Wolf meetings planned The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal agency that oversees all endangered species issues, including the controversial Mexican gray wolf reintroduction in the Gila National Forest, will host a series of 12 public scoping meetings beginning next month that may very well determine the overall direction of the wolf reintroduction. Those meetings will be held in numerous places, including Flagstaff, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Cruces, Grants, Alamogordo and Albuquerque, that are hundreds of miles away from the closest free-roaming wolf. And they will be held in hamlets, such as Glenwood, and Alpine and Hon-Dah, Ariz., that, while close to the wolf-recovery area, are very small and remote. But the only large town that can legitimately be described as part of the wolf recovery area Silver City which has neighborhoods with more people than Alpine and Glenwood combined and which has beaucoup residents who pass wolf signs every time they go for a backcountry hike will not host one of the public-scoping meetings. Ironically, Ty Bays, a long time local rancher who serves as the Southwest Regional vice-president for the New Mexico Cattlegrowers' Association, feels that Silver City may have been left off the public-scoping meeting itinerary because of its anti-wolf perception among USFWS personnel. "I think they left Silver City off because the Grant County Commissioners sent a resolution to Fish and Wildlife saying that the federal government needs to pay ranchers for livestock losses due to wolves," Bays said. "I think the decision is political, but it doesn't really matter. We'll make the drive to Glenwood for the meeting there." A spokesperson for USFWS said accusations that Silver City was left off the public-scoping itinerary had nothing to do with the town's perceived liberal, pro-wolf-recovery bias....