Where Might This Go?

In my earlier years I was something of a wolf apologist. I had read Farley Mowat's "Never Cry Wolf" and believed it was non-fiction. He claims that most of the diet of the wolves he came into contact with was small animals such as mice and voles, etc., and that they had little to no taste for the Caribou in the area he went to. That might even have been true for areas where the Caribou herds are not resident throughout the year. But I didn't realize that didn't translate to Elk in Idaho.

My wife, with my agreement, even sponsored a wolf at a wolf recovery center. Little did we know.

We live reasonably close to Yellowstone National Park (YNP). We have lived even closer and since 1970 have been sure to visit for multi-day trips at least a couple of times a year. We have backpacked through YNP for multi-day trips a number of times.

Elk by the hundreds greeted us in YNP on each of our multi-visits. Sharing them with our sons was one of our joys. Looking forward to the possibility of seeing bear and wolves was also enticing. We did see some bear but so far haven't seen any wolves.

Alas I began to notice a substantial reduction in sighting Elk a few years after the planting of the Canadian wolves. I didn't yet realize what was going on but began to get concerned. I started digging into what was known about the Elk herd in YNP, and was shattered by what I found. I had no clue that each wolf killed, on average, over 20 Elk per year...higher in some instances. When I looked at the exponential growth in the number of wolves that was happening under the mismanagement of judges and lawyers I was appalled.

I was also having bad experiences in my previous Elk hunting areas in Idaho. Live Elk were diminishing and signs of predator kills were growing.

It kind of came to a head this year. On my first day of Elk hunting I sat on a ridge and heard a pack of wolves yapping and then howling for several hours. I didn't see an Elk that day or for the rest of trip. On the second day a friend of my son came up and hunted with him in the morning. His friend had a deer tag (we were muzzleloader hunting mostly for Elk and also for doe deer) and shot a deer at first light. My son was right there. They went down to clean it and in a few minutes two wolves came crashing down from the ridge right at them. The wolves came within about ten yards and then split up, one staying above them and one circling below them. They were able to keep the wolves at bay as they retrieved the deer and left.

The next week (September 2014) wolves killed a dog in the yard at a house near mine.

I had also seen a couple of full-page ads in our local newspaper, and on their website, supporting the uncontrolled growth of wolf packs.

I decided it was time to get more active on this topic.

"This" in my topic statement isn't definitive. It might mean this blog. For that I intend to continue to research and contribute where I can to overall game management in Idaho. I don't consider the wolf as fundamentally different from other predators such as bear and cougar. But I now know wolf lethality in Elk is an order of magnitude larger. Thus their numbers need to be an order of magnitude smaller.

"This" might mean the whole wolf thing. I know I can't predict where that will end up. I doubt we'll be able to put the cat back into the bag and again eliminate wolves from Idaho. (I see estimates of over 60,000 Gray wolf in Canada and Alaska so remain confused as to what the Endangered Species Act has to do with wolves in Idaho). I suspect it is unlikely we'll even be able to get wolves managed in YNP and thus have to live in one with the  new animal desert numbers of both wolf and Elk in YNP.

Meanwhile I bought my first wolf tag yesterday.

And lament the poor Elk. I generated the following chart using the data from the USFWS in the following post (which I thought was a lost post but found sitting in "draft posts".) I multiplied the number of wolves in that chart by 21.6, the average number of Elk killed per year by each wolf. That is an average number and it is variable. The lowest I have seen as just over 11. The largest about 35. It is affected by predator/prey relative abundance, season of the year, other game, and other environmental factors. But whatever number in that range you might favor the result is the same for me: unacceptable.