Washington may be close to wolf plan
Lewiston Morning Tribune, Idaho, 2011-11-28
By Eric Barker, Lewiston Tribune, Idaho
Nov. 28--Washington's four-year effort to develop a plan to manage a recovering wolf population could soon become final.
The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission is scheduled to take action Saturday on the plan that spells out how wolves will be managed. The plan also sets the population thresholds they must reach before they can be removed from the state’s endangered species list.
Even as the plan was being developed, wolves from Idaho, Oregon and British Columbia have been moving into the state and establishing new packs. There are now five confirmed packs in Washington; two in the North Cascades region and three in the northeastern corner of the state. There is one suspected but still unconfirmed pack in the Blue Mountains southeast of Dayton. Wolves have frequently been spotted and even photographed in the Blues, but biologists have not been able to determine if they have produced pups â€" one of the criteria for being a pack.
Wolves are listed as endangered in the entire state by the Washington Endangered Species Act and in the western two-thirds of the state by the federal ESA. The plan that will go before the commission in Olympia calls for a total of 15 breeding pairs of wolves to be established for three consecutive years before protections can be lifted. But it also requires a minimum number of packs to occupy various regions of the state and would prevent delisting even if numbers were robust in other regions.
For example, in order for the animals to be removed from state protection, there must be at least six breeding pairs in eastern Washington, four in the northern Cascades and five in the southern Cascades and northwest coast. Ranchers and hunters have criticized the population goals contained in the plan as too high while some environmental groups have backed the plan.
Officials with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the authors of the plan, predict the wolf population will have to reach 210 animals before the breeding pair and geographic thresholds are met. The plan would allow wolves to be killed by state wildlife officials if they were having a negative effect on at-risk deer or elk populations. But that could only occur if the wolves having the effect were above recovery thresholds for the specific region where the problem was occurring.
As the wolf population grows, rules governing the lethal removal of wolves that prey on livestock would become more liberal.
Hunting would not be allowed until wolves are removed from protection in the entire state and a hunting plan is in place.
An agenda for the meeting is posted at
http://wdfw.wa.gov/commission/meetings.html on the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife website, and the wolf plan is available at
http://wdfw.wa.gov/conservation/gray_wolf/mgmt_plan.html.
