Idaho wolf survey reveals thriving breeding numbers

[hirshey]

Anyhow, we all digress. Lots of breeding pairs, lots of wolves. I have gone to Idaho looking for/hunting wolves (since 2011) and either see, hear, and/or find their tracks and scat every time. Not surprising news to me, but good outlook on connecting with one in an upcoming season or two! I'll keep buying two tags every year.

[wolfbait]

January 23, 2015 "In a briefing to the Fish and Game Commission in Boise last week, Hayden estimated Idaho holds roughly 1,000 wolves and probably many more breeding pairs than have been confirmed so far." 
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2015/jan/23/idaho-wolf-survey-reveals-thriving-breeding/

In 2007 the minimum population estimate was 732 (Appendix A)
 http://fishandgame.idaho.gov/public/docs/wolves/reportAnnual07.pdf


liberal harvest by hunters and trappers of 29% or less of a wolf population has no impact (yes I said NO impact) on wolf population increases. http://idahoforwildlife.com/files/pdf/georgeDovel/The%20Outdoorsman%20No.28%20May%202008%20FWS%20Biologist%20Says%20Wolf%20Numbers%20Underestimated%20Mech%20Says%203,000%20Wolves%20Exist%20in%20ID,%20MT%20&%20WY.pdf


Where are all of Idaho's wolves going?



 The Predator Death Spiral…


We’re continuing to see an alarming trend in Western wildlife management. I am calling it the “Predator Death Spiral.” The underlying cause of this phenomina is when a wildlife agency attempts to hide or “pad” their big game population estimates when over predation begins to take hold. This in turn creates a downward spiral that cannot easily be avoided, and is often not even noticed until the state hits both a financial and PR rock bottom. Idaho was the first state to hit the wall with the “Spiral” followed by Montana and now Wyoming has begun to slip into the Spiral’s grip. The wolf situation has caused these three Western states to slide down the jagged slope of diminishing herds, shrinking revenues and bad PR among their customers and financial lifeline…out-of-state hunters.

The details of the spiral start out very subtle. The wolves, cougars and grizzly bears start to take a few more elk and moose each year as their unchecked populations grow and expand. The state does not react at first with cuts in the tag quotas. This would mean a decrease in revenue that would have to be met with either more tags somewhere else or even worse, budget cuts. So they do what most Government agencies would do in this situation…nothing! After a few years of turning a blind eye to the situation a bad winter like the winter we had in 2006 and 2011 hit and further accelerated the problem. But, the bad winter was even worse than imagined from a wildlife management perspective. The increased snowpack and cold temps caused far more than the usual winter kill. The predators did extremely well because of the increased snowpack that gathered the herds even tighter than usual, on heavy snow accumulations that created a wolves dream come true scenario. A concentrated food source stuck in a snow bank that cannot escape…perfect. After the long cold winter is over the elk and deer that did survive go into the spring in tough shape. Many of the cows and does have aborted their young in order to survive.

The post winter mortality counts come back into the department as an alarming number. But budgets have to be met. So being ever optimistic the state decides to give the remaining quotas just one more year to see if they might bounce back. After-all, the counts could have been flawed, there is no way we could have lost that many big game assets in one year, right?

The next fall the hunters are complaining, the harvest stats are coming back very low and things are not looking good on the PR front. Many non-resident hunters are threatening not to apply the following year and the outfitters are starting to make their voices heard.

The state reacts, and cuts the elk tags inside the wolf  and winter zones. But the money has to be made up somewhere, after all a few hundred non-resident elk tags equate to big money. So the state moves to increase the quotas on elk outside the wolf zone and increase the deer and antelope tags substantially in an effort to compensate for the loss in revenue.


As wolves continue to take their toll, state Game and Fish Departments struggle to make their budgets as big game populations plummet and demand for non-resident licenses crash.
A second harsh winter strikes and wipes out the antelope and deer herd excesses. Things are looking bad, but the state budgeteers don’t give up easily. Someone recommends the idea of raising license costs to all hunters, after all supply and demand economics formulas say a non-resident elk tag should go for over $2,500. But the resident tag increases get shot down by the commission but everyone likes the idea of sticking to the non-resident hunter a bit more. They can afford it, have you seen how much a house in California is worth? (pre-2008 of course). The following fall the hunters don’t see near the game they did even the previous year. Things are getting bad. Thanks to the internet the word gets out and many of the non-resident hunters move their camps and non-resident dollars to Colorado and New Mexico to hunt elk and deer.

The next thing the state knows, they are sitting on millions of dollars worth of unclaimed and unwanted non-resident tags. Now with the wildlife resource in shambles and a multi-million dollar budget shortfall the state is finally forced to wake up and smell the coffee. This isn’t the 1970’s…it’s no surprise to us that a non-resident hunter who pays over $1,000 for an elk tag expects a good elk hunt, why should it come as a surprise to the state Game and Fish Commission? But it does. What the state fails to realize is, that once they began to charge that kind of money for tags and preference points they in affect gave up the option to simply brush it off as a “bad winter, try again next year” excuse that worked so well in the past.  In the information age non-resident hunters no longer accept excuses easily.

This is the bottom. A state is stuck to come clean and admit they are in a real hole. They don’t have the wildlife any longer to support their budgetary needs and their customers know it. This is the type of situation where a little fudge in numbers here and there has created a beast that cannot be controlled and is getting bigger, badder and uglier every year until the bottom is hit.

Why? Because it would mean that the states would have to admit to contributing to their own financial demise. Some Western Fish and Game Departments have in fact become a wolf in sheep’s clothing to their constituants. Some inside the departments have, although reluctantly, in some cases went along with the Federal Government’s master plan to re-introduce super predators back into the ecosystem to eventually control big game herds without the use of hunters. It’s almost as if the state neglected to realize that this would, in fact, slit their own throats by gutting their departments of the necessary funding to run.

And this is not just a Wyoming, Montana and Idaho problem. Wolves have already begun to take hold in Washington, Oregon and Utah. Nevada, and Colorado are certainly next. And for all of you midwest whitetail hunters out there, sorry, your not safe either. The government has devised a plan to expand the Mexican wolf North from Arizona and New Mexico into Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, North and South Dakota and Nebraska to connect with the upper midwest wolf populations in Minnesota and Wisconsin. This would give super predators a way to control whitetail deer populations minus the use of hunting as a management tool.

This is a critical situation but all is not lost yet. There have been huge strides made in the recent wolf debate and wolves are starting to be controlled now in Montana and Idaho. We all as hunters need to keep pressure on our politicians and state agencies to make sure they do the right thing for our wildlife. We pay them to manage our wildlife resource in a responsible manner, make them earn their money. Taking the easy way out is not good enough. They need to do better, our big game wildlife resource depends on it.

Drop me a line and let me know what your thoughts are…maybe I’m just a conspiracy theorist…who knows. I know what I’ve heard and seen first hand so far, though, and it’s not looking good.

Guy

http://blog.eastmans.com/the-predator-death-spiral/


20 moose tags added to North Idaho hunts

http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/outdoors/2015/jan/26/20-moose-tags-added-north-idaho-hunts/


Poor Attendance at “Idaho Wildlife Summit” Reflects

Citizen Mistrust of F&G Refusal to Manage Wildlife

http://idahoforwildlife.com/files/pdf/georgeDovel/The%20Outdoorsman%20No%20%2050%20Sept%202012-Summit.pdf

[Sitka_Blacktail]

Wolfbait, the scenario put out by "Guy" in Eastman's leaves out some very important pieces of the puzzle as far as game populations and managing them. I really don't expect you to understand them because your mind is closed. But I'll list some of them anyway.  First off, game populations are never static. They are always going up and down responding to conditions, habitat, disease, and yes predators which respond with up and down trends themselves. Good managers try to take the hard edges off these trends and soften the ups and downs. As far as softening goes, most hunters would rather it was just the downs that are softened and not the us, but the ups are just as important in the long run. If you let herds outgrow their habitat, they will damage it to a point where there is a big die off and recovery is long in coming. So managers are generally more liberal with bag limits on an upward cycle and offer more doe or cow hunts , in the case of cervids, to try to head off disaster. When herds are trending downward, they naturally try to limit harvest. But sometimes, a good trimming is what the herd needs to let things regenerate.  There will never be a herd in the wild that stays the same year after year. Anyone who expects that is very naive indeed. It doesn't matter if there are predators involved or not.

Here is something "Guy" missed in his rant. In the 50s and 60s, Idaho's deer and elk populations had climbed to great heights. Yearly harvests of deer were in the 60,000 to high 70,000 range. The high was over 78,000 in 1968. There were no wolves and a fair number of bears and a few lions in those days. And yet the deer herds crashed. Spectacularly! If you cant blame it on predators, what can you blame it on? Bad winters, and habitat.  By 1976, the deer harvest had dropped to just over 25,000.

Same with elk. From the mid 50s, Idaho was regularly having elk harvests in the 12,000-17,000 range with a high also in 1968 of just over 17,000. Then by 1976, the harvest had dropped to just over 4,000 elk. Again, you cannot blame wolves or predators. natural conditions and habitat did that.

Then both deer and elk started to come back again until the late 80s for deer with a harvest of 95,000 in 1989 and elk peaked in 1994 with a harvest of almost 30,000.  Then another downward trend started for both species. You could try to blame it on the introduction of wolves, but it was more than likely once again a habitat issue. The 80s and early 90s coincided with high timber prices and aggressive logging which opened up the land to produce good graze for both deer and elk. As those openings grew into thick reprod, graze was lost and subsequently the habitat couldn't support as many animals. Throw in a few bad winters and what we saw was normal up and down activity in herd dynamics. A few areas with marginal habitat are still in a downward trend, others have stabilized. Herds will continue to go up and down as always in spite of predators which will also go up and down.

The other thing "Guy" left out was disease. Part of the decline seen in the last couple decades was due to diseases such as chronic wasting disease, blue tongue, brucellosis, and other diseases. Here is where wolves can actually help. I will be the first one to tell you, wolves don't just take weak and sick animals. They also take healthy animals when they can and need to. But wolves will take out the weak, sick, injured, and old first as a general rule. They want to eat, and want to do it the easiest way with the least risk of being injured or killed themselves. They often "test" prey animals to see if there will be much resistance. They will take out the easiest targets first. That's one reason predators go after newborns. There isn't near as much food there, but it's much easier and less risky to kill them. The point being, wolves can be a good governor when it comes to disease. They can take out the weak and sick before they spread whatever disease they are carrying. They also keep prey herds broken into smaller groups and spread out which in turn also limits the spread of disease.

In reality, instead of being a negative, wolves can be a neutral, especially if they end up neutralizing other predators in the area. One of my predictions is that game birds will thrive once wolves get to work on local coyote populations. Deer fawns should actually get a break from fewer coyotes too.

As long as Idaho keeps managing wolves with hunting, trapping, and lethal removal where necessary, the worst is past.

[wolfbait]

The “Blame It on Conley” Excuse

On Feb. 7, 2012 I received emails from several concerned citizens containing a criticism by Idaho Rep. Marv Hagedorn for their blaming IDFG for problems that began 18 years ago. Rep. Hagedorn’s 460-word post, reportedly on the Lobo Watch Facebook blog, included the following opening paragraph:

“Remember, the people that were involved in this are gone (Connelly died a few years ago, but was out as the Director soon after this happened). Continuing to blame the people that are in the department now for deeds done by others 18 years ago isn't the answer to fixing the problem.”

Conley did not die until Oct. 5, 2012 and continued to influence game management from his return to Idaho until shortly before his death – see IDFG photo below:

Birds of a Feather

2010 photo of Jerry Conley with then Director Cal Groen and Idaho Statesman Environmental Reporter Rocky Barker.

Cal Groen was taught his duties as Director of the Nature Conservancy’s Idaho Conservation Data Center, and hired by Conley in 1990 to assume those duties. IDFG Staff who supported Conley’s illegal Agreement and Permit to FWS to transplant larger Canadian wolves into existing territory of smaller native wolves, included Groen, Lonn Kuck, Steve Huffaker Virgil Moore and many others.

While it is true that Conley left Idaho for Missouri as part of an alleged agreement not to be fired, in 2008 his former IDFG accomplices, including Cal Groen as Director, quadrupled the minimum number of wolves IDFG agreed to maintain. That illegal wolf plan, which was never approved by the legislature as the law required, was sent to FWS by Idaho Gov. Otter, along with exhibits and his letter promising to manage for more than four times as many wolves as had been approved by FWS.

Even after our repeated publication of this illegal activity forced Gov. Otter to stop supporting this debacle in Dec. 2010, IDFG officials refused to kill enough wolves to halt the mule deer and elk decline.

Promises F&G Had No Intention of Keeping

In Feb. 2009 Research Biologist George Pauley promised hunters in both Idaho and Montana that IDFG would use Wildlife Services to kill 80% of the Lolo Zone wolves each year for five years – leaving only 20-30 remaining wolves in 3-5 packs each year. In March 2010, after a helicopter census found the Lolo Zone elk had declined by another 57%, Director Groen’s op-ed news release said: “Fish and Game will do what it takes to restore the health of the Lolo herd.”

In his May 17, 2011 “Business Plan” new Director Virgil Moore promised the Commission and Idaho big game hunters that F&G would also initiate wolf control in other zones in 2012 “where wolf predation is known to be preventing achievement of ungulate goals.”

Wolf Estimate Indicates Removing 80-100 Wolves

On Dec. 16, 2011, IDFG estimated there were from 75-100* resident wolves and at least seven packs in the Lolo Zone. Only three of those packs were actually counted and they totaled “at least” 31 wolves – less three wolves that were later killed.

(* includes estimated wolves that were not part of packs – but does not include wolves in 6 of the 8 border packs that hunt in both states, but are claimed by Montana)

If Idaho added even one-third of the shared wolves in Montana’s border packs and their non-pack members to its 75-100 Lolo Zone estimate, the estimated wolf total would have increased to 100-125. The combined 80% kill by hunters, trappers and Wildlife Services would then be 80-100, leaving 20-30 wolves as planned.

By mid-February 2012 when the Wildlife Services helicopter gunner crew was called in to remove the wolves, hunters and trappers in Idaho had killed only 22 wolves in the Lolo Zone. More than half of those were killed before the year-end estimate of 75-100 wolves was calculated and published on Dec. 16th, and would not have changed that estimate.

From mid-February, during the remaining month and a half of trapping season and 4-1/2 months of hunting season, only six more wolves were killed in the Lolo Zone by hunters and trappers. Even if we ignore the wolf kill that occurred before the end-of-year December 16th population estimate, subtracting the entire 28 killed from the 80-100 (80%) that should have been killed would still have resulted in Wildlife Services having to kill between 52 and 72 wolves.

Instead, Deputy Director Unsworth told Wildlife Services to stop killing wolves on the third day, after it had killed only 14. Killing only 42 total wolves in the 2011-12 season protected the rest of the wolf population, including all of the 2012 pup increase, from humans.

Although only 14% of the Lolo Zone is wilderness and the wolf hunting and trapping seasons are 10 months and 4-1/2 months long, the fact that hunters were only able to kill 12 wolves and trappers only 16 is more evidence that the restrictions placed on sport hunting and trapping make it impossible to make a dent in the wolf population.

What Could Have Been – But Isn’t

Biologists’ 2008 plan to reduce Lolo wolf numbers by 80% and maintain ~25 wolves per year for five years meant killing about 105 wolves initially. But it also meant that an estimated 3,600 or more of the 5,110 Lolo elk that were counted in 2006 would still be alive.

If bears and lions were strictly controlled, the ratio of 25 wolves to 3,600 elk – one wolf for at least 144 elk for the next five years – would have allowed enough elk calves to survive to get a good start at rebuilding the declining Lolo elk herd. Instead, the 2011 Lolo Zone elk harvest was down 95% from the highs of 1989 and 1995!

The biologists’ repeated failure to recommend a legitimate wolf control action and their years of false promises, posturing, and misrepresentation of facts, should make it obvious to everyone that IDFG officials have no intention of controlling wolves to restore healthy game populations in the Lolo Zone, or anywhere else.

Instead they spent thousands of dollars of sportsmen license fees trying to convince hunters to attend the “Wildlife Summit” and then ask elected officials to fund their anti-hunting agenda with general tax revenues.


Read more @ http://idahoforwildlife.com/files/pdf/georgeDovel/The%20Outdoorsman%20No%20%2050%20Sept%202012-Summit.pdf

[huntnphool]

January 23, 2015 "In a briefing to the Fish and Game Commission in Boise last week, Hayden estimated Idaho holds roughly 1,000 wolves and probably many more breeding pairs than have been confirmed so far." 
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2015/jan/23/idaho-wolf-survey-reveals-thriving-breeding/

In 2007 the minimum population estimate was 732 (Appendix A)
 http://fishandgame.idaho.gov/public/docs/wolves/reportAnnual07.pdf


liberal harvest by hunters and trappers of 29% or less of a wolf population has no impact (yes I said NO impact) on wolf population increases. http://idahoforwildlife.com/files/pdf/georgeDovel/The%20Outdoorsman%20No.28%20May%202008%20FWS%20Biologist%20Says%20Wolf%20Numbers%20Underestimated%20Mech%20Says%203,000%20Wolves%20Exist%20in%20ID,%20MT%20&%20WY.pdf


Where are all of Idaho's wolves going?



 The Predator Death Spiral…


We’re continuing to see an alarming trend in Western wildlife management. I am calling it the “Predator Death Spiral.” The underlying cause of this phenomina is when a wildlife agency attempts to hide or “pad” their big game population estimates when over predation begins to take hold. This in turn creates a downward spiral that cannot easily be avoided, and is often not even noticed until the state hits both a financial and PR rock bottom. Idaho was the first state to hit the wall with the “Spiral” followed by Montana and now Wyoming has begun to slip into the Spiral’s grip. The wolf situation has caused these three Western states to slide down the jagged slope of diminishing herds, shrinking revenues and bad PR among their customers and financial lifeline…out-of-state hunters.

The details of the spiral start out very subtle. The wolves, cougars and grizzly bears start to take a few more elk and moose each year as their unchecked populations grow and expand. The state does not react at first with cuts in the tag quotas. This would mean a decrease in revenue that would have to be met with either more tags somewhere else or even worse, budget cuts. So they do what most Government agencies would do in this situation…nothing! After a few years of turning a blind eye to the situation a bad winter like the winter we had in 2006 and 2011 hit and further accelerated the problem. But, the bad winter was even worse than imagined from a wildlife management perspective. The increased snowpack and cold temps caused far more than the usual winter kill. The predators did extremely well because of the increased snowpack that gathered the herds even tighter than usual, on heavy snow accumulations that created a wolves dream come true scenario. A concentrated food source stuck in a snow bank that cannot escape…perfect. After the long cold winter is over the elk and deer that did survive go into the spring in tough shape. Many of the cows and does have aborted their young in order to survive.

The post winter mortality counts come back into the department as an alarming number. But budgets have to be met. So being ever optimistic the state decides to give the remaining quotas just one more year to see if they might bounce back. After-all, the counts could have been flawed, there is no way we could have lost that many big game assets in one year, right?

The next fall the hunters are complaining, the harvest stats are coming back very low and things are not looking good on the PR front. Many non-resident hunters are threatening not to apply the following year and the outfitters are starting to make their voices heard.

The state reacts, and cuts the elk tags inside the wolf  and winter zones. But the money has to be made up somewhere, after all a few hundred non-resident elk tags equate to big money. So the state moves to increase the quotas on elk outside the wolf zone and increase the deer and antelope tags substantially in an effort to compensate for the loss in revenue.


As wolves continue to take their toll, state Game and Fish Departments struggle to make their budgets as big game populations plummet and demand for non-resident licenses crash.
A second harsh winter strikes and wipes out the antelope and deer herd excesses. Things are looking bad, but the state budgeteers don’t give up easily. Someone recommends the idea of raising license costs to all hunters, after all supply and demand economics formulas say a non-resident elk tag should go for over $2,500. But the resident tag increases get shot down by the commission but everyone likes the idea of sticking to the non-resident hunter a bit more. They can afford it, have you seen how much a house in California is worth? (pre-2008 of course). The following fall the hunters don’t see near the game they did even the previous year. Things are getting bad. Thanks to the internet the word gets out and many of the non-resident hunters move their camps and non-resident dollars to Colorado and New Mexico to hunt elk and deer.

The next thing the state knows, they are sitting on millions of dollars worth of unclaimed and unwanted non-resident tags. Now with the wildlife resource in shambles and a multi-million dollar budget shortfall the state is finally forced to wake up and smell the coffee. This isn’t the 1970’s…it’s no surprise to us that a non-resident hunter who pays over $1,000 for an elk tag expects a good elk hunt, why should it come as a surprise to the state Game and Fish Commission? But it does. What the state fails to realize is, that once they began to charge that kind of money for tags and preference points they in affect gave up the option to simply brush it off as a “bad winter, try again next year” excuse that worked so well in the past.  In the information age non-resident hunters no longer accept excuses easily.

This is the bottom. A state is stuck to come clean and admit they are in a real hole. They don’t have the wildlife any longer to support their budgetary needs and their customers know it. This is the type of situation where a little fudge in numbers here and there has created a beast that cannot be controlled and is getting bigger, badder and uglier every year until the bottom is hit.

Why? Because it would mean that the states would have to admit to contributing to their own financial demise. Some Western Fish and Game Departments have in fact become a wolf in sheep’s clothing to their constituants. Some inside the departments have, although reluctantly, in some cases went along with the Federal Government’s master plan to re-introduce super predators back into the ecosystem to eventually control big game herds without the use of hunters. It’s almost as if the state neglected to realize that this would, in fact, slit their own throats by gutting their departments of the necessary funding to run.

And this is not just a Wyoming, Montana and Idaho problem. Wolves have already begun to take hold in Washington, Oregon and Utah. Nevada, and Colorado are certainly next. And for all of you midwest whitetail hunters out there, sorry, your not safe either. The government has devised a plan to expand the Mexican wolf North from Arizona and New Mexico into Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, North and South Dakota and Nebraska to connect with the upper midwest wolf populations in Minnesota and Wisconsin. This would give super predators a way to control whitetail deer populations minus the use of hunting as a management tool.

This is a critical situation but all is not lost yet. There have been huge strides made in the recent wolf debate and wolves are starting to be controlled now in Montana and Idaho. We all as hunters need to keep pressure on our politicians and state agencies to make sure they do the right thing for our wildlife. We pay them to manage our wildlife resource in a responsible manner, make them earn their money. Taking the easy way out is not good enough. They need to do better, our big game wildlife resource depends on it.

Drop me a line and let me know what your thoughts are…maybe I’m just a conspiracy theorist…who knows. I know what I’ve heard and seen first hand so far, though, and it’s not looking good.

Guy

http://blog.eastmans.com/the-predator-death-spiral/


20 moose tags added to North Idaho hunts

http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/outdoors/2015/jan/26/20-moose-tags-added-north-idaho-hunts/


Poor Attendance at “Idaho Wildlife Summit” Reflects

Citizen Mistrust of F&G Refusal to Manage Wildlife

http://idahoforwildlife.com/files/pdf/georgeDovel/The%20Outdoorsman%20No%20%2050%20Sept%202012-Summit.pdf

 You left out the best part.

 "F&W Directors finally see the writing on the wall and jump ship, to take control and make the same mistake in the next misguided liberal state."