed roadmap for establishing wolf populations in suitable habitat. In February 2012, we and allies also petitioned the California Fish and Game Commission to protect California gray wolves as an endangered species under the California Endangered Species Act — which would help protect wolves wandering across the line between Oregon and California and trigger the creation of California’s first-ever wolf recovery plan.

Now recovery for wolves across the country is facing a new threat. In March 2012, in response to our petition for gray wolves in the lower 48, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recommended removing federal protections from gray wolves that remain on the endangered species list. The Service conceded it would still consider protection for subspecies or breeding populations (including Mexican gray wolves) and for populations in the Pacific Northwest and Northeast.

But that wouldn’t leave very many protected wolves out there. I n April 2011 Congress put a rider on a must-pass budget bill that stripped Endangered Species Act protections from wolves in all of Montana and Idaho, the eastern third of Washington and Oregon, and a small portion of northern Utah — an unprecedented action that, for the first time in the history of the Act, removed a species from the endangered list by political fiat instead of science. Given license to kill by the feds, both Montana and Idaho have wolf plans that call for drastic reductions in wolf populations, primarily by allowing hunts. Wolves have only begun to recover in the other states covered by the legislation, which may have the effect of stifling further recovery. The Fish and Wildlife Service has also stripped protections from wolves in the Great Lakes region, where — as in the northern Rockies — both Minnesota and Wisconsin have state plans that call for big cuts in wolf populations, including by reinstating a bounty in Minnesota. And the agency has proposed delisting wolves in Wyoming.

Just a day after northern Rockies gray wolves were officially removed from the endangered species list, the Center filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the anti-wolf congressional rider — and when a judge reluctantly upheld the rider, we appealed in August 2011. The same year, the Center and allies filed suit under state law to save the lives of two Oregon wolves that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife had ordered killed without conducting the necessary environmental review. The next year we had another victory in that state when pressure from the Center, a dozen other conservation groups and more than 5,000 individual citizens helped get the Oregon State Legislature to kill a bill that would have made sweeping changes to the state’s wildlife-management laws — changes that would have made it much easier for people to kill any of Oregon’s tiny, struggling wolf population.

Since the original wolf recovery plans were written, we’ve learned much more about wolves’ behavior, ecology and needs. We know, for example, that returning wolves to ecosystems sets off a chain of events that benefits many species, including songbirds and beavers that gain from a return of streamside vegetation — which thrives in the absence of browsing elk that must move more often to avoid wolves — and pronghorn and foxes that are aided by wolves’ control of coyote populations. 

The Center’s work for wolves should spark a new national conversation about wolf restoration that identifies suitable habitat, considers connectivity between populations, and gives these beautiful animals a chance to survive and thrive.