Thursday, June 23, 2011

Enviros ‘helped’ wolf lose protection

The pro-wolf lawsuit groups also shrugged off hunters' concerns, by repeatedly pointing out that the northern Rockies overall have plenty of elk. (The latest totals: Idaho has about 100,000 elk, Montana has 117,880 and Wyoming 120,000.) It didn't seem to matter to them that wolves were taking a heavy toll in some locations. At the end of 2010, there were only 4,635 elk in the famous herd on Yellowstone's northern edge - a radical decline from the 14,538 elk that were there in 2000. The elk herd on the West Fork of the Bitterroot, in western Montana, had only seven calves for every 100 cow elk, alarming biologists who say the herd won't survive without at least 25 calves per 100 cows. Idaho's long-declining Lolo elk herd was down to 2,000 from a record 16,000 in 1988. There were other factors involved, of course, including subdivisions taking over Bitterroot winter range and the Lolo forests reclaiming meadows created by previous fires. But an adult wolf eats 11-35 elk per year. To claim that hundreds of wolves were having little or no effect on big game numbers smacked of willful naivete; it was like the oil and gas industry insisting that the decline of deer and antelope around Pinedale has nothing to do with the 1,400 gas wells drilled on that winter range. As state wildlife managers try to recover elk herds in places like the Lolo, permits to hunt cow elk are eliminated, infuriating hunters who are accustomed to taking a year's supply of meat from those herds. Hunting families rely on that meat, and the permits mean even more to agencies like the Idaho Fish and Game Department, which relies almost entirely on the sale of hunting and fishing licenses to pay its staff and carry out habitat protection and other projects. The lawsuit-filing groups also had a mixed relationship with the ranching community, at best...more

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