http://www.billingsnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2345:paperwork-lets-predators-feast&catid=85:front-page-categoryCoyotes and other predators have begun a surge, almost a feeding frenzy, since regional wolf populations have increased in the past few years.
It’s not so much the wolves, it’s the paperwork and field restrictions, say federal wildlife officials.
“You saw the figures for coyote damage,” said John Stueber, Montana director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Service. “They’re going through the roof.”
At meetings with cattlemen and sheepmen earlier this month, Mr. Stueber presented the grim statistics of the growth in predation in Montana since 2006. For example, coyotes killed 111 calves in 2006 – and 1,348 in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. Coyotes were blamed for 698 lamb kills and 135 adult sheep deaths in 2006, compared to 2,488 lambs and 422 adult sheep in 2010.
“Wolves take so much time from our other predator work,” said Mr. Stueber. “We’re not able to do any preventative work” such as deterrence of other predators.
His agency’s statistics say grizzlies in Montana took five calves in 2006 and 32 in 2010 and 12 adult sheep in ’06 and 29 this year. Lion kills of lambs have increased 10-fold to 91 and killings of calves and adult sheep have doubled.
George Edwards, Montana livestock loss reduction and mitigation coordinator, said the spike in livestock losses is drowning his independent state agency.
“We can only pay losses that are confirmed by Wildlife Services,” Mr. Edwards said, but must pay for losses based on prevailing market prices at the time of the kill.
Cattle prices are the best they’ve been in three years and sheep and lamb prices have set records this fall.
In a three-state area, he said, “it cost $1 million a year” to pay livestock wolf predation. “In Montana, we paid $144,000 in claims in 2009 alone.”
Stueber said that last year in Montana, he said, “We spent half a million dollars on wolf work.”
Budgets for federal predator-control measures haven’t gone up for 10 years, said Jeff Green, western regional director of Wildlife Services, but costs have.
He added that it doesn’t help that each time wolves are listed or de-listed as threatened species, or another lawsuit is filed, Wildlife Services people must be pulled out of the field and into offices to do more write-ups for the courts or legislators.
Wolves trailed bison herds for millennia before Great Plains bison were hunted to the edge of extinction in the late 19th century. Wolves then turned to domestic livestock that took the place of buffalo and cattlemen paid “wolfers” to shoot, trap, or poison the predators and clean them off the ranges.
A century ago, wolves had nearly vanished from the Lower 48 states. As an endangered species, they couldn’t be killed if they were discovered and in the 1980s packs began trickling down into Montana from the Canadian Rockies. In the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, a federal program reintroduced wolf packs in the mid-1990s.
Officials now estimate around 1,700 wolves live in the Northern Rocky Mountains of the United States.
Mr. Stueber said the protected status of wolves – and grizzlies, which began to come back on their own in the 1970s - have taken many predator-control methods out of the tool box.
Poisons or pesticides can’t be used in the ever-expanding wolf or grizzly country, he said, as they might accidentally claim one of these protected species. Trapping has become labor-intensive as trappers must check traps daily to ensure no wolves are snared, with the result that fewer coyote traps can be placed.
Stillborn budgets have kept hunters and researchers out of the air, said Mr. Stueber.
“Doing wolf work without a helicopter – it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said, and aircraft have been grounded because of budget freezes.
A rancher suggested that public wolf hunts such as occurred recently in Idaho make help keep wolves down and discourage them from roaming in livestock areas.
Mr. Green said: “The problem with problem hunting is that we lost five (radio) collars (in Idaho). That’s nine wolf packs that are gone with the wind” as researchers now have no way of keeping tabs on them by tracing radio signals.
“Preserving those collars is a very important thing” for monitoring wolves and avoiding potential conflicts with livestock before they happen, he said.
As for grizzlies, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks says: “It is generally agreed there are more than 500 in the northwest Montana Rockies, about 600 in and around Yellowstone National Park.”
Mr. Stueber says, “Now grizzly bear populations are large enough that they’re moving back onto the plains, which puts them into the middle of livestock.”
my fear is that in this state we (Olympia) will not have the political will or money too carry out needed control actions. When you combine that with limiting access to rendezvous and denning areas, limiting coyote hunting/tapping in areas that wolves inhabit, we will have a mess
