By Nick KuzmaPublished: Sep. 27, 2021 at 2:59 PM PDT
MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS, Wyo. (RELEASE) – Yellowstone National Park wolf biologists report that the park’s Junction Butte Pack (27 wolves) lost three wolves to Montana hunters during the first week of Montana’s wolf hunting season. The Junction Butte Pack transcends Yellowstone’s northern range and is the most viewed wolf pack in the world.
Multiple recent overflights conducted by the park confirmed the pack size has been reduced from 27 to 24 animals, losing two female pups and one female yearling. Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (FWP) confirms three wolves were killed outside of Yellowstone in the general vicinity of where the Junction Butte Pack was traveling in mid-September.
Yellowstone wolves in the northern range spend an estimated 5% of the time outside the park, usually in late fall. For over a decade, the state of Montana limited the number of wolves taken from Montana wolf management units 313 (Gardiner) and 316 (Cooke City), which are immediately adjacent to the park’s northern boundary. Ninety-eight percent of wolves in Montana are outside units 313 and 316. Recent state changes to hunting and trapping have lifted restrictions within these units making Yellowstone’s wolf population in the northern range extremely vulnerable. Montana has also authorized baiting from private property. Over 33% of the boundary Yellowstone shares with Montana is within one mile of private property where baiting is now permissible.
“Yellowstone plays a vital role in Montana’s wildlife conservation efforts and its economy. These wolves are part of our balanced ecosystem here and represent one of the special parts of the park that draw visitors from around the globe,” said Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Cam Sholly. “We will continue to work with the state of Montana to make the case for reinstating quotas that would protect the core wolf population in Yellowstone as well as Montana’s direct economic interests derived from the hundreds of millions spent by park visitors each year.”ADVERTISEMENThttps://416f468f4c09e0c44fe51e8e7e75f4e6.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Visitor spending within communities that are 50 miles from Yellowstone exceeds $500 million per year, tens of millions of which is spent by visitors coming to watch wolves and supporting Montana businesses in gateway communities.
The Junction Butte Pack formed in 2012 in the northern section of the park. They are the most observed pack in Yellowstone because they den within view of the Northeast Entrance Road and the road to Slough Creek Campground, providing thousands of visitor’s daily views. The pack had eight pups in 2021.
VALLEY VILLAGE (CBSLA) — A man has been charged with a felony count of animal cruelty for allegedly setting a trap in Valley Village that caught the foot of a coyote pup who eventually had to be euthanized.
Richard David Wallem was also charged with a misdemeanor count of using a trap with saw-toothed or spiked jaws to take fur-bearing mammals, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
The coyote pup reportedly had its foot stuck in the trap for more than 24 hours over the Fourth of July weekend before a local teenager heard its cries and alerted authorities, according to PETA.
Authorities then had to euthanize the pup because of the severity of its injuries, PETA said.
“Coyotes are curious, playful, loyal animals who love their families, and maiming them with torturous steel-jaw traps is not only hideously cruel but illegal,” Lisa Lange, PETA’s senior vice president, said in a statement Wednesday.
“The terror that this pup endured only ended when a kind teen stepped forward. We must be good neighbors to our local wildlife and stop demanding the extermination of sensitive animals who are simply trying to survive.”
It was not immediately said when Wallem would be arraigned.
The first wolf pups in several years have been born on Isle Royale in Michigan, the National Park Service reported this week.
This is exciting news. We have followed the progress of the wolves on this remote island close to Canada for years and championed their survival. Albeit small, Isle Royale illustrates, in a microcosm, the important role wolves play in their ecosystems, and the harm that can ensue when they are removed from the habitats they have historically occupied. It’s an especially important lesson at a time when wolves elsewhere in our country are about to lose their federal protections, making them easy targets for trophy hunters and trappers.
In 2018, there were just two wolves remaining on Isle Royale, down from a historical average of 20 to 30 animals. Climate change has resulted in the loss of ice bridges from Canada, making it harder for wolves to migrate to the island. This, in turn, led to problems like inbreeding and lack of genetic diversity. The two wolves who remained on the island were older and too closely related to reproduce successfully. Moose numbers swelled, causing devastating harm to the island’s forests and dooming the moose population to slow, cruel starvation.
In 2018, with urging from the Humane Society of the United States and other wildlife protection organizations and scientists, the NPS decided to augment the population with 20 to 30 new wolves over the course of three to five years.
Now, two years into those efforts, not only is there evidence that pups have been born on the island, but small groups of wolves have begun travelling together and establishing territories on Isle Royale, restoring the island’s ecological balance. These interactions, according to John Vucetich of Michigan Technological University, who has led research on the wolves of Isle Royale for nearly two decades, are “exciting to see.”
But even as the wolves of Isle Royale show promising signs of recovery, others in Michigan and around the United States are about to find themselves in the sights of trophy hunters.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is closing in on lifting federal Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves across the lower 48 states by the end of this year. USFWS director Aurelia Skipworth recently told the Associated Press that the removal of these protections was “very imminent.”
The agency is moving forward with this poorly thought out plan despite the opposition of scientists and the 1.8 million Americans who commented on the rule. Unfortunately, the USFWS decided it was more important to appease trophy hunters and other special interests who have long lobbied for ending protections for wolves.
Wolves were first given Endangered Species Act protections in 1974 after activities like trophy hunting and trapping, along with other manmade causes like habitat loss, led to dangerous drops in their populations around the country. Their recovery is far from complete and even today they can only be found in about 15% of their historic range in the contiguous United States.
If wolves are delisted, we know that states will rush to open trophy hunting and trapping season on them like they did last time protections were removed. For example, from 2011 to 2014, when wolves in the Great Lakes region were delisted, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin all opened season on them, killing nearly 1,500—including many pups—despite widespread and vehement public opposition. States like Wyoming and Montana, where wolves have already been delisted, have massacred thousands of these animals using exceptionally cruel methods like being chased down by GPS-collared hounds, being caught in steel-jawed leghold traps and wire snares, and even being run down with snowmobiles or large trucks. This year in Idaho, where the wolf hunting season runs nearly all year, trophy hunters, trappers and state and federal agency personnel have killed 35 wolf pups, including some as young as four to six weeks old. Altogether, 256 wolves have been killed in Idaho so far in 2020 and many more will lose their lives before the year is over.
The tremendous efforts undertaken to restore wolves to Isle Royale are a reminder of the place these animals occupy in the hearts of most Americans and the value they bring to our ecosystems. By removing federal protections for wolves across the United States, our government will doom them to a future where we will doubtlessly see wolf families torn apart and pups killed or orphaned. We urge the USFWS to heed the science and abandon its disastrous plan before it’s too late for America’s wolves.
Sara Amundson is president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund.
The rollback of a rule banning controversial hunting methods in Alaska’s national preserves has some worried the National Park Service is ceding control to states with less conservation-oriented goals.
In June, the National Park Service announced a new rule that allows previously banned hunting practices—including baiting bears with human food and killing mother bears with cubs
… Read More
PHOTOGRAPH BY AARON HUEY, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
WHEN WOLF HUNTING season opened in Alaska on August 1, it became legal in many national preserves for hunters to kill nursing mothers in dens with their pups. In October, when black bear hunting season begins, females settling down for hibernation with cubs can be targeted in portions of Denali National Preserve and Gates of the Arctic National Preserve. And in spring, when cubs and their mothers emerge, they too will be legal game.
Other previously banned hunting practices—including baiting bears with doughnuts, popcorn, or other human food—also are allowed now in Alaska’s national preserves.
National preserves affected by the new hunting rule
Ten national preserves in Alaska are affected by the new rule: Aniakchak, Bering Land Bridge, Denali, Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Katmai, Lake Clark, Noatak, Wrangell-St. Elias, and Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserves. National park lands are not affected.
These practices aren’t new. Many have been permitted for years across tracts of wilderness in the state, and some have been used for centuries by Alaska natives. But on National Park Service-managed lands—including national preserves, national parks, and national monuments—federal law had prohibited the most controversial hunting techniques.
On June 9, however, a final rule issued by the National Park Service said that the United States government may no longer block hunters from using those methods in Alaska’s national preserves. According to the Park Service, this is meant to bring federal regulations more closely in line with state ones.
Alaskan officials so far have granted permission for these controversial methods only in certain national preserves, but the rule change opens up all 10 of the state’s preserves (a total land area about the size of South Carolina) to the option of allowing them.
The announcement drew criticism from scientists, wildlife managers, and animal advocates, who say the new rule allows cruelty to animals and undermines the National Park Service’s conservation mission.
“Allowing the killing of bear cubs and wolf pups is appalling and goes against a basic convention of good hunting—the fair chase,” says William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University, in Corvallis. “It’s not consistent with compassionate management in any way.” Fair chase, a code adopted by many hunting organizations, entails ethical and sportsmanlike pursuit of wild game by ensuring that an animal has a reasonable chance of escape.
But Alaska state officials see it differently. “We look at it as more of an alignment of regulations between the Park Service and the state,” says Eddie Grasser, director of the division of wildlife conservation at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Ripple and others disagree with that interpretation. They acknowledge that the hunting rule change may not threaten Alaska’s overall populations of bears and wolves, but they express concern that it undermines the National Park Service’s mission to preserve and protect nature—not just in Alaska, but possibly throughout the U.S.
“This [rule] sets a dangerous precedent,” Ripple says. “It has implications for the potential exploitation of wildlife in federal protected areas of the lower 48 states.”
His concerns reflect those of many biologists and wildlife managers who fear that it could encourage other states to lobby the federal government to open their nationally protected areas to controversial practices inconsistent with federal policies.
“What about the potential for killing cougar kittens in federal preserves in the state of Utah?” Ripple says. “Or bobcats, coyotes, wolves, and bears? There’s all kinds of predators that live in preserves in the lower 48 states.”
Managed for hunters
Alaska’s wildlife legislation is unique in the United States, if not the world. The state’s Intensive Management Law of 1994 mandates that certain predator species be managed to ensure that populations of moose, caribou, and deer “remain large enough to allow for adequate and sustained harvest.” For many Alaskans, wild game is a vital food source, second only to fish. Subsistence users annually exploit an estimated 36.9 million pounds of wild foods, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
The number of bears killed by hunters in Alaska has risen in recent decades as a result of liberalized regulations such as waivers on hunt fees, year-long hunting seasons, allowance of baiting, and legalization of commercial sales of hides and skulls.
PHOTOGRAPH BY AURELIADUMONTPHOTOGRAPHY, ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
The state’s management goals contrast sharply with what federal law establishes for ands overseen by the National Park Service. Those areas are to be managed for conservation and for enjoyment by the American public in a way that will “leave them unimpaired” for future generations. In national preserves, the law says, hunting and fishing may be allowed only if it doesn’t threaten their natural resources.
National preserves in Alaska have long permitted hunting and fishing, but “what is new here is the inability of [the National Park Service] to manage national preserve lands in Alaska…as conservation areas rather than as ‘pastures’ to generate bushmeat for Alaskans,” says Sterling Miller, a retired bear research biologist from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “It’s degrading not just to predators but to moose, caribou and deer, who are now increasingly valued only for the calories they produce.”
Federally protected national parks, preserves, forests, refuges, and monuments are by definition public lands held in trust by the federal government for the benefit of all Americans, whose taxes pay for their maintenance and management.
“The National Park Service was founded over a hundred years ago on the principle of caring for our nation’s treasures unimpaired for the benefit and enjoyment of future generations,” says Sally Jewell, who was secretary of the interior during the Obama administration. The new rule change “is ill-advised and inconsistent with the tradition of subsistence and recreational hunters as conservationists, who appreciate the need to maintain nature’s balance.”
Alaska’s management approach in theory could promote habitat improvement, Miller says, but its implementation has focused almost entirely on reducing the number of animals—especially wolves—that prey on moose, caribou, and deer. Wolf hunting seasons have grown longer, and kill numbers have increased. Over time, the state has implemented specific predator control plans with the goal of killing more wolves in certain areas, including allowing hunters to use a plane or helicopter to herd wolves into an open space such as a frozen lake, then land the aircraft to shoot the exhausted animals.
The intensive management law also has been applied to reducing brown and grizzly bear numbers, although bears mainly have been affected by the more general liberalization of hunting regulations. This includes waivers on fees to hunt bears, allowance of baiting, year-long hunting seasons, increased numbers of animals a hunter can kill annually, and the legalization of commercial sales of hides and skulls. The intent, again, was to increase populations of hooved animals for hunters’ benefit, because bears sometimes predate on young moose and caribou. As a result, the number of brown bears killed by hunters has doubled from 850 a year in 1980 to 1,700 in 2013.
Because of their place at the top of the food chain, predators are keystone species, crucial to the functioning and structure of ecosystems. Research from around the world shows that removing predators can cause a cascade of problems, including changes in everything from the populations of other plant and animal species to how diseases behave in ecosystems and how much carbon ecosystems absorb.
“Recent scientific studies have demonstrated the fundamental importance of wolves and bears in stabilizing ecosystems,” Ripple says. “A significant reduction of large carnivores can trigger a chain of events causing ecosystem degradation.” (Read about how the return of wolves to Yellowstone helped strengthen elk herds.)
Legislative flip-flopping
Throughout the U.S., management of federal lands often is coordinated cooperatively between state and federal authorities. For years, Alaska authorities didn’t push for national preserves to permit the most aggressive forms of hunting—some of which previously were illegal under state law as well. That began to change in the early 2000s, when Alaska’s governor, Frank Murkowski, started pressing harder to implement the state’s intensive management law and reduce predators in national preserves.
Alaska’s wildlife legislation is unique in the United States, if not the world, because it mandates that predators should be managed to ensure that populations of moose, caribou, and deer remain high for the benefit of hunters.
PHOTOGRAPH BY VDBVSL, ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
The National Park Service issued a rule in 2015 resisting parts of that idea by specifically forbidding such things as killing mothers with babies, shooting swimming caribou from boats, and using dogs to hunt bears.
In 2017, Alaska filed a lawsuit protesting that change, arguing that the Park Service had to adopt Alaska state regulations for managing preserves. Alaska, says bear biologist Sterling Miller, was “not willing to cede that the Park Service has any authority but to lay down and play dead to whatever the state wants them to do.”
The next year, the Trump administration began dismantling the 2015 rule. The National Park Service published a new environmental assessment, which concluded that while the changes to hunting regulations might affect some individual animals, family groups, or packs, it did not expect hunters to adopt the controversial hunting methods widely enough to have significant effects on populations.
The 2015 rule was removed in October 2019, but that change wasn’t made public until June 2020, with no explanation for the delay. The news drew harsh rebukes, including a letter to the Department of the Interior from the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, a nonprofit organization made up of 1,800 current, former, and retired National Park Service employees.
The “awful” new 2020 rule “is an affront to the Park Service mission and to all [its] employees who have served during the past 40 years to administer and protect the resources and values of national preserves in Alaska,” the coalition members wrote. “To proceed with this rule, ignoring the scientific information and significant legal and policy concerns expressed in this letter, would be unconscionable.” (Further reading: In 2017, Congress overturned a similar rule affecting Alaska’s national wildlife refuges.)
Don Striker, acting Alaska regional director at the National Park Service, told National Geographic in a written statement that the June 9 rule provides more consistency between state and federal lands and simplifies rules for local hunters. “The 2015 hunting prohibitions were not required to ensure natural populations of wildlife in our federally managed areas,” he wrote. “The National Park Service has determined that removing them will not result in significant impacts to park resources.”
Cascading effects
Almost none of the success stories Alaska regularly cites in support of its wildlife management practices have been borne out, Miller says. The state, for example, partly attributes a 2 to 4 percent annual increase of one caribou population to its wolf reduction efforts. But in 2017, biologists with Alaska Department of Fish and Game published a peer-reviewed study that found no evidence linking increased caribou to wolf reduction, likely because not enough wolves (834 between 2004 and 2017, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game) were killed to have an effect. The lead author of the paper, Rod Boertje, says the caribou population was already increasing before wolf control started.
Wolf hunting season in Alaska opened on August 1. Under the new National Park Service rule, hunters may now legally kill nursing mothers in dens with their pups in many national preserves. Together, Alaska’s national preserves encompass an area the size of South Carolina.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NATURAL HISTORY ARCHIVE, ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
“There’s other scientists that would disagree with that,” Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Eddie Grasser says of the research findings. “The fact of the matter is, when wolf control started is when the [caribou] population went back up.”
Several studies across the U.S. have found that in most cases, predator reduction doesn’t increase prey populations in the long term. Moreover, it also can harm entire ecosystems by allowing herbivore populations to grow out of control. In a paper in Biological Conservation, Ripple noted that the disappearance or reduction of large predators in Olympic, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Zion, and Wind Cave National Parks resulted in major changes to plant communities and began to transform areas into entirely different habitats.
On the other hand, in 1995 and 1996, when grey wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, the ecosystem began to revert to normal. The number of elk decreased, some woody plants started growing taller, and the number of beavers increased. This suggests that reestablishing populations of predators in places they’ve been extirpated could be a helpful restoration tool.
“I think the biggest problem is that Alaskans have been deceived about whether reducing large carnivores actually does provide benefits in terms of increased harvest of moose and caribou,” Miller says. “They’ve been sold a bill of goods.”
Any effects the new regulation may have on wildlife will be difficult to discern, he adds, because federal and state officials don’t track the number of animals hunted in a way that records where they were killed—within national preserves or elsewhere. Also, no data are available about how many people might take advantage of the newly permitted hunting methods. In August, a public opinion survey of 984 Alaskans revealed that 68 percent oppose hunters in national preserves being allowed to kill wolf pups in their dens, kill hibernating bears, and bait bears with human food.
Grasser also doesn’t believe the new hunting methods will have wide appeal. “Most people in Alaska are like me,” he says. “We hunt based on…fair chase. I’ve never baited bears, I’ve never denned anything, and I’ve never shot a caribou swimming across the river.”
But some biologists and wildlife managers remain concerned about the effect the Trump administration’s rule change could have on Alaska, even if it doesn’t kick off a chain reaction of rule changes that threaten animals in other states. With the exception of northern Canada and Russia, few other places in the world compare to Alaska’s sprawling wilderness, says John Schoen, a wildlife biologist now retired from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
“There is no other state in our nation that still has vast, intact landscapes that support all of their original species, communities, and ecological processes,” Schoen says. “These areas are national interest lands belonging to all Americans, not just Alaska resident hunters.”
A group of former National Park Service (NPS) employees is asking the Interior Department to completely abandon a new policy allowing hunting tactics that make it easier to kill bear cubs and wolf pups in Alaska.
The rule, finalized earlier this month, ends a five-year ban on baiting hibernating bears from their dens, shining a flashlight into wolf dens to cause them to scurry, targeting animals from airplanes or snowmobiles, and shooting swimming caribou from boats.
Former NPS managers who worked in the state said the new rule ignores scientific information on Alaska’s wildlife and raises significant legal and policy concerns.
“We are utterly appalled that NPS has adopted this final rule, which is so contrary to its mission,” the employees, now affiliated with the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, wrote in a letter to Interior.
NPS waived the 2015 regulations imposed under the Obama administration that prohibited the controversial hunting tactics, arguing the state, not the federal government, retained the authority to regulate hunting practices there.
“The amended rule will support the Department’s interest in advancing wildlife conservation goals and objectives, and in ensuring the state of Alaska’s proper management of hunting and trapping in our national preserves, as specified in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act,” NPS Deputy Director David Vela said in a release announcing the rule.
“It will also more closely align hunting and trapping regulations with those established by the state of Alaska by providing more consistency with harvest regulations between federal and surrounding non-federal lands and waters.”
The policy change is set to begin in early July.
But critics have argued that allowing the hunting tactic will reduce populations of wolves and bears that prey on the caribou and moose favored by game hunters.
“Alaska is the last place in the United States, if not the world, where large intact ecosystems have been designated for protection, so that they function naturally with little to no direct influence from man,” the letter from the former employees states.
The former NPS employees say the agency is abdicating its responsibility under the law to manage hunting practices on federal lands in order to promote conservation.
The rule, they argue, not only violates laws requiring vigorous environmental review of the impacts of the decision, but NPS regulations that “specifically promotes conservation of natural processes.”
“Under NPS management policies wildlife may only be managed for healthy populations, not to ‘achieve human consumptive use goals,’ ” they said.
The policies are also not meant to increase animals that can be harvested by hunters, according to the former employees.
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