Groups will wait to see how state handles wolf management first
CHRIS MERRILL Star-Tribune environment reporter | Posted: Saturday, March 29, 2008 12:00 am
LANDER - Opponents of wolf delisting might not seek an injunction in federal court after all.
Although some sort of legal action is likely, it's not a foregone conclusion that conservation groups will try to convince a federal judge to order the government to immediately put wolves back on the federal Endangered Species list.
On Friday, gray wolves in the Northern Rockies were removed from the federal endangered species list.
Wyoming is now managing its wolves as a trophy game animal in the northwest corner of the state - and as a predator, which can be shot on site, everywhere else.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published its decision to delist gray wolves in the Federal Register one month ago, and the ruling went into effect Friday.
The day the delisting decision was published, a coalition of 11 conservation groups, including the Sierra Club, the Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council, filed a notice of intent to sue the government regarding the decision.
The Endangered Species Act obliges those wishing to file suit to issue first a notice of intent, and then to wait 60 days before actually bringing legal action before a federal judge.
There are 29 days remaining in the mandatory waiting period, and unless the coalition decides emergency proceedings are necessary, there will be no lawsuits filed until at least the end of April, if any are filed at all.
Mike Leahy, Rocky Mountain director for the D.C.-based Defenders of Wildlife, said if a large number of wolves start getting killed between now and the end of April, his group may seek emergency action; otherwise it will wait to challenge the decision.
"Once the 60 days are up, we'll file the lawsuit itself, and then we'll have to decide if we're going to ask for an injunction," Leahy said. "We're choosing to wait and see how much people exploit the flexibility in the state plans to go out and kill wolves."
If private individuals in Wyoming attempt a wholesale slaughter of wolves outside the trophy game zone, the Defenders of Wildlife will almost certainly seek an injunction, he said.
An injunction against the delisting, if issued, would essentially require Fish and Wildlife to put wolves back on the endangered species list until a legal decision is rendered.
"Injunctions are hard to get," Leahy said. "There's never a guarantee that you're going to get an injunction from a judge, and that's kind of why we're waiting to see how things play out on the ground."
An attorney with the pro-environment law firm Earthjustice, however, said his firm does plan to file a lawsuit when the 60 days are up, and will likely seek an injunction against the delisting decision at some point, if not immediately.
"We anticipate asking for an injunction sooner or later," said Doug Honnold. "We don't want to see the population of 1,500 wolves be decimated while the litigation ensues."
Honnold said even under the most optimistic of scenarios he believes there will be "substantial reductions" in the numbers of wolves unless a court tells the states that it won't permit the reductions.
"In almost 90 percent of the state of Wyoming wolves are on the chopping block," he said, referring to the state's dual status for wolves. "I think it's a foregone conclusion that there will be a reduction in wolf numbers in the state of Wyoming under this state management scheme."
Most of Wyoming's estimated 359 wolves live inside the newly designated trophy game zone, where wolves can be killed by private citizens only with a legal take permit.
But the remaining 30 to 35 wolves currently living outside the trophy area are considered predators, and it is lawful in Wyoming for anybody with a legal firearm to shoot these wolves without limit.
Leahy shares Honnold's concerns about Wyoming's management plan.
"There are currently six packs in the 'shoot-on-site' zone and about 10 packs near the border of the trophy zone," Leahy said. "So a significant and quick reduction in Wyoming's wolf numbers is possible."
The Defenders of Wildlife would like those wolves outside the trophy zone afforded more protection because they have the potential to spread out further into their historical range.
"It's a not insignificant number of wolves," Leahy said. "And those are the wolves that are in a position to disperse to Utah and Colorado and recover wolf populations in the Southern Rockies."
The 1,500 estimated wolves currently living in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana are descendants from 31 wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s.
"One of our big concerns with the delisting plan is that it basically isolates wolves in and around Yellowstone National Park, and prevents their dispersal into Utah and Colorado and over into Eastern Idaho," Leahy said. "Dispersal into the south is important if you're interested in restoring ecological balance to the Southern Rockies, as well."
The Defenders of Wildlife is not opposed to state management, he said, but it is concerned that the state plans, as currently written, will allow up to 70 percent of the current Northern Rockies wolf population to be killed off.
Sylvia Fallon, a geneticist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said her group wants to challenge the federal government's decision to delist gray wolves because it has "no scientific basis for its recovery goals."
"[The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] completely disregarded science," Fallon said. "The vast majority of scientists would say that the science then and the science now tells us that we need many more wolves on the ground than their original recovery goal of 300."
In order to create a genetically viable wolf population for the long term, Fallon said, there would need to be 2,000 to 3,000 wolves in the Northern Rockies, with some genetic exchange between the three primary populations in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.
"We're not against delisting, as long as we have a truly recovered population of wolves," she said. "Once we get there we'll be as happy as anybody else to see them removed from protection."
But Mike Jimenez, the federal wolf recovery coordinator for the state of Wyoming, said the best scientific data - along with empirical evidence - shows that wolves are not in any danger of becoming too inbred.
"Under the Endangered Species Act we had an obligation is to bring back a viable wolf population, which the Fish and Wildlife Service and the states have done," Jimenez said. "We used peer-reviewed science, we sponsored genetic studies, and those studies showed that under the worst-case scenario genetic diversity might be reduced in 100 years, but even with that possibility, it is still not a threat to the animals."
The Endangered Species Act calls for species viability, he said, not the highest possible level of genetic diversity.
And although the three main groups of wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are mostly geographically isolated from each other, the Fish and Wildlife Service has tracked wolves dispersing between the groups.
"We know wolves have dispersed back and forth between those three areas, but the question has been 'do they breed?'" Jimenez said. "There is an expanded paper coming out that does show that wolves have gone back and forth and actually bred."
Wolves, as a species, are naturally averse to inbreeding, Jimenez said, and it is in their nature to disperse, to leave areas of high wolf density and go into areas with lower wolf density.
"Back in the '90s had wolves go from Montana to Washington, from Yellowstone to Denver, and recently we tracked a wolf that went from [Canada] down to Idaho," he said.
The idea that wolves aren't going to disperse between the larger sub groups and exchange genetic information is contrary to what he and other wolf experts have observed, Jimenez said.
"There's an academic argument to be made, but there is also an argument based on empirical data," he said. "Regardless of all the theoretical possibilities [for genetic decline], you don't see that on the ground."
Even if the wolves lose too much genetic diversity after decades or a century, Jimenez said, the solution is relatively simple - officials can introduce new blood into the population by bringing wolves down from Canada, just as they did in the mid-1990s when they reintroduced the canines here in the first place.
Environment reporter Chris Merrill can be reached at {M7chris.merrill@trib.com or 307-267-6722