Lawmakers: Wolves still endangered
By Gazette News Services [here]
Five congressmen from the House Natural Resources Committee want to delay a plan to remove gray wolves in the Northern Rockies from the federal endangered-species list.
In a recent letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, the congressmen wrote that states “hostile to wolf conservation” could reduce today’s 1,500 wolves to “as few as 300″ if the predators lose protected status.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which Kempthorne oversees, plans to announce the delisting of wolves in the Northern Rockies next month.
That would allow Idaho, Wyoming and Montana to host public hunts for the animals. The states already are setting hunting seasons and quotas.
Last year, more than 140 wolves were killed in the Northern Rockies by federal and state officials and ranchers in response to wolves’ preying on livestock.
The Dec. 17 letter to Kempthorne was signed by Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.Va.; Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.; Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash.; Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, R-Md.; and Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J.
Wolves in the Great Lakes region were removed from the endangered species list in 2007.
by bear bait
I have been reprimanded for not referring to the proper wolf species in a blog comment. So I googled “wolf species” and found out that the flavor of wolf introduced (not reintroduced: the species had never lived there) into Yellowstone NP and now infecting Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and probably Oregon, Utah and Nevada, is the MacKenzie Valley Wolf from northern Canada.
The wolf that lives in Minnesota is the Grey Wolf of the Great Plains subspecies and has Buffalo Wolf lines in its DNA.
The MacKenzie Valley Wolf subspecies (one of the largest subspecies in animal size) are not the extinct Northern Rocky Mtn supspecies, the extinct Southern Rocky Mtn subspecies, the Great Plains wolf (stable in the Great Lakes and Dakotas), the Mexican Grey Wolf that is extinct, or the Eastern Timber Wolf (a population at risk found north of New England in Canada).
I got in trouble for talking about Grey wolves in Russia (same species as in the US and Canada, but living in northern Asia and Europe).
Essentially the wolf deal in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming is all about an introduced exotic to replace what might or might not be an extinct subspecies. There are indications that wolves indigenous to the Southern Canadian Rockies were pioneering into the Northern Rockies of the US. But that was not fast enough for bought-and-paid-for eco-terrorist Bruce Babbitt, Sec of Interior, who fast-tracked the introduction of an alien wolf subspecies into a National Park. And it was a NP that his family did not have business in or around, to boot. What a generous man.
Nowhere in the literature I have read is the MacKenzie Valley wolf listed as a species of concern, at risk, endangered or extinct. As a matter of fact, like any exotic introduced species into a new habitat and without natural checks and balances, the introduced MacKenzie Valley wolf subspecies is doing quite well in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, and more than likely on into Oregon, Nevada, Washington, and Utah.
It would be wonderful if they ate nutria and possums. I imagine they will do their part to further lessen ungulates decimating the range and woods. I have trouble figuring out how that will reduce conflagration danger, but someone will make a learned and scientific conclusion based on the needed outcome.