The Look of Success

In the wake of successful wolf reintroductions, managers who once fervently defendedwolves are now faced with killing them. Are we ready for modern predator management?

By Jim RobbinsOctober-December 2005 Vol. 6 No. 4

For most of the 1990s, Ed Bangs, head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’sEndangered Species Office, helped truck wolves from Canada to the U.S. and wasinstrumental in establishing the first pack in the Northern Rockies in more than half acentury. For years he nurtured them and protected them from poachers.

A decade later, the return of the wolf has been wildly successful. Since 1994, theirnumber has gone from a handful to more than 850 and continues to grow. They willlikely soon colonize new states, including Oregon and Colorado. The job of taking careof the wolf population has changed, too.

Now the job is to protect the species in a different way: by killing as ruthlessly aspossible those wolves that show a proclivity for livestock. Bangs and state biologists inMontana and Idaho find professional hunters to shoot the wolves from helicopters orfixed-wing aircraft or to track them on the ground and kill them. Sometimes the hunterskill a lone wolf; sometimes they kill a whole pack, pups and all. To do the latter, theycatch a wolf, collar it, and allow it to return to its pack. Tuning in to the transmitter, theyfollow this so-called “Judas wolf” as it visits—and betrays—its pack-mates. The hunterskill them one by one. “If there’s no alternative, we kill a couple of wolves,” said Bangs.“And we keep killing them until we run out of wolves or the problem stops. ” The ironyis not lost on Bangs.

***

The American West is getting wild again. Half a century after the wolf was dynamited inits den, hunted, trapped, and poisoned out of the West, it has reclaimed the northernRockies. This is one of the fastest recoveries of an endangered species on record, and fewexpected so many wolves would come back so quickly.

The return of the gray wolf (Canis lupus) has become one of the most controversialwildlife issues in the U.S. While people in Alaska and the northern Midwest have longlived with wolves, the wolves were gone for so long in the West that their return to dailylife has been a shock. This is partly because wolves touch something very deep in thereservoir of human emotion—a depth to which few other animals come close—yet atopposite ends of the spectrum. Some respond to a wolf howl with shivers of delight, butfor others that same ululating howl evokes chills of fear.

But the return of the wolf clearly demonstrates something else. Wildlife management haschanged dramatically since the last wolf was wiped out some 60 years ago. Although the

northern Rocky Mountains contain millions of hectares of federally protected wildernessand parks, much of the area is covered by snow and ice for more than half the year.Wolves, like people, want to live in the more hospitable valley bottoms. But that’s whererural subdivisions have spread unchecked and where people keep everything from llamasto horses to potbellied pigs and dogs and where ranchers graze cattle and sheep. It’s alltoo tempting a target for some wolves.

So the diminishing wilderness has met the computer age to create what some call—onlyhalf in jest—“robo-wolf.” Managing wolves in this New West is an intensive processwith radio and GPS-collared animals that are tracked down when they kill, night-visionscopes for those who hunt wolves, and electronic guard systems that are activated bywolves wearing special electronic collars. This technology may well be the harbinger offuture predator management.

***

Canis lupus is arguably the most charismatic of what biologists refer to as “charismaticmegafauna”—wildlife with sex appeal and the fierce public support that seldommaterializes for the Wyoming toad or the short-nosed sucker fish. This is so, at least inpart, because the wolf is a social animal that loves, mates, and rears its young much likehumans do. On the other hand, there are deeply ingrained stories about the dark side ofthe big bad wolf.

“When people start talking about wolves,” says Bangs, who has spent the last 17 yearsmeeting with people passionate one way or the other about these predators, “withinseconds they are talking about something else—their children’s heritage, the balance ofnature, someone else telling you what to do. A lot of people get tears in their eyes andstart sobbing. Managing the wolf is managing a symbol.”

“As a consequence,” he says, “wolves are managed much more intensively than any otheranimal. People on both sides want to know where wolves are.” Last year, for example,the Montana legislature passed a law mandating that every wolf pack in Montana have atleast one wolf with a radio collar.

The wolf’s Rocky Mountain homecoming offers tourists and naturalists the breath-stealing sight of a pack of the long-legged hunters loping across a grassy meadow orsunning themselves, drunk on meat, on a Yellowstone Park hillside. But because nopredator kills as often or with the same savagery as a pack of wolves, it has also meant areturn to raw, frontier-style brutality in the Rocky Mountain West—not just by wolvesbut by the people charged with managing them. And because American culture idealizeswildlife, the killing—on both sides—has come as a shock.

The killing has been ratcheted up in recent years as the animal’s numbers have grown.From a few dozen animals at reintroduction, there are now around 850. This increase hasoccurred much more rapidly than expected: biologists had predicted there would bearound 500 at this point. Wolves kill often, for each wolf needs an average of 4 kg of

meat daily. They also travel far and wide, and each pack has a home range of 650 to over1,300 km2.

Because the West is growing ever more crowded and the habitat ever more fragmented,officials say there is no way to keep the wolves in the West without constantlymonitoring, shooting, and trapping them. The current population of wolves is growingannually by 30 percent, which can take a toll on people’s livelihoods. “The key tokeeping the wolf around is human tolerance,” Bangs says. “The only reason wolvesdisappeared is because we killed them all. How do you kill the minimum you need tomaintain human tolerance so we don’t kill them all again? You kill problem wolves.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service goal is to have at least one member of almost everypack fitted with a radio collar so that the pack’s whereabouts is always known. There are110 packs in the three states, ranging from just two wolves to ten or so in each pack.

Lone wolves who take livestock are hunted down and killed almost immediately.Trespassing packs are dealt with harshly: they are repeatedly trapped, drugged, harassed,and—if they continue to range too close to people and livestock—dispatched withextreme prejudice. More than 300 wolves have been shot by federal agents since 1987, apractice known as “lethal control.”

Wolves in Yellowstone National Park get even more hardware. In the Park’s twelve wolfpacks, two to four wolves in each pack are fitted with collars. Some collars beam thewolf’s whereabouts to a GPS satellite 48 times a day. Biologists in the field candownload that information into a receiver if they are within a kilometer or so of theanimal. New-generation collars bounce the wolf’s location off a satellite to a computerwhich then e-mails the wolf’s whereabouts to researchers. The biologist doesn’t evenhave to leave the office.

With such intensive management, some say, the West’s wildlife is less than truly wild.But ultimately, it may be the only way to keep predators around. “If we don’t haveinformation, then we can’t manage them, and without that, they don’t stand a chance ofsurviving in this humanized environment,” says Douglas Smith, National Park Servicewolf biologist.

***

A meeting of ranchers about wolves sounded like Tales from the Crypt for theagricultural set. Three ranchers who had suffered wolf attacks quietly related story afterstory about wolves howling around their homes at night, about coming home to findfrightened, bawling, huddled cows circled by wolf tracks in the snow, about the emptyfeeling in the pit of the stomach when they see buzzards circling their pasture, and aboutcows who have trampled calves while fleeing approaching wolves. “It makes the hairstand up on the back of your neck to hear 75 or 80 cows screaming at the top of theirlungs,” says Randy Peprich, a lean, bearded rancher in the Paradise Valley north of

Yellowstone National Park who has had numerous wolf depredations on his ranch. “Inever heard a cow scream until the wolves came back.”

Ranchers are not the only ones struggling to acclimate themselves to wolves. Owners ofrural residential homes, which have sprung up throughout Montana during the pastseveral decades, have also discovered the wolf at their door and observed the predator-prey relationship disconcertingly play out in the front yard among the tulips anddaffodils. A helicopter pilot flying over Ninemile Valley near Missoula watched as twowolves chased three deer in circles around a house.

The Ninemile, situated a few hundred kilometers north of Yellowstone, is home to a largepopulation of wolves. Motion picture actress Andie McDowell lived here for severalyears in the 1990s when the wolves were first colonizing the valley. She spoke out insupport of the wolves, says Bangs, but her enthusiasm waned after the two GreatPyrenees guard dogs she had bought to protect her children were slaughtered by wolves.One was found half-eaten under the swing set. “She wasn’t against wolves after that,”says Joe Fontaine, a wildlife specialist who works for Bangs. “She just didn’t speak outin favor of them.”

The reality of the predator-prey relationship can test the mettle of even the most ardentwolf supporters. A saddle horse in the Ninemile, for example, was apparently set upon bywolves and galloped away, so frantic and blinded by fear that it impaled itself on the endof a 10-cm diameter irrigation pipe. It managed to free itself and run a short way beforecollapsing and being eaten.

Wolves that kill livestock are a minority; most stay with a wild diet. But from the firstattacks in1987 until the end of 2004, wolves have dropped 429 head of cattle, 1,074sheep, 9 llamas, 12 goats, and 4 horses. This may seem like a lot, but “It’s so low,” saysBangs. “It’s half of what we thought it would be.” And if it weren’t for ongoing effortsby federal agents, the toll would have probably been much higher.

Federal biologists have tried in several ways to make the situation tenable for ranchersand rural homeowners. Those with wolves nearby are often given antennas and receiversso they can track the wolves. They are sometimes given rubber bullets, bean bags, andother “less-than-lethal” kinds of weapons. Ranchers in Montana and Idaho are allowed toshoot wolves now, but only if they see them attacking livestock.

***

Some environmentalists do not accept as a given the need to kill wolves. Defenders ofWildlife, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental group, lobbied for years to return thewolf to the Western wilds, and now it wants to protect those animals. It has paid out morethan half-a-million dollars to reimburse ranchers for dead livestock in an effort to makethe wolf politically acceptable. The organization is also pioneering nonlethal methods ofkeeping wolves away.

With hundreds of red flags fluttering in the breeze, the lower sheep pasture at one ranchlooked like a used-car lot. A European innovation, “fladry” appears to keep wolves awayby scaring them. It usually works for only a month or two, after which the wolvesbecome habituated. But it’s better than nothing and can be used at key times. Researchersare also testing “turbo fladry,” where an electrical current runs through a wire threadedthrough the flags.

Some wolves are fitted with a RAG (radio-activated guard) collar, which trips anelectronic alarm when the wolf approaches. The alarm plays taped sounds of glassbreaking, people yelling, sirens, gunfire, and explosions.

The best defense against marauding wolves is human presence, and so Defenders ofWildlife has created the Wolf Guardian Project. At their own expense, deeply committedvolunteers, including students and housewives, camp out in remote mountain pasturesduring lambing and other critical times of the year.“Anything that makes it not worth the risk for the wolves can help avoid or reducedepredations,” said Suzanne Asha Stone, the Northern Rockies Representative forDefenders of Wildlife. The guardians track the wolf’s radio collar and, when the wolfapproaches, whoop it up—yelling, banging pots and pans, firing off firecrackers.

There are, however, only so many guardians to go around. So the go-to strategy remainsshooting the problem wolves. The killing is usually carried out by Wildlife Services, adivision of the Department of Agriculture that hunts down nuisance wildlife and is goodat what it does. Officials are apparently also worried that the public will find out, forwhereas the press can ride with the Marines into Baghdad, no one gets to see whatWildlife Services is doing to wolves with taxpayer dollars. A request to a public affairsofficer with the Department of Agriculture in Denver to accompany an agent on a lethalcontrol action was refused. The business of killing wolves is better done out of view ofthe public.

***

So is this what we wanted? And if not, what did we expect? The case of wolfreintroduction into the western U.S. raises some uncomfortable questions about predatorconservation in the modern world. Do we want to reintroduce predators for their role inecosystems, or are we just trying to recapture a symbol of the wild? Despite our bestintentions, how much “wildness” are we willing to tolerate? And is the hyper-management worth it? “I think it’s kind of ridiculous, myself,” says Bangs. “We don’t doit with any other animal in North America. There’s a lot to be said for ignorance andmystery. The essence of wilderness and the wild is its unpredictability.”

BOX: Living with Wolves—The European Counterpart

In 1978 biologist Petter Wabakken arrived in Hedmark, Norway, to begin teachingwildlife biology at the local college. He heard from local hunters that they had seen wolf

tracks but that no one had believed them. Wabakken decided to find out for himself. Inthe no-man’s land that is the Swedish-Norwegian border, Wabakken found a solitarywolf pair. Three decades later and after dozens of scientific publications, countless coldwinter days spent following wolf tracks, and the arrival of a third wolf in 1991, thepopulation exploded.

Now the Scandinavian wolf pack numbers more than 100. Their presence has put Norwayand Sweden on notice: as signatories to the 1970 Bern convention, the two countries hadpledged to protect and restore the biological integrity of their native animal communities.But the rapidly expanding wolf population would put that resolve to the test.

A similar story is playing out in the rest of Europe. European wolves, exterminated fromvirtually every central and northern European country by the end of the Second WorldWar, are coming back. Wolves roam the plains of central Spain and the vast arctic tundraof Finland and Karelia; they are found in great numbers in the deep forests of Romaniaand the sunbaked hills of Greece. All told, 25 European countries are now home towolves, with the number likely to expand as wolves migrate from current populationstrongholds to Austria, Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

If the wolf is ever going to find a permanent, welcoming home in Europe, Scandinaviaought to be it. Norway and Sweden are wealthy, liberal democracies with a sense of thenatural world so integral to the Scandinavian identity that it is recorded in thousand-year-old Norse myths. But Scandinavians are grappling with the challenge of modern predatormanagement. “The farmers remember when their parents worked hard to get rid ofwolves, and now the city folk are coming and telling them they have to have wolvesagain,” says Olof Liberg, a Swedish researcher at the Grimsö Wildlife Research Stationand coordinator of SKANDULV, the Scandinavian Wolf Research Project.

But does this mean it can’t work? Not if you ask the Swedes. Swedish officials havefound a successful formula for protecting their wolf population. Farmers who havelivestock in wolf areas can apply for money to build fences and other protectivestructures; if a wolf takes an animal, the state will also pay compensation for the lostlivestock. Wolf biologist Luigi Boitani of the University of Rome, Italy, says that Swedenhas been the most successful of all European nations in integrating science into publicpolicy when it comes to wolves.

But just over the border in Norway, the growing wolf population was greeted withgunshot salvos after the Norwegian government elected in Spring 2005 to cull one-fifthof the country’s population of 25 animals. Norwegian farmers are also paid compensationif they lose livestock to wolves, but Norway’s sheep population of more than 2 millionanimals is nearly five times larger than Sweden’s—and Norwegian sheep are allowed toroam the mountains freely to graze in the summer.

Scientists have responded to the challenge by using innovative approaches to keep tabson wolf populations. The Scandinavian Wolf Research Project, for example, issponsoring a wolf hot line in association with hunter groups. Hunters can call the hot line

and find out whether wolf packs are in the areas where they plan to hunt. The hope is thatfewer hunting dogs will fall prey to packs. And in a region where virtually every self-respecting citizen owns a cell phone, Scandinavians have figured out how to give wolvescell phones, too. One wolf was fitted with a special collar that held a cell phone instead ofa radio transmitter. Every time the wandering wolf neared a cell-phone tower, the phonesent a text message, allowing researchers to track the wolf’s movements.By Nancy Bazilchuk

Table: Current European Wolf Numbers1

Select countries:Belarus 2000-2500Bulgaria 800-1000Croatia 100-150France 100Greece 1500-2000Italy 400-500Lithuania 600Macedonia >1000Norway 25Romania 2500Spain 2000Sweden 150Ukraine 2000

Table Caption: The main conservation issue in Europe is the incongruence betweenbiological and administrative units. For example, although wolf numbers per country areused for policy and administrative purposes, there are actually only six major biologicalpopulations of wolves across Europe.

1Personal communication with Luigi Boitani, Department of Animal Biology, Universityof Rome, Italy.

About the Author

Jim Robbins lives in Montana and has written about wolves since the first animalsreturned to the state in the early 1980s. He has written two books and many articles aboutenvironmental issues for The New York Times, Discover, Audubon, and Condé NastTraveler.