Group will sue feds over mexican gray wolf trapping

An environmental group has notified federal authorities that it will sue to block them from trapping wolves that wander into Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico or the northern Rocky Mountains. On Wednesday, the Center for Biological Diversity announced its intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over a 2011 rule it adopted allowing agents to trap and relocate wolves wandering north of Interstate 40 or south of Interstate 10. Those areas are outside the agency’s Mexican gray wolf recovery zone — a 4.4million-acre swath centered in Arizona’s Apache National Forest and New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, where reintroduced wolves are considered experimental under the Endangered Species Act. Outside the recovery zone, wolves enjoy fuller protection as an endangered species. The group asserts that this means they should be allowed to roam “perfectly good wolf habitat” regardless of where they originated. “Despite that full protection, the Fish and Wildlife Service surreptitiously granted itself a permit to remove wolves from those areas,” said Michael Robinson, conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity. The group is challenging the rule in part because it was made without public involvement.  In recent years, it has grown more likely that wolves could come into the states from the booming population in Wyoming or from Mexico’s reintroduction efforts near the border. Wolf advocates believe that the rules Fish and Wildlife established before reintroducing wolves into the Blue Range that straddles the Arizona/New Mexico line impeded recovery, compared with the similar effort in the northern Rockies...more