POLSON — A number of Dixon ranchers have said they have lost cattle to wolves again, in the same location where they were pestered by a tenacious wolf pack last summer and fall.
Ranchers say there are six wolves in the Selo Creek/Valley Creek drainage, where last year the He-wolf pack was a recurrent problem to cattle producers. That pack was eliminated, save for one lone female pup who had been radio collared and left for tracking purposes.
According to Tribal biologist Stacey Courville, there are now three confirmed wolves in the Selo Creek area. One is the collared pup remaining from last year’s He-wolf pack. “She found a couple companions,” Courville stated. “We’ve been tracking them.”
While ranchers believe there are more wolves there, only sightings confirmed by tribal or state fish and game representatives are considered official.
Confirmations can be through “credible sightings,” typically those by a game warden or other wildlife official, through photographs, or through descriptions that match up to the reality of what the game wardens know is on the ground.
Courville said one example of misidentification is through hide color. He recalled checking out a report of “grey wolves” only to discover a pack of coyotes.
While Courville said there have been no confirmed depredations since December, ranchers are wary.
Wolves have picked the drainages around Dixon to settle into, and have been preying on the cattle of ranchers in the area. The carnivores are getting too close for some.
Kraig Glazier, a wolf expert with the USDA’s Wildlife Services program, said wolves will kill anywhere. “It doesn’t matter if it’s right next to your house.”
Melanie McCollum knows that for a fact. Last fall, she faced off with a wolf over a calf carcass the wolves had killed. While trying to cover the carcass as instructed by APHIS, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, she was confronted by a wolf who didn’t want to leave.
While no one was hurt in that incident, it could be worse. Those living near the recovered populations have seen a lot of activity, and are concerned about the wolves’ presence.
“I don’t have young kids anymore,” McCollum said, “but I have grandchildren who play in my yard.”
While controversy rages in the environmental circle as to whether or not wolves should be delisted, to the men and women who work with wolves in the state of Montana, there is no doubt: “Wolves are here and there’s no going back,” said Glazier.
Glazier works with APHIS, the department in charge of responding to calls of livestock depredation. In the Mission, that depredation typically means wolves.
According to a recent presentation Glazier gave to the Western Montana Stockgrower’s Association, there are over 1,550 wolves in the tri-state recovery area that includes the Idaho panhandle, northwest Wyoming, and western Montana. There are over 400 in Montana alone, he said.
Ted North, who works under Glazier, said the agency removed 15 wolves between Sept. 26 and Dec. 1 of 2007 from the Flathead reservation.
Nonetheless, “They just keep showing up,” he said. “We can never find an end to them.”
Basically, North said, “What’s happening is there’s so many wolves, they’re saturating the area. It seems in every drainage there’s a pack.”
Unfortunately, some of those wolves seem to prefer beef for supper. And that concerns ranchers. There are 55,000 head of cattle in Lake and Sanders Counties, according to the Stockgrowers’ Association. The Dixon area, which straddles both counties, has been especially hard-hit by beef loving carnivores.
Glazier said as sheep production decreases in the state, the wolves have turned to calves for easy pickings. As part of his presentation, he showed a video a rancher had shot of a newborn calf being taken by a wolf. As the large canid made off with the calf, he carried it in his jaws, shaking it vigorously. Glaizer said it looked like a coyote with a jackrabbit. The crowd said it looked like a dog with a toy. No one could believe the wolf so greatly outsized the calf.
“Normally, we don’t get the luxury of seeing a depredation in action,” Glazier said.
The footage gave credence to what ranchers have been saying: when a wolf takes a calf, there’s nothing left.
The men form APHIS also admitted what the ranchers already know: wolf depredations in their part of Montana are high. Really high. “It’s the next highest region after Yellowstone Park,” Glazier said.
Agency-confirmed “damage on calves went up 300 percent,” he added.
“It’s just getting worse every year,” said North. “It’s just increasing.”
Also increasing has been ranchers request to fly over an area in search of wolves. The agency uses one pool of funds for the overflights, but that budget has been cut this year by $160,000, Glazier said. In 2007, there were 159 requests for flights. 73 wolves were removed as part of the state’s management, “and the population still increased by 31 percent,” said Glazier. “Biologically,” he said, “the wolves are recovered.”
The majority of the wolves, and the complaints, are in the western part of the state. “We have five active managements going on (in Western Montana) right now,” Glazier said.
It’s hard to keep track of all the wolves, and their movements. An average dispersal range for a wolf is 550 miles, Glazier said. “They can move.”
The problems faced by ranchers in the Dixon area are due to resident packs, however. North said while the local wolves “eat a lot of elk and deer, they’re hunting livestock, too.”
“You see a lot of attacks on cattle,” Glazier said.
The wolves are only doing what’s natural, everyone agrees.
A wolf’s skull, Glazier said, is about the size of a black bear. However, the wolf skull is configured for just one thing: killing. The large cranial horn on the skull is there only to support jaw muscles, Glazier said. Those jaws can take a five-pound bite out of a cow. And a single feeding on a cow can remove 300 pounds of meat Glazier said.
Because the wolves in the Mission Valley reside north of I-90 and migrated in independent of human reintroduction efforts, they are considered fully protected under the Endangered Species Act. The Mission’s wolves cannot legally be shot, harmed or harassed, no matter their actions.
“You can’t even legally scare them off if they’re harassing you’re livestock,” Glazier told the cattle producers.
Glazier hopes that delisting will help control the predation problem by instilling a fear of humans into the wolves. The state’s proposed hunting season could be enough to convince the wolves to stay away from human settlements, he hopes.
“The first year would be the best year for a hunt,” he said, “because the wolves are pretty habituated to humans now.”
However, even if a state officiated hunting season was put in place, it wouldn’t apply to the Reservation, said Dale Becker, the Wildlife Program Management director for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
“I anticipate the state’s hunt will not occur here on the Reservation,” Becker said. “When I work this process through the tribal council and elders, I suspect they would limit some kind of hunt to tribal elders.”
“You guys are going to have problems,” Becker told the ranchers, “If there are wolves in the area.”
And that means trouble for the ranchers, and possibly an end to a way of life some families have known since they settled into the area a hundred years ago.
An Idaho study on wolves depredating cattle stated that for every one confirmed loss of cattle to a wolf, there are eight unconfirmed losses. That’s too big a hit for the cattle producers to take.
As one rancher said as the meeting came to a close, “It never hits home to anybody until it’s in your own backyard.”
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