Idaho and Montana step up their efforts to reduce wolves

Although wolf hunting season is not yet closed in certain areas of the west, both Idaho and Montana are setting their sights on new ways to reduce their wolf populations.  Last week, Matt pointed to a resolution by Idaho’s legislature to declare a state emergency allowing for the reduction of wolves.  Over the weekend two more articles came out that highlight the states’ ability to reduce wolf numbers through a variety of means.

An article in the Helena Independent Record reports that Montana is making it easier to kill wolves through the use of Wildlife Services – a federal agency that already has wide discretion to kill wolves and other predators for the benefit of the livestock industry.  Wildlife Services will no longer need to receive permission from Montana’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks division to kill wolves in the vicinity of confirmed livestock depredation sites.  Montana’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks director also said he expects hunting quotas to increase next season as another way to lower the wolf population.

The Idaho Statesman is similarly reporting that Idaho plans on increasing their “management tools” to reduce their state’s number of wolves.  Unsatisfied with the results of this year’s hunt, Idaho’s Fish and Game director is proposing to increase harvest limits, issue multiple tags and allow trapping of wolves. 

These news stories aren’t exactly a surprise to us.  Central to our concerns over delisting is the latitude that the states have to reduce their wolf populations to well below current levels – levels that don’t get us to a recovered population.  As we have pointed out, due to outdated recovery plans that call for only around 300 wolves in the three state region of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, these states have little motivation to maintain more than a couple hundred of wolves – far fewer than the thousands of wolves that more recent science says is necessary for a viable population in the long term. 

In fact, these stories help illustrate exactly why we are in court to challenge the removal of endangered species protections from these wolves.  This season’s hunts stopped the wolf population from growing for the first time since reintroduction.  And as the hunts come to a close later this month, it is all too clear that this was just the beginning of the states' plans for wolves in the Rocky Mountains.

Image: Gray wolf in Yellowstone National Park, shared by SigmaEye via Flickr.

Crude Awakening: Audubon Magazine Tells the Tale of Tar Sands and Bird Habitat

Last summer, Audubon Magazine reporter Barry Yeoman travelled north to the open pit mines in Alberta, Canada where a dense form of oil is dug from the earth like coal. He saw the devastation caused by these tar sands mines first hand and has written about them and the surrounding Boreal forests and wetlands in a well-crafted article just published this month. The story includes striking photographs by Jon Lowenstein.  The article tells the story of the high price of an oil addiction that leads oil companies to go after ever more costly and destructive forms of fuel for our cars and trucks. The Peace-Athabasca Delta, downstream from the tar sands mines, is critical bird habitat and nesting area for many of America’s migrating birds. Water use and water and air pollution from the tar sands are helping to kill it – not to mention the fears that local communities have for their health.

Barry describes the Delta aptly in this way:

The boat glides between banks lined with cattails and bulrushes that bow as we pass. The only houses along some stretches were built by beavers. A dozen kingfishers keep pace with us, and we spot pelicans and pileated woodpeckers. Marcel points to a distant flash of movement: a bald eagle. This avian display, he says, is nothing. “Some days in the springtime, when the birds are migrating north—oh, man! For days on end there are flocks in the thousands.” The delta, part of North America’s 1.5-billion-acre boreal forest, serves as the convergence point for all four major North American flyways. Some 215 species—including the endangered whooping crane and neotropical migrants like the olive-sided flycatcher and the American wigeon—use its freshwater wetlands for breeding, nesting, or stopping over.

I travelled with Barry to the tar sands and the Peace-Athabasca Delta last summer and I saw and felt the truth that his words describe. Read his story and you’ll have a good sense of the beauty and the danger in this remote part of Canada that is so closely connected to us through the birds that we love. Go to NRDC’s BioGems action page for the Peace-Athabasca Delta and you’ll be able to send a letter to the Environment Minister of Canada asking for tar sands oil expansion to stop so that the birds of the Peace-Athabasca Delta can be protected.

Visit NRDC and Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s new social networking site: www.welovebirds.org