Back Off!

Where wolves and livestock mix there will always be dead wolves and dead livestock. There is no such thing as nonlethal “control.” But there are nonlethal methods of postponing and limiting control, and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks is committed to them. It teaches ranchers how to harass wolves with noisemakers, rubber bullets, and cracker shells (gun-launched firecrackers). It is experimenting with electric fencing and “fladry” (an ancient method devised in Europe in which red flags are hung from ropes). Because wolves fear things they haven’t seen before, they’ll avoid fladry for as long as 45 days. The Bozeman-based Predator Conservation Alliance—in partnership with Sime’s agency, the Madison Valley Ranchlands Group, the Turner Endangered Species Fund, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Forest Service—trains and hires horse riders to stay with livestock 24 hours a day and run off approaching wolves.

Still, the USDA’s Wildlife Services—which takes its orders from the Fish and Wildlife Service in Wyoming and from state managers in Idaho and Montana—is killing more and more Rocky Mountain wolves. “If you go back 10 years,” says Bangs, “we were annually removing about 7 percent of the population in all three states. Three years ago we removed 8 percent. Last year it was 12 percent. That’s the price of success. It means that all the available habitat is being filled up and young wolves are trying to establish home ranges in heavy livestock areas, where they’re probably not going to make it.”

Cattle killing is highly aberrant wolf behavior. It has to be learned, and when it’s learned it’s passed on. Wolf advocates don’t want stock-killing wolves in the population any more than ranchers do. “Wolves are afraid of new things,” says Bangs, “but yearling wolves aren’t very successful hunters. We see packs in which yearlings are helping to feed new pups, and they’re trying everything they can. They stumble on killing livestock. And all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe I’ve been walking by these things.’ That’s why we try to break that pattern. Sometimes when you remove a couple of wolves from that pack, the problem just stops.”

Exaggerated as it is, the threat to livestock is real. But what of the alleged threat to humans? That’s real, too, though we face far graver danger from, say, poodles. It is possible that somewhere a wild, healthy wolf has killed or will kill a human; and there have been several reliable reports of bites, as Ron Gillett tirelessly observes. But anyone who avoids the northern Rockies for fear the kids might be “taken down by a wuff” needs to find a concrete bunker for meteor protection. Having been educated by the governors of Idaho and Wyoming, other state politicians, the Idaho Anti-Wolf Coalition, the Idaho Values Alliance, and the Brothers Grimm, perhaps a few tourists really are staying away. But there are hundreds of thousands who come to the northern Rockies each year specifically to see wolves.

A two-year study, completed in 2006 by University of Montana economist John Duffield, reveals that wolf watching in the greater Yellowstone area provides local communities with $70 million annually.

Duffield found that about 151,000 tourists see wolves each year in his study area. Alas, I’m not one of them. While I’ve seen wolves in Minnesota, I’m still looking in the northern Rockies. I’ve come close. Seven miles into de facto wilderness in the Clearwater National Forest—where the state wanted to reduce the wolf population by about 75 percent and still might if wolves are delisted—I found wolf tracks and scat. And one afternoon when I was alone in camp I tried to initiate a conversation with the wolves that were all around me. Instantly my howling was answered and from only a few hundred yards away.

An hour later two Nez Perce biologists showed up all excited because they’d heard howling only a few hundred yards away. Soon it became clear that we’d been conversing in wolf. That was information my companions who were far up the valley and who’d heard the “wolves,” too, didn’t need to know right away.

I expect to see a Rocky Mountain wolf soon. But if I never do, just knowing they’re out there again, coursing over frozen lakes, silhouetted on ridgetops, singing under stars unblemished by ambient light, making the wild, beautiful land I own with all Americans even wilder and more beautiful—well, that’s almost enough.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

To learn more, go to these sites: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (http://westerngraywolf.fws.gov/), National Wildlife Federation (www.nwf.org/), and Defenders of Wildlife (www.defenders.org/).