Nature in the Balance
In the northern Rocky Mountains of Idaho, the New West meets the Old West as conservation groups and a handful of livestock producers search for ways to share the land with the native gray wolves. Text and Photos By Julie Palmquist '93 (author pictured below)
Hearing a pack of gray wolves howling in the northern Rocky Mountains is an experience that is nothing short of miraculous. The sound is like that of an ocean wave or an ancient bell, swelling and reminiscing until it fades. The low collective tone of the adults balloons outward as it echoes farther from its source while pups and yearlings yip and howl in a manner that is best described as "jubilant."
One evening, late last summer, I awoke to the howling of a pack of wolves known as the White Hawk Pack. I was camped on a slope above Champion Creek in the heart of Idaho's Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA) with two of my colleagues. We could easily discern the howling of wolves from the more common calls of coyotes, as we all spend our working hours at a sanctuary housing more than 30 wolves. This, however, was the first time that any of us had ever heard wolves howling in the wild. We sat, motionless, until a moment later when the night air exploded with the sound of gunfire, shot from the valley below. The shot was a shepherd's warning to the White Hawk Pack and a call to action for us, the so-called "Wolf Guardians" of Wolf Haven International.
We emerged from our tent shouting,"Run away wolves!" as the once tranquil evening erupted into a surreal and carefully choreographed chain of events. While other volunteers camped above and below us scrambled into action, the radio-activated guard (RAG) device, triggered by wolf's radio collar, began cycling through its litany of machine gunfire, breaking glass, galloping horses and other unnerving clatter. The 700 decibels of noise and blinding white strobe light emitted by the device were signals that B47 and the other members of his pack were nearing dangerous territory. As "Wolf Guardians," it was our job to frighten the wolves away from our campsite--the only barrier between them and the herd of 2,000 sheep bedded down on the ridge above us.
Armed with floodlights, radio telemetry equipment and our own voices, we embarked upon our nightlong vigil as the full moon rose from behind the Sawtooth Mountains. According to our first few telemetry readings, B47 and his pack were within a mile of where we were standing. As we made our way farther up the slope behind our tent, the signal grew progressively fainter, indicating that the pack was indeed heading away from the sheep and us. Eighteen minutes later, B47's signal was no longer audible. With the wolves now beyond range of both the telemetry receiver and the RAG device, Champion Creek regained a semblance of normalcy while the shepherds and the other volunteers returned to their campsites. During the hours that followed, the three of us would remain awake, sleeping briefly in shifts, taking telemetry readings every 45 minutes.
We'd been in the SNRA for one week, nomadically camping in a different spot each night depending on the location where the sheep were bedded down. At times, our hikes were made painfully slow by the spiny sagebrush and dry degraded soil. It appeared to us as though every inch 
of the landscape had been tread upon by countless numbers of wooly ewes and black-faced lambs. For centuries the 756,000 acres of publicly owned land within Idaho's Sawtooth National Forest has been used for recreation, timber harvesting, mining, and livestock grazing. The same land is also vital habitat for almost 300 bird and mammal species and more than 25 species of fish. Such use of public land at what many consider the expense of the wildlife has become a target for both controversy and compromise, particularly since gray wolves were reintroduced to the area in 1995 and 1996.
Gray wolves were once common throughout all of North America. Beginning with the first paid government wolf bounty in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the late 1600s, wolves were systematically wiped out of 95 percent of their home range within the lower 48 United States by the early 1900s. The primary cause for their demise was the spread of livestock grazing. Wolves and other predators were seen as nuisances and rabid, bloodthirsty fairy tale characters--and the perception remains somewhat the same today. It has only been within the last 30 years or so that an inherent scientific truth has begun to be realized and acted upon: The wolf‚s fate and our own are inextricably linked.
Out of a need to repair the earth's enervated ecosystems, man has begun to bring the wolf back from near-extinction to select areas of its former habitat. In 1995 and 1996 a total of 56 gray wolves were captured in British Columbia and set free within designated recovery areas of central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park. These northern Rocky Mountain states have thus far set the stage for one of the most successful wildlife recovery programs, ever. Program officials predict that the wolves in those areas, numbering more than 500 at last official count, will have met recovery goals and be ready for removal from the federal endangered species list within the next five years. Once gray wolves are delisted, management of the species will then revert to the individual states according to their own federally approved management plans.
The future for wolves, without the protection of the Endangered Species Act, remains uncertain. Ironically, the places where wolves have been reintroduced are the very same places where anti-wolf and anti-federal government sentiments run high, places where property rights and grazing rights are thought to be the due reward for generations of hard work and sacrifice. Idaho has been among the most difficult states in the northern Rockies wolf-recovery effort. According to Carter Nieymeyer, the Idaho wolf-recovery coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS),"The assumption with most people in Idaho is that there are too damn many wolves already" Last year the Idaho legislature adopted a resolution calling for the removal of all wolves from the state by "whatever means necessary" While the resolution holds no political or legal clout, it is a symbolic gesture that further complicates the process of wolf recovery and/or reintroduction.
If wolves are to survive in Idaho and elsewhere, it will require an equal amount of creativity and compromise, as with the "Wolf Guardian" program. Wolves kill livestock, and within reintroduced populations (legally classified as"nonessential experimental" offending individuals can be lethally managed by government agents or ranchers with a permit when confirmed depredations on livestock occur. This is generally intended to be an option only when unsuccessful nonlethal interventions have been made. The purpose behind the"nonessential experimental" designation is not to allow ranchers to indiscriminately kill wolves, but rather to increase public acceptance of the large predators by allowing the occasional removal of problem wolves. The designation allows recovery officials to address the concerns of those living and working in wolf country in a timely and consistent manner.
Fortunately for the wolves, a great deal of emphasis has recently been placed upon developing effective nonlethal management methods. The managing agencies, conservation groups, and a handful of livestock producers are doing much of this work cooperatively in an approach that has been described as the New West meeting the Old West. The most successful developments include permitting ranchers to use rubber and beanbag bullets to keep wolves away from their livestock; placing RAG devices within close proximity to the livestock; and using guard dogs combined with a human presence.
One of the most promising and unusual methods for preventing livestock depredation is a centuries-old Eastern European technique termed "fladry." This lightweight barrier consists of brightly colored strips of surveyor's tape strung on a rope exactly 18 inches apart. For some reason, wolves are reluctant to pass through the barrier when it is strung between trees, yet it appears to have virtually no negative effect on livestock. In light of these options, a number of livestock producers and other land-use advocates who were once opposed to wolf recovery are beginning to view the wolves as a more acceptable challenge to their livelihood. Livestock producers who have dealt with depredation know what to expect and how to deal with it, making the issue somewhat less contentious.
There are many reasons why wolves might turn to depredation as a means for feeding themselves and their families. There may be a dramatic drop in the prey population caused by drought or other natural conditions. A young and inexperienced lone wolf might find livestock to be an easier target than its native prey, or a wolf might develop a taste for livestock by scavenging on a carcass left by another predator or livestock operator. During the spring and summer, wolves are particularly vulnerable to this behavior while denning or tending to pups and are unable to travel any great distance in search of food. At the same time, livestock are often being herded onto public grazing allotments well within the wolves' established territories.
In the case of the White Hawk Pack, four of the wolves were involved in a series of confirmed depredations on several sheep and one guard dog belonging to a grazing permittee who had not been overly sensitive to the plight of the wolf pack that shared his grazing territory. Authorities vainly requested that he relocate the sheep or attempt to harass the wolves away from the area and were reluctant to initiate lethal control actions. In most cases, it is only necessary to remove one or two individuals from a pack in order to end depredating, as it may be a learned behavior among pack members. However, Wildlife Services agents did kill four of the pack's adult wolves last summer, on two separate occasions, causing a fair amount of controversy within the conservation community. This loss of four wolves left only two adults, one collared male (B47) and one uncollared female, to feed nine pups in a valley flooded with livestock. Just prior to the second of the two control actions, representatives from the Nez Perce recovery team, Forest Service (FS), and the conservation community met to discuss nonlethal management options resulting in the establishment of the "Wolf Guardian" program. With the eventual and wary permission of the grazing permittee, volunteers were rallied from as far away as California for the sole purpose of protecting sheep in order to protect the remaining wolves of the beleaguered White Hawk Pack.
I have been working for Wolf Haven International and wolf conservation for four years now and I can't think of anything else that I would rather be doing. What is most fascinating to me about wolf recovery is that it isn't really about wolves. As long as the animals have adequate prey, territory, and are left to themselves, they can survive. Wolves are what are known as the apex predators, the top dogs in the wilderness food chain. Wolves generally do not kill other wolves but for an occasional territory dispute or dominance struggle. People kill wolves and wolf recovery is all about people--their values, traditions, cultural heritage and the like. People impart the very best and the very worst of human nature upon wolves and rarely see them for what they really are.
While it would be difficult to predict the long-term feasibility or outcome of the"Wolf Guardian" program, as I stood on that mountainside on a chilly August night in the midst of the noise and the flashing lights, as the signal from B47's radiocollar grew fainter still, I knew beyond all doubt that we were doing work that truly mattered. If only for one more day, the 11 wolves of the White Hawk Pack would remain as nature intended--together as a cohesive unit. A family. In a seemingly insignificant act of standing on a moonlit slope, shouting,"Run away wolves!" into the night, I experienced what I believe to be one of life's greatest purposes: to be actively engaged in an effort to protect that which is so pure and at such great risk.
Editor's Note: In early April Julie Palmquist wrote to the Quarterly with disturbing news. The White Hawk Pack--the wolves that so many people worked so hard to protect--was lethally controlled over this past weekend for killing one lamb and two calves. Volunteers did what we felt was right in order to protect those wolves despite the knowledge that further depredations would most certainly warrant additional control actions. I consider myself to be a very practically minded conservationist, and I accept the use of lethal control as one of many tools for managing livestock depredation problems. However, that doesn't make hearing of their demise any easier. At times such as this, the fact that our wildlife is so expendable overwhelms me.
