Wolves Still a Target, Even on Endangered List
A recent federal court ruling that returned Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolves to the endangered species list means that hunters won’t be allowed to shoot at them this fall, but that doesn’t mean the wolves won’t have guns pointed their way. Wildlife management officials still have the authority to shoot wolves if they prey on livestock, and those incidents led to more wolf deaths last year than public hunts. Conservation advocates hope the judge’s ruling will turn more attention toward non-lethal methods of protecting livestock from wolf attacks.
“Livestock conflicts are the greatest cause of wolf mortality in the Northern Rockies,” says NRDC wildlife advocate Matt Skoglund. “If the wolf attacks livestock, [officials] usually go kill that wolf, and sometimes they kill the whole pack.” In Montana, where Skoglund is based, 72 wolves were killed in public hunts in 2009, but 145 — twice as many — were killed after clashes with livestock.
Focusing on non-lethal measures to keep wolves and livestock apart would be beneficial to everyone, Skoglund says, because “you’re not losing livestock, and you’re not losing wolves.”
Several non-lethal practices are already being tried across the Northern Rockies. Electric fences, guard dogs, and red flags around the perimeter of a grazing area can all deter wolves. Then there’s the old-fashioned approach: a rider on horseback, just like in the old days. Wolves tend to avoid humans, so a range rider who tends the herd and actively frightens away any wolves that come around can help fend off attacks.
But some of these methods can be expensive, Skoglund says, and so far there hasn’t been significant public funding to help ranchers adopt them, so they’ve had to shoulder any costs themselves.
Wolves aren’t born with a taste for livestock — they tend to prefer ungulates like deer and elk. But as opportunistic feeders, if they discover that sheep or steer make for an easy meal, they’ll keep coming back. “Carnivores have an amazing capacity to learn,” says Carolyn Sime, the state wolf coordinator for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “They remember where their food sources are… It’s like a bear finding a bird feeder.”
The vast size of Montana’s grazing pastures means that putting up a fence around livestock is often impractical, Sime says. Range riders cost money ranchers often say they don’t have, and other methods don’t always prove effective. Once wolves make a habit of feeding on pastured animals, Sime says, it may be too late to ward them off peacefully.
“If we see targeted behavior where wolves are specifically hunting livestock, that’s a behavior that is not likely to be turned around by non-lethal tools,” Sime says. “Honestly,” she adds, “sometimes you have to kill the wolf.”
But it doesn’t need to be that way. In April, the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife granted a total of $1 million to 10 states with wolf populations to help compensate livestock owners for losses and fund non-lethal prevention methods. But Montana’s $140,000 will go entirely to compensating ranchers for the value of their lost livestock — the state paid out $145,000 last year and expects to pay at least as much this year. George Edwards, who manages the state’s livestock loss mitigation program, says Montana wants to fund non-lethal projects, too, but if it doesn’t pay back ranchers first, animosity toward wolves will only increase. With state money and private donations dried up, “We were just on the edge of having to send out ‘Sorry, we’re out of money, we’ll pay you when we can’ letters,” Edwards says — so there’s nothing left for non-lethal projects.
Still, killing wolves that prey on livestock and compensating ranchers are only temporary solutions, according to biologist Timm Kaminski. Ranchers are displeased even if they’re paid, and another wolf can easily move into a dead wolf’s territory, creating a cycle.
“Management through the barrel of a gun… doesn’t solve the depradation issue,” Kaminski says. “It’s like being in the Iraq and Afghanistan War and just signing onto it for a lifetime.”
Kaminski believes solutions will come from a broader view of the Rocky Mountain ecosystem that wolves and livestock share. He founded the Mountain Livestock Coalition, which combines the knowledge of scientists and livestock owners to try to keep wolves and ranch animals out of each other’s way. Isolated non-lethal projects may not work well, Kamisnki says, because wolves will simply go wherever the pickings are easiest — like the next ranch over. But paying careful attention to wolf and livestock behavior and getting multiple ranchers to cooperate can often avert conflict, he says.
For example, by studying animals in Yellowstone National Park, Kaminski and his colleagues found that wolves are less likely to prey on animals that stand their ground instead of running away. Young sheep and cattle — the ones most often killed — are prone to run, but they’re less likely to do so if they’re in a close group, as the animals are at feeding time. Kaminski worked with a group of ranchers in Alberta, Canada, who had been feeding their cattle in the morning and grazing them in the evening. That means that when the wolves came at nightfall, the livestock were spread out on the pasture, the skittish calves bolted, and the wolves attacked. When the ranchers all agreed to feed at night instead, the dynamic changed: wolves could hunt deer and elk in the pasture, the livestock stayed safe in a cluster on the feed line, and conflicts declined dramatically.
But that kind of change takes a lot of knowledge about carnivore and livestock behavior, and it takes cooperation between conservation interests and agricultural ones. That’s not always easy to achieve, Kaminski says. He is frustrated with the cultural clash between ranchers who care about the wilderness but need to make a living, and some environmentalists who vilify them for threatening wolves.
“It’s tearing urban and rural people apart, and all they do is fight,” Kaminski says. “It’s not healthy, for the people or the land, to continue to broker all this on the backs of working ranchers or the wolves that we spent 20 years [trying] to reintroduce. I think it’s time for us to look for a unifying approach.”
Northern Rockies Wolves Back on the Endangered List
Wolves in the Northern Rockies
Wolves Under Seige
Continue here: Wolves Still a Target, Even on Endangered List
Why the Buffalo Can’t Roam
In front of Karrie Taggart’s tidy, red-roofed Montana house, half a dozen bison relax in the spring sun. Others amble slowly along the road, graze in yards, or doze in driveways, untroubled by the occasional passing car, pedestrian, or dog. Their distinctive profiles, with sloping shoulders and furry, horned heads, create a bizarre picture beside the hot tubs and satellite dishes. Each spring, in search of fresh pastures and calving grounds, several hundred bison migrate out of Yellowstone National Park to graze near Taggart’s home in the jagged southwest corner of Montana, just west of the Wyoming border. For Taggart and her neighbors on Horse Butte Peninsula, the bison are as regular — and welcome — this time of year as the 8 p.m. sunsets. Surrounded on three sides by a lake, Horse Butte, with about 50 year-round human residents, is a rare place: one of the only spots in the country where wild bison roam the neighborhood. "They have their babies here," Taggart says. "It’s so beautiful to see them walking around. It’s a blessing to get to see that." But on May 15 of each year, Taggart’s beloved bison become outlaws. State regulations designed to protect cattle from brucellosis, a dreaded disease carried by elk, cattle, bison, and their relatives, restrict Yellowstone’s bison to the boundaries of the national park. Yet bison can’t read maps or rule books, and they’re natural wanderers, having once roamed across the western prairie in giant herds. So each spring, just before the cattle-grazing season begins, armed livestock officials in helicopters and on horseback and ATVs sweep across Horse Butte and other areas near Yellowstone in a ritual known as "hazing," chasing the errant bison back into the park. The process is stressful to the bison, and sometimes fatal. More than 3,700 Yellowstone bison — more than currently exist — have been killed by federal and state officials since 2000 during hazing and disease control efforts. The herd was culled by almost 40 percent two years ago. A new round of hazing began this week. As of Tuesday, there were no reports of deaths. But spurred by the outrage of residents like Taggart and a wave of support for large-scale conservation projects, state officials and wildlife groups have launched new, promising efforts to restore the wild bison to some of its former range, both around Yellowstone and farther afield. If successful, their efforts could reduce the fear of brucellosis and change attitudes toward this iconic American animal, eventually allowing bison to remain on Horse Butte year round. More importantly for the preservation of the species, they could also allow free-roaming bison from Yellowstone to re-colonize larger swaths of Montana and the rest of the plains. The 3,000 or so bison that make their home in Yellowstone are special, after all. Out of the tens of millions that once roamed from northern Mexico to the Alaskan interior, only about 500,000 plains bison remain. (By comparison, there are more than 2.5 million head of cattle in Montana alone.) Most of the remaining bison are livestock, raised on ranches for low-fat burgers. Just 20,000 or so live in "conservation herds," like the one in Yellowstone, intended to help the species survive. Yet even in those herds, the plains bison is a vestige of what it once was. Most bison DNA has been tainted by cattle genes, thanks to early-20th-century efforts to breed a hybrid "beefalo" that would be rugged but docile. Yellowstone’s herd is genetically pure, making the animals vital to the species’ future. But confined to the park, they’re hardly fulfilling the role that bison once played across the American West. Bison were what scientists call a keystone species — one whose absence fundamentally alters the ecosystem. Migrating, grazing bison created habitat for prairie dogs and birds; they carried seeds and pollen for hundreds of miles; they generated mini-wetlands by wallowing in the dirt; and they provided meals for carnivores at all levels of the food chain. Today, bison herds are too small, and their range too limited, to play any real ecological role. They are, from a biologist’s perspective, "ecologically extinct." It doesn’t have to be that way. Many endangered species around the world have seen their habitat vanish under pavement, or their forests mowed down for cropland. But the Yellowstone bison, and most other herds around the West, are surrounded by large landscapes in which they could theoretically roam and thrive. The limits to their freedom are not geographic; they are social and political. Accustomed to seeing bison behind fences, we can scarcely envision what it would look like if they roamed free, like deer or elk. But those committed to bison conservation can picture it clearly, and they are beginning to spread the vision. First up: Ranchers vs. residents As with almost every dispute in Montana, the debate over Yellowstone bison often comes down to property rights. In this case, it’s the rights of homeowners vs. cattlemen — and the fight is spilling over from Horse Butte to both in the courtroom and the state legislature. "I don’t want to see a bison shot on my private property," says Ann Stovall, who has lived on Horse Butte her entire life and now takes care of her elderly mother (as well as five dogs, a cat, a gerbil, and a parrot) in the house where she grew up. "I should be able to have them on my property if I want them. We need something to graze the grasses down around here. Why not bison?" On the other side are ranchers terrified of losing their livelihoods. Brucellosis is a bacterial disease that causes cattle to abort their first calves. The U.S. Department of Agriculture long ago adopted harsh policies to keep the bacteria from spreading. One case can doom a rancher’s whole herd to slaughter; a second case within two years revokes the entire state’s disease-free status, which means restaurant chains and supermarkets will buy their beef elsewhere. There are no cattle to protect on Horse Butte anymore, and there never will be again. The peninsula’s only ranch is now in a conservation easement, meaning it can no longer be used for cattle, and the Forest Service retired its grazing allotments there last fall. Still, livestock officials worry that bison might cross a narrow arm of the lake that surrounds Horse Butte — walking on ice in early spring or swimming as summer approaches — and arrive at ranches where cattle do graze, bringing the disease with them. That concern led the Montana Stockgrowers Association to sue on behalf of ranchers who graze cattle across the water from Horse Butte, trying to turn the May 15 deadline into state law. Taggart, Stovall, and other peninsula residents are fighting the suit in court, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups, arguing that it infringes on their property rights. Complicating the issue is the fact that scientists believe the biggest risk of brucellosis transmission doesn’t come from bison. Wild elk in and around Yellowstone carry the bacteria and roam freely across exactly the same areas where bison are prohibited. A recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey found that brucellosis rates among the area’s elk are on the rise. So why are the bison regulations so much stricter? The best answer anyone can give is that bison are more easily contained, and the bureaucracy that manages Yellowstone’s herd — five state and federal agencies with often irreconcilable differences — makes the status quo nearly impossible to change. Glenn Hockett is pushing for a new approach. An ecologist, avid hunter, and president of the Gallatin Wildlife Association in southwestern Montana, Hockett thinks the current system venerates the rights of ranchers over those of homeowners whose lives are disrupted by bison management tactics. "Can you imagine, you’re out in your yard having a barbecue, and suddenly these helicopters come?" he says. In his view, it’s time to remove Montana livestock officials (whose main interest is protecting cattle) from the bureaucratic morass overseeing bison. Hoping to capitalize on support from pro-bison homeowners and Native American tribes who have a strong cultural connection to the animal, Hockett has introduced legislation that would leave Yellowstone’s wandering herd in the hands of state wildlife officials, where he thinks they belong. His proposal has twice failed to garner enough support and faces competition from another bill — supported by the cattle industry — that would instead give livestock officials the power to manage elk. But if it gains ground in the next legislative session, Hockett’s bill could eventually get rid of something that many Montanans have come to resent as much as someone telling them what to do on their land: the Interagency Bison Management Plan. Face-to-face case for change On the ground floor of the Montana wildlife agency’s Bozeman office, a sign above the water fountain reads, "Please do not spit your tobacco into the sink." Down the hall, a grizzly bear hide hangs in the conference room, bearing its fangs at all who enter. On this particular spring day, the room is occupied by a group of Montanans united by their penchant for Wrangler jeans. Only their accessories help tell them apart; there are cowboy boots for the livestock contingent, baseball caps for the hunters (who, like Hockett, double as wildlife advocates here), woolen hats for activists from the Buffalo Field Campaign, and mustaches and beards for the biologists. They’re gathered for a meeting of the Interagency Bison Management Plan, made up of officials from Yellowstone National Park, the Gallatin National Forest, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP), and the state Department of Livestock. At meetings like this, hours can pass without anyone uttering the word "bison." The group spends the better part of this particular afternoon discussing whether or not Native American tribes, who have recently joined the group, need to submit formal documents announcing their participation. Frustrated, some environmental groups sued the National Park Service last year for violating its mission to preserve wild bison and the forest service for failing to protect its habitat. Sitting in the back row in the chair closest to the door, Arnie Dood listens patiently, fighting the urge to bolt. A large man whose gray beard marks him as a member of the biologist clan, Dood has spent more than 30 years with the state wildlife agency, leading recovery efforts for Montana’s endangered native species, including wolves, grizzlies, black-footed ferrets, bald eagles, and peregrine falcons. Last August, Dood was given a new task. "The assignment I have is to look at the opportunities to restore a huntable population of wild bison somewhere in Montana," he says, taking care to emphasize each potentially loaded word. "If you want bison on the larger landscape, you can’t just protect them. You have to fit them in." The mere fact that his project exists is something of a coup. Dood’s first order of business is to travel the state, meeting with residents and ranchers, hunters and activists, trying to find common ground on bison-related issues. He’s good at listening; Dood doesn’t own a cell phone and tries to avoid email, preferring face-to-face interaction. Presenting his plans at the interagency meeting, he makes a point of telling the tribal representatives — who have felt neglected in the past — how happy he is to have them in the room. Later, in his second-floor office, surrounded by skulls and skins, Dood seems less like a revolutionary and more like a friendly neighbor who’s hoping to ease some longstanding tensions. And there are plenty to ease where bison are concerned. "People are familiar with bison in Yellowstone," Dood says. "They may be used to seeing them in someone’s pasture. But there’s not a lot of familiarity with bison as wildlife, as an animal that moves across the landscape like deer, elk, and moose." While much of Montana’s native wildlife nearly vanished during the frontier days (in the 1920s and ’30s, deer were so rare that sightings of tracks made the paper), all of its common animals have since been restored — except for bison. "Some people think it’s ’cause they were too directly competitive with cattle, some people think it’s because they were connected with the Indians and there were racial issues," Dood says. "I think part of it is they were gone early. Before the homesteaders showed up, there were still elk, deer, antelope. The trajectory was down, but they were still there, so people were familiar with them. But the bison were gone." They had been hunted to near extinction as the first wave of pioneers and armies drove Native Americans off their land. In Montana, just getting people used to the idea of wild bison herds again might be the first step toward breaking Yellowstone’s bonds. A century in the making Dood’s approach of long talks and face-to-face interaction makes it clear that changing minds, not to mention the rules, won’t be a fast process. But that’s no surprise, considering that bison conservation has been languishing for the better part of a century. Even the American Bison Society — a group that helped save the animal from extinction under Teddy Roosevelt at the turn of the 20th century, when only 25 remained in Yellowstone — stopped far short of returning the animals to the larger landscape. Now Roosevelt’s group has been resurrected by the Wildlife Conservation Society, whose scientists contributed to a recent effort by several dozen bison researchers to develop a vision for restoring the animals throughout their native ecosystem. "This is bigger than Montana," says Keith Aune, a conservation biologist who now heads up the reconstituted bison society. In his office in downtown Bozeman, on the same street as Ted’s Montana Grill, media mogul Ted Turner’s bison restaurant, a historical map illustrating "the extermination of the American bison" hangs above Aune’s desk. Aune is an expert in brucellosis, which is transmitted when other animals come into contact with either a fetal carcass or related fluids on the ground. Using bison fetuses taken from slaughterhouses, Aune and his colleagues studied how long it takes for the bacteria to disappear from both the carcass (if scavengers don’t get all of it) and from the ground. The research was designed in part to help the Interagency Bison Management Plan make decisions about when and where bison could graze outside the park. (Aune also helped conceive of a quarantine program designed to create a brucellosis-free bison herd that could be used for reintroductions. See " Homeless on the Range .") Aune’s research shows how long it takes for land where disease-carrying bison once grazed to become safe for cattle. For instance, if bison are gone by May 15 and cattle arrive on June 11, ranchers could be 95.5 percent certain that no bacteria remained on the ground. But when Aune presented his data at the interagency group’s April meeting and asked the livestock representatives what level of risk is acceptable to them, they couldn’t answer. They’re trying to protect something that to some degree is unquantifiable: a nearly $1.4 billion industry, sure, but also a culture that, to some, embodies the essence of life in Montana. But the fact is, it’s impossible to reduce the risk of brucellosis to zero. "There’s only one way to get there," Aune tells the group, "and that’s to never have bison and cattle on the same landscape." But because Yellowstone’s elk can also transmit the disease, zero risk is a fantasy. "We don’t have zero risk with any disease management in the world," Aune says, "including with human health." Aune is now looking far beyond Yellowstone as he tries to give bison a chance to resume their ecological role. It’s a massive collaborative project that involves managing disease, analyzing complex legal designations (tribal versus state jurisdiction, livestock versus wildlife status), understanding regional economics, and knitting together patchworks of public and private lands. Not to mention closely monitoring bison herd demographics and grassland ecology. A study published in 2008 by Aune’s Wildlife Conservation Society colleague Eric Sanderson and more than two dozen collaborators laid out a vision for bison restoration that included potential "recovery zones" across North America. Aune is assessing these areas. Most of his work is conceptual so far, but it’s creating the kind of blueprint that’s needed before action can be taken. "I’m looking at climate change resilience, social and political environments, which stakeholders are there. What are the obstacles and how might we deal with them?" Aune says. "Then we need these individual efforts by states to do these things." As with Dood’s talking tour, just considering these options represents a first step that hasn’t been taken in a century of bison conservation. "I think we’re at the point where there are some phenomenal opportunities," Aune says. "If we could get two or three of these things going in the next 10 years, that would be a remarkable step forward for this species." Spring hazing season underway Back on Horse Butte, the days are getting longer. Livestock officials announced plans last week to push about 400 buffalo back into the park, and reports say the men in helicopters and on horseback have already rounded up more than 140 of the animals. As Taggart and her neighbors wait to see if any of their spring visitors will be killed by this year’s hazing, Arnie Dood is making his rounds, spreading the bison gospel to places like Malta, in the state’s northeastern corner, where cattle outnumber people by more than 17 to 1. Despite the steep and rutted road ahead, Dood remains positive. "These animals were part of this place," he says, "and they can be again. Not in 1800s abundance. But they can be a part of the landscape. We can make progress at this."
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Why the Buffalo Can’t Roam
She Runs With The Wolves
Laurie Lyman is perched in the middle of a harmonic convergence. A lilt of wolf song is wafting from a broken line of mountains in front of her, answered by a howling soloist on the flanks of Specimen Ridge, about a mile to the south. She is bundled beneath a layer of goose down, a hat with ear flaps, and footwear that looks like an astronaut’s. As she tries to locate the canid clans in her spotting scope, she explains in a whisper that the larger chorus belongs to the Druid Peak pack. "Let’s listen," she says, "and see if members of the Agate Creek pack reply." Lyman is one of the most highly regarded wolf trackers in Yellowstone National Park. And, at age 58, she serves as a lesson to anyone carrying an AARP card that real adventure still lies ahead: until six years ago, she was a grade school teacher in suburban San Diego. Now, says Rick McIntyre, a biologist with the park’s wolf project, "Laurie is a better spotter than I am." In fact, he adds, she is "one of the best in the world" in terms of her ability to observe and interpret the subtleties of wolf behavior in the wild. Hauling around a spyglass mounted on a tripod nearly as tall as she is, Lyman is out every day, logging her observations in a field journal. Each evening, she e-mails the day’s highlights to McIntyre and other researchers. Her work is unpaid, just a hobby one might say, but McIntyre and wildlife advocates consider it especially valuable at a time when federal agencies are struggling to fund vital research. On this frigid morning the Agate Creek pack remains elusive. But from signals emitted by the wolves’ radio collars, Lyman knows the pack is on the move, so she will be too. She’ll spend the next few hours driving her Subaru station wagon along an undulating road in search of the best vantage points for spotting wolves. From there she will record notes about who’s mating with whom, who’s leading hunts, which wolves are helping to rear newborn pups, and which packs are fighting with other wolves-or running up against other deadly predators, namely grizzlies. Last fall, when Montana wildlife officials allowed the state’s first wolf hunt in the better part of a century, Lyman realized that one of the wolves killed was the alpha female of the Cottonwood pack, a regular in the valley. With her deep knowledge of wolf behavior and pack dynamics, Lyman knew the loss of 527, as the fallen female was known, would inevitably lead to the death of others in her pack. What appeared on paper to be the death of a single wolf was in fact much more. "Her shooting and the subsequent loss of others have caused chaos among the wolf populations of the Lamar Valley," Lyman says. "After [527] was shot, her pack splintered," she adds, motioning toward the location of their former territory. When an alpha wolf is killed, packs are often left aimless or killed off by rival packs, she explains. Sometimes individuals disperse to establish new territories. Immediately after she noticed that 527 had been shot, Lyman sent out an e-mail alerting fellow wolf watchers and advocates. Her message intensified an already heated campaign to close the hunt. Hunters had taken out 13 wolves in southwestern Montana, surpassing the government’s quota of 12. The state suspended the hunt and resolved to revise its rules before this year’s hunt. "These amateur wolf watchers are giving us information that allows us to understand a bigger picture," says Lisa Upson, a wildlife advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which, along with other environmental groups, filed a lawsuit in June 2009 to stop the federal government from stripping the wolves of their protection under the Endangered Species Act. If successful, there will be no hunt this year at all. Lyman’s contributions are vital, Upson says, because they provide "a special kind of knowledge that doesn’t come through in government data."
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She Runs With The Wolves