Reprinted with permission from the author.
By George Dovel
In 1995 when I asked one of the Idaho Fish and Game Commissioners why he supported wolf introduction he denied it. But when I then asked him why he allowed the IDFG Position Statement supporting wolf introduction to be published unchallenged before the wolves were released in Idaho, he said, “We were going to get wolves anyway and the 10J Nonessential Experimental introduction gave us more freedom to manage wolves that would impact our big game herds.”
The 10J Rule written in 1994 and in effect until amended slightly in 2003, provided that when a State or Tribe determined wolves were adversely impacting a game herd, all they had to do was ask the feds to capture and relocate those wolves. Yet neither Idaho nor Montana ever made such a request.
According to information published in the Federal Register by Ed Bangs in 2007 and 2008, Wyoming was the only one of the three states to make such a request. Bangs wrote: “The Service suggested that the State identify the sites in Wyoming where they would prefer the wolves to be moved, but no sites were ever identified and no wolves were ever moved.”
Cow/Calf Permits Contributed to Lolo Elk Decline
Meanwhile as wolves began to invade areas with high elk densities such as Clearwater Region Units 10 and 12 (later called the Lolo Zone), calf survival began to decline. Instead of mitigating the losses by removing some of the lions and bears – and then requesting FWS to relocate some of the wolves if it was still indicated, the Region issued several thousand antlerless elk permits.
Unit 10 elk census counts 1989 – 2010
Click for Larger Image
That, of course, only increased the calf decline which by 1998 in Unit 10 had dropped 89% in 10 years and had dropped 76% in four years (including the three years since wolves were introduced. Part of that short-term calf decline must be attributed to the 48% decline in the number of adult female elk from 1994-1998.
Although not quite as dramatic initially, the elk decline in Unit 12 followed the same pattern of over-harvesting cows and calves – even after wolves were introduced – to make the bull-to-cow ratio look better:
Unit 12 elk census counts 1985 – 2010
Click for Larger Image
In 1997 when Cal Groen became the new Regional Supervisor, the Clearwater Citizens Advisory Council (CCAC) expressed concern about extreme winter losses during the 1996-97 winter. It recommended eliminating antlerless elk permits and reducing the number of hunters in the Lolo Zone.
Instead, IDFG claimed the winter losses were normal and Groen increased the number of antlerless Lolo Zone elk permits from 1,900 to 1,950, and did nothing to decrease either the season lengths or the number of hunters. These and similar antlerless controlled hunt elk permits in other Clearwater units could not be justified biologically so all were listed as “Research Study” in the 1997 Big Game Regulations.
The new A-B Elk Tag system was adopted and in 1998 the CCAC demanded the F&G Commission cap the number of elk hunters in the Lolo Zone which is how that unwieldy system was designed to work. The Commission cut the number of “B” Tag hunters by two-thirds but Groen responded by giving an unlimited number of “A” Tag purchasers a 32-day either-sex archery elk season.
That season was set during the rut for the first time in decades and resulted in much higher hunter success than for the capped October rifle hunters with “B” Tags. To better understand the impact of Groen’s actions, the following chart portrays elk harvest data for Lolo Zone Units 10 and 12 from a spread sheet provided by IDFG’s Bruce Ackerman and Mike Elmer – but the 1995 harvest was actually much higher than they reported:
It actually totaled 1925 elk (nearly as high as the 1989 harvest of 1975 elk) and if the graph were corrected it would show a tremendous dive from ’95 to ’96 (one year before the bad winter). The classic predator pit that was forming even before the 1996-97 winter hit, plus Groen’s increasing rather than halting antlerless harvest in 1997 and still allowing archery antlerless harvest after that, drove the elk into a predator pit from which they could not recover.
Commission Enacts New Predator Control Policy
During the January 1999 Predator Symposium in Boise, attended by the F&G Commission, IDFG biologists and representatives of various interest groups, world-renowned wildlife authority Dr. Valerius Geist spent two hours patiently explaining why it is vital to control wolf populations to a strict minimum to keep them from destroying other wildlife populations.
In its August 1999 Commission meeting, after age-sex surveys revealed the number of elk calves per 100 cows in the Lolo Zone was less than 10, the Commission stopped listening to Groen’s claims that it was lack of habitat and unanimously passed the following resolution:
“That it be the policy of the IDFG to severely and demonstrably reduce the number of predators adversely affecting, or that may adversely affect, big game, upland game birds, fish and migratory waterfowl. And to that end, the Department will suggest an action plan that will accomplish this objective.”
Acting Director Mallet and Wildlife Bureau Chief Huffaker did their best to turn Commissioner Roy Moulton’s motion into another study but the Commission refused to accept more unsubstantiated claims that lack of forage was the problem. However calls went out to the Department’s predator preservationist allies and the next morning news headlines across the state described “The F&G Commission’s War on Predators.”
Although Groen took steps which increased the hunter harvest of bears and mountain lions resulting in more newborn elk calves and adult cows surviving, the increases were not enough to offset the added wolf predation. That was the extent of the “war on predators.”
Working behind the scenes without the constraints of law or ethics, the old guard of “wildlifers” that actually runs the agency destroyed Moulton’s ability to function as a Commissioner just as they had destroyed Steve Mealey’s ability to lead the agency a few months earlier. Commissioner Fred Wood quickly learned he had no support among the Commission for attempting to address the real problems with the declining Clearwater elk herd.
Twelve Years of Habitat Planning Result in No Change
Groen formed a Habitat Initiative with the FS and other agencies to allegedly address the changes in elk habitat and has spent the last 13 years blaming elk declines throughout the Clearwater Region on changes in forest canopy. In December 1998, hunters, loggers and other local area citizens formed the Clearwater Elk Recovery Team (CERT) which worked with state and federal agencies to implement changes in forest health practices.
By Dec. 2002, none of their suggestions had been adopted so they appealed to Sen, Crapo who expanded the participants to include outfitters, various environmental organizations and the Nez Perce Tribe. But in 2006 environmental members threatened to sue if either timber cutting or wolf control was implemented and the Feb. 2010 USFS joint meeting minutes agreed that not even one change had been adopted as a result of 12 years of citizen consensus and recommendations.
10J Rule Change Seen As Way To Save Declining Elk
When FWS rewrote the 10J Rule, published in the Jan. 6, 2005 Federal Register, it recognized that “wolf translocations would likely fail because no unoccupied suitable habitat remained in Idaho.” It simply required the States or Tribes with FWS approved wolf plans to make a determination that wolf predation was one of the primary causes of an unacceptable decline in a wild ungulate population or herd before they submitted a plan to kill most of the wolves for several years until the herds recovered.
Hunters and residents of more than two dozen deer and elk units that were being decimated by wolves saw this as the answer to their wolf problems, regardless of whether or not Idaho wolves were de-listed. FWS signed an agreement with MTFWP where that agency agreed to take over wolf management for the feds and on January 6, 2006, Idaho Gov. Kempthorne signed a similar Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with the Secretary of Interior agreeing to manage Idaho wolves for the feds.
10J Wolf Control Plan Sabotaged
One of Idaho’s duties listed in the MOA was “Implement lethal control or translocation of wolves to reduce impacts on wild ungulates in accordance with the process outlined in the amended 10(j) rule.” IDFG spent a year completing preparation (scoping, peer review, etc.) of the Clearwater 10J Wolf Control Plan and it was made public on Jan. 26, 2006 – but IDFG obviously had no intention of killing any wolves.
Instead of accurately and truthfully reporting that wolf predation was the primary cause of the decline in cow elk numbers from about 1998 to January of 2006, the proposal claimed forest maturation was the sole primary cause of the decline! Neither the authors nor their peer reviewers had evidence to support this false claim (e.g. excessive forage utilization, subnormal birth weights, subnormal weight gains in calves that survived, etc.) yet it was accepted as fact like any other lie that is repeated often enough.
The list of secondary causes included allowing hunters to kill cow elk in the mid 90s to allegedly increase calf elk survival, losses from the severe 1996-97 winter, calf predation by bears and adult predation by mountain lions and, finally, predation of cow elk by wolves. How could IDFG possibly claim wolves were killing too many cow elk when Groen continued to allow cows to be harvested by A-Tag archery hunters until he left in 2007?
IDFG Knowingly Sacrificed Elk and Deer Herds to Improve Its Chances for Managing Wolves Sooner
If you go back and look at the elk populations in both Unit 10 and Unit 12 during the counts in 2006, you will see there were still 3,254 cows, 865 calves, and 385 spike bulls – most of which would survive the remaining month of mild winter if IDFG began killing 43-50 wolves per year for five tears then. But even if IDFG refused to change its undocumented claim that lack of habitat was the primary reason for poor elk survival, it could still have saved this and other elk herds by controlling wolves once the “primary” requirement was removed from the 10J.
That change was published in July of 2007 and the Final Rule, which allowed Idaho and Montana to remove all but 20 breeding pairs (200 wolves), became effective on Feb. 28, 2008. IDFG had plenty of time to either resubmit its original plan to kill ~50 wolves in the Lolo Zone – or have a new plan ready to kill more wolves in a larger area.
But instead of being concerned about the tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue to Idaho from hunters, and the millions more this fiasco was costing rural Idahoans, IDFG chose to listen to Defenders of Wildlife Northern Rockies representative Suzanne Stone. Late in 2007, Steve Nadeau finished a shocking new Wolf Management Plan vowing to manage for 5-7 times as many wolves as had been agreed upon!
When Idahoans soundly rejected his effort during a Dec. 2007 Commission meeting, IDFG spent the winter convincing urban media readers to support the plan. Yet with elk numbers nose-diving, no one said where the extra animals to feed the extra wolves would come from.
According to Deputy Attorneys General and other advisors to IDFG, this massive step backwards was supposed to stop the inevitable lawsuit by DOW and its accomplices to halt a proposed 2008 hunt – but of course it didn’t work. They filed suit at the last minute and three months later the Judge canceled the 2008 wolf hunt on July 18th and returned the wolves to federal protection.
F&G Commission “Sort Of” Directs Use of 10J Tools –
That was a real slap in the face to the citizens who had been watching their game herds and livestock destroyed by wolves for more than a decade and the Idaho F&G Commissioners pretended they were going to do something about it. On Nov. 6, 2008, they passed several Wolf Management Directives for IDFG including: “4. To develop and aggressively utilize all tools and methods available under the new 10(j) Rule to control wolves in critical areas that are impacting ungulates starting with the Lolo zone and progressing to other critical areas, in the event de-listing does not occur.” (emphasis added).
Biologist George Pauley estimated there were 130 to 150 wolves in the Lolo Zone and helped prepare a plan to remove at least 105 wolves each year (about 80%), leaving 25 wolves. He and other biologists used their telemetry studies to prove that wolves continued to be the major cause of death among both cow elk and elk calves that survived to six months of age.
But Then Fails to Use 10J, Except as a Threat to Get Wolves Delisted – Despite 40% Loss in Elk Harvest
Except for a brief six-day period when the Bush administration was leaving office, NRM wolves were not de-listed until six months after the Commission passed its Wolf Management Directives. Yet the annual expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars for radio-collaring and monitoring antlerless elk and deer was wasted money and effort as the Commission still failed to use the 10J Plan.
On May 6, 2009, two days after wolves were finally delisted, IDFG Biologist Pete Zager told a Western States and Provinces Deer and Elk Workshop in Spokane that the number of elk harvested annually by hunters in Idaho had been declining, from around 25,000 in the mid-1990s, when wolves were reintroduced to the Northern Rocky Mountains, to roughly 15,000 last year (2008). That represents a 40% decline from the average harvest and even more from the 1994 harvest of 28,000 just before the wolves were released into Idaho.”
If the Commission’s concern had been trying to maintain healthy wildlife populations as required by Idaho Law, it would have told Wildlife Services to begin killing at least the proposed 105 wolves in the Clearwater Basin during the 2008-09 winter when the job was easily done using aircraft. This would also have prevented several times that many wolf pups from being conceived and born and would have prevented the near total destruction of the elk and deer in the Lolo and Selway Zones before the September 1, 2009 sport wolf hunting season even began.
But regardless of what IDFG may say now as more Idahoans are learning the extent of the extreme wolf damage to our deer and elk herds, Director Groen, Deputy Director Unsworth and virtually every other IDFG official have made it abundantly clear that their only goal concerning wolves has been to build a huntable population of wolves as a big game trophy species and ignore their impact on Idaho wildlife and rural Idaho citizens.
Printing Graphs Prompts Damage Control by Groen
When Mike Dubrasich provided graphs depicting the destruction of the largest elk herd in Idaho (see: westinstenv.org/wildpeop/2010/02/27/lolo-elk-decline/ ) on Feb. 27, 2010, they were quickly circulated around the U.S. Then in a damage control op-ed News Release on March 8, 2010, Director Groen wrote, “Idaho Fish and Game is committed to saving the Lolo herd and keeping Idaho’s other elk herds healthy.”
Then Groen described the so-called “aggressive steps” they took to prevent the elk from declining, but carefully omitted the fact that, as Clearwater Region Supervisor for nine years, he was responsible for that decline. When he took over in 1997, despite what he now describes as “the severe winter of 1996-97,” the number of cows in the Lolo Zone still exceeded the 6,100 minimum goal by an estimated 1,000 or more (see ‘97 & ‘98 counts).
But, as previously stated, instead of compensating for the starvation loss of several thousand cows and calves in the higher elevations in the 1996-97 winter by eliminating antleress hunts in 1997, Groen increased the Lolo Zone antlerless permits to 1,950! There is simply no rational excuse for that and what happened next.
Wolves Decimated Cow Elk in Lolo Zone
Although significant bear removal temporarily increased the ratio of surviving calves to cows, the number of cows counted in surveys that were five years apart had declined by nearly two-thirds! By 2002 and 2003 the total number of cows in Units 12 and 10 (the Lolo Zone) had declined from 1,000 more than the minimum goal of 6,100 to 3,000 less than that goal!
Five years of increasing predation by wolves on elk cows and older calves had systematically destroyed the herd’s ability to recover from the 96-97 winter. The sharp decline in total calf recruitment was so obvious that even a biologist with no math skills could not have missed it – but in case they did – graphs illustrating the radical elk decline and harvest trend were printed in color in the 1998-2003 Elk Management Plan for the Lolo Zone.
Groen Has Led Refusal to Utilize 10J Rules
In January of 2006 Groen approved submitting the plan to FWS for removing 43-50 wolves per year for five years knowing it could not be approved because it emphasized wolf predation was not a primary cause of elk not meeting management goals. Early winter calf-to-cow ratios in the Lolo Zone were 27-to-100 due to extra bear kill by hunters, yet the total of female calves that survived until spring were only one-third of the number needed to replace the cow elk being killed each year by wolves!
Groen’s refusal as Director to recommend Wildlife Services start killing at least the 105 wolves in the Clearwater in 2008-09, and again in 2009-10, guaranteed the Lolo Zone elk herd would be decimated. A long list of bona fide experts including Bergerud, Geist, Kay, Taylor and even Mech warned IDFG it would not be able to control wolves with sport hunting and trapping – yet Groen is still telling the public he will do the impossible.
At the beginning of the Commission review of public input discussed at length in the lead article in this issue, Groen admitted that the Forest Service gave him $100,000 to live trap and collar wolves in the wilderness. Yet he admitted the expert wolf trappers could not even catch one wolf in the wilderness during the entire summer.
The fact that Mr. Dubrasich created and published only two graphs illustrating the near demise of the Lolo Zone elk herd was because that was the only one of the 29 elk zones he received the information on. And because those graphs were published and widely circulated, Groen responded with his claim that IDFG would save the Lolo elk and keep Idaho’s other elk herds healthy.
But the Idaho elk harvest does not drop 40% by 2008 and even more in 2009 just because only one of 29 elk Zones is in trouble. Among those that are in serious trouble are 11 Units in the Selway. Sawtooth and Middle Fork Zones – with a dozen Units elsewhere not far behind.
The Demise of Idaho Public Lands Hunting for All
The actual number of wolves in Idaho right now, including several hundred new pups, is undoubtedly closer to 1,600 than to the 856 minimum estimate for Dec. 2009. But feeding even 1,000 wolves for one year will require 16,421.to 32,840 elk (White & Garrott WSC Vol 33 No 3). Either figure is more than hunters killed in 2008 or 2009
The propaganda statements by Groen are in direct contrast to claims from his wolf expert/Game Manager Jon Rachael in the Boise Weekly the following day. Rachael stated that any eventual balance between big game and wolves is not likely to be acceptable to those who for the last 100 years have looked at deer and elk as a food source.
(In 16 years I have never seen any evidence that IDFG officials had any intention of using 10J to control wolves. The evidence remains clear it has been a colossal deception to hide the real agenda which will ultimately end or sharply curtail the heritage of public land natural resource uses we have enjoyed since statehood. – ED)
