Post by: bearpaw on February 26, 2012, 08:29:38 PM
By EVE BYRON Independent Record | Posted: Sunday, February 26, 2012 12:00 am | (10) Comments
Dylan Brown Independent Record
Rick Dunkerley talks about his frustration with wolves that he believes have impacted the elk herds that used to winter on his 3,000-acre Baldy Mountain Ranch.
Fast facts
Elk cow/calf ratios have been declining on the Blackfoot-Clearwater area by nearly 30 percent annually since 2009, with only 12 calves per 100 cows spotted in January. Typical ratios are 30 cows per 100 calves.
A minimum of 56 wolves in nine confirmed packs roamed in the Blackfoot drainage at the end of 2011. It is an increase from the 2010 minimum count even after 17 wolves were harvested by hunters last year.
Lion harvest was exceptionally low in the Blackfoot between 2001 and 2010, allowing numbers to steadily increase, at an estimated number of three per wolf to a possible 150 lions.
Antlered white-tailed deer harvest has been near or below a 27-year low since 2009.
Antlered mule deer harvest at the Bonner Creek game check station was lower in 2011 than it's been since the late 1950s, when FWP checked only a small fraction of the hunters they do today.
In 2011, FWP checked 30 percent fewer hunters at the Bonner station than in 2008, and saw less than 60 percent of the mid 1990's average.
LINCOLN — Rick Dunkerley used to look out his picture window at dawn and watch about 100 elk overwinter in his meadow.
That hasn’t happened for a few years now.
“Not one elk. Not one time,” Dunkerley says unhappily, looking out at that meadow. “I understand that not all of them are gone, but the wolves ran them off their winter grounds.”
Dunkerley believes wolves have run most of the elk off of the 3,000-acre Baldy Mountain Ranch he and his wife own in Hunting District 293, just south of Lincoln. He used to charge hunters for the chance to shoot a bull elk and let cow elk hunters on for free. But he’s not taking anyone’s money now because that wouldn’t be ethical. He knows firsthand — Dunkerley hunted his property four times last season and didn’t even see a deer.
“I’m beyond mad anymore. Now I’m just sad,” Dunkerley said last week. “This place used to be crawling with game.”
His buddy, Lincoln taxidermist Jay Roberson, agrees that most of the elk are gone from the area and also puts the blame on wolves. He said the loss of elk is having an economic impact on the community.
“About three years ago, I was seeing more residents hunting here because we’re renowned for our elk,” Roberson said. “The nonresidents who had hunted here for 15 or 20 years would come back and spend their money not just helping the outfitter and taxidermist but the liquor stores, grocery stores, motels and restaurants. Now they’re not coming back.”
Wildlife biologists say it’s not just wolves, but a “perfect storm” of predators that’s hit not only the Blackfoot Valley’s elk herds hard, but also the mule deer and white-tailed deer populations. They note that while the Bitterroot, Madison and Paradise valleys are getting a lot of attention for low elk numbers, the situation in the Blackfoot Valley is just as bad if not worse.
“This is equal to the record lows we observed out there during the winter of 1996-97, so it’s the real deal and all reasonable inference points to total depredation,” said Jay Kolbe, the Region 2 biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “We need to manage wolves, but there’s a lot more going on here.
“It’s kind of a perfect storm. At the same time we had wolf recovering happening … we eliminated female mountain lion harvest, so that population grew at a relatively high density during the same period of time. On top of that, we’re seeing the southern expansion of the grizzly bear population. So in the same five to six years, all of these changes happened independent of each other but the impact of their high densities is the story.”
Plenty of elk in places
Most big game herds cycle through high and low population periods, and contrary to public opinion, in the past five years, Montana’s statewide elk population has grown from 130,000 to 140,000. Most of Montana’s hunting districts hold more elk than wildlife biologists believe the land and ranchers can handle, so state Fish, Wildlife and Parks commissioners set high or unlimited quotas, especially for cow elk to keep reproduction down.
“People say FWP can’t count because there’s not elk in their area, but you have to factor in the private lands in the eastern part of the state, which are offsetting the losses in places like the Bitterroot, the Big Hole, Lincoln or Yellowstone,” said Tom Toman, a biologist with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. “When you’re using statewide numbers, it’s not really giving you a good picture if you’re only interested in one part of the state. If you tell those hunters the population is up 10,000 elk in the last five years, but they haven’t gotten an elk or seen a track for five years, they’ll call B.S. on that.”
In recent years, wildlife biologists have undertaken numerous studies to look into what’s dropping elk populations in some areas. Are hunters too successful? Are wolves killing too many elk calves, or is it due to some other predator, like mountain lions, bears or even coyotes? Or is it drought, climate change or other habitat issue?
At the most recent Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission meeting, Chairman Bob Ream noted that while people blame the precipitous drop in the elk population in some areas on wolves, the first progress report from an ongoing three-year study of elk calf mortality in the Bitterroot Valley in western Montana showed that mountain lions and bears killed more calves than wolves.
Yet Toman and the study’s authors noted that the early study results only covered spring and early summer, which is when wolves are giving birth and staying close to their dens.
“Every foundation (study) we have funded showed that lions and bears caused the biggest mortality in elk calves early in the spring. We had a study in Jackson Hole (Wyo.) where grizzly and black bears were going through the sagebrush flats like they were doing a grid search, looking for calves, which don’t give off any odors,” Toman said. “But it’s not until the fall that wolves are out, teaching their young how to hunt.”
Variables
Other factors also might be at play.
The Bitterroot study notes that from the mid 1960s until 2003, elk numbers steadily increased there. After 2004, cow/calf rations declined throughout the valley, hitting historic lows in 2009.
That time frame was the period when wolves were becoming an established presence in the Bitterroot; the wolves had been reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the mid 1990s after being hunted to near extirpation.
But that also was the same time frame in which FWP increased the number of antlerless elk that could be harvested due to growth in the population in Hunting District 250 in the Bitterroot. So while only 35 antlerless elk were taken by hunters in 1999 that increased to 280 in 2004, 230 in 2005 and 188 in 2006. As the population dropped, so did the number allowed to be harvested and in 2010, only 12 antlerless elk were taken.
So hunters may have impacted the herd, Tomen noted.
Another seven-year study of elk in the Cody, Wyo., and Absaroka Wilderness region showed that elk that didn’t migrate to the high country in the summer had an 85 to 95 percent pregnancy rate, while only 60 percent of those that migrated were pregnant.
“The study found out that five to seven years of drought had harmed the plants, and they lost 40 percent of the green-up period for plants in the high country,” Toman said. “That would directly affect the nutritional plan of a cow elk and if they’re not in good shape she can’t maintain that pregnancy.
“It’s just a matter of across the board balance,” Toman added. “It’s absolutely fascinating what’s going on out there as well as the excuses and blame. It’s so complex. There’s no one causal factor. Everyone wants it to be something simple, that the wolves moved in, but it’s probably more to do with grizzly bears, mountain lions, black bears, seasons and drought.”
Blackfoot Valley
Whatever the cause, the precipitous plunge in the number of cow/calf elk pairs in the Blackfoot Valley is alarming to Kolbe, who works out of the FWP Seeley Lake office. He said typically, the ration is right around 30 calves per 100 cows. Instead, it’s ranging from 12 to 22 calves per cow in some hunting districts.
“We’ve seen consistent and recently a fairly dramatic decline in calf recruitment in the last four years, particularly in districts north of Highway 200, and it’s causing me and a lot of our constituents concern,” Kolbe said. “This is the real deal, and all reasonable inference points to depredation. The unique thing is those districts have a very complex predator system.”
The total number of elk also has declined, like in HD 293, where the objective is 750 elk but at last count it stood at 600 head. In HD 281, the objective is up to 700 elk, but last year only 500 were observed.
FWP has confirmed at least nine active wolf packs in the Blackfoot Valley, with a minimum of 56 individual wolves. Kolbe is quick to note that there could be more wolves there; this is just the number the agency can document.
That’s up from 2006, when the fives wolves known as the Elevation Mountain Pack first took up residence in the Blackfoot area. They were joined by the Monitor Mountain Pack in 2007, then the Mitchell Mountain and Arrastra Creek packs in 2008, for a total of 15 wolves in the area.
Hunters removed 17 wolves this year out of the quota of 20 in the wolf management unit, but even with that, the wolf population grew, Kolbe said.
“That’s consistent with the statewide trend, where the minimum increased by about 15 percent, even with what we did on the ground,” he added. “We’re working to try to strike a balance.”
Kolbe adds that it’s not just elk whose numbers have crashed in the Blackfoot Valley. Beginning in 2007, biologists saw a severe decline in white-tailed deer numbers, culminating in the lowest white-tailed buck harvest in 30 years.
“And mule deer may be faring even worse,” Kolbe said. “The harvest was lower than it’s been since 1958, when we started keeping records.”
In response, FWP limited antlerless doe and cow elk permits. Along with low hunter success rates, that has prompted hunter trips to drop 50 percent from where they were in the mid 2000s, and hunter days are down 40 percent in recent years in the Blackfoot Valley, Kolbe said.
“People are not participating like they used to,” the biologist said.
That includes mountain lion hunters, and a ground-breaking study in the Garnet Mountain Range showed that without their impact, mountain lion populations grew at about a 6 percent rate per year. When they were hunted at a high rate from 1998-2000, the population declined by 8 to 12 percent.
“We drew mountain lion levels down by intent in the early 2000s,” Kolbe said. “Now they’re back up to the high levels and now we have lion densities we haven’t seen for a while.”
What to do?
Aware of the concerns regarding predators and prey, FWP officials set up a work session in Helena on March 7 to discuss options.
Although most of the changes would take legislative approval, the commission may consider increasing the harvest quotas for mountain lions and wolves, or even black bears, if they become problematic. Hunters could be allowed to take more than one wolf or use electronic calls. FWP could lower the nonresident wolf hunting fees from $300 to the resident cost of $20. It could lengthen hunting seasons, or possibly allow trapping wolves. The agency could use helicopters and sharpshooters to kill wolves, like Idaho does, even though the commission has shied away from that in the past.
Controlling grizzly bears is a little trickier, since they’re still under the protection of the federal Endangered Species Act. FWP meets regularly with members of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to continue discussions on removing grizzly bears from federal protection, which could lead to hunting.
Regardless of what’s behind the drop in game populations, Dunkerley and Roberson say they hope something is done soon.
“We are in the abyss,” Roberson said. “We’re not talking about trophy bulls, we’re talking about meat in the freezer for most people. This is what they do to get by.”
Dunkerley added that until four years ago, the fabulous elk hunting in the Lincoln area was a well-kept secret, and he’d like to see elk once again have a strong presence in the area.
“The bugling elk, to me, is the essence of the Rocky Mountains, and it’s quickly disappearing in the Northern Rockies,” Dunkerley said. “What we have is a large predator problem.”
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