State laws keeps data about legally killed wolves secret.
By Mike Koshmrl, Jackson Hole, Wyo.
October 16, 2013
Hunters have reported killing five wolves in a Wyoming hunt area that abuts Yellowstone National Park’s Lamar Valley, raising fears a park pack has been crippled.
Wolf watchers in the Lamar Valley — perhaps the most famous place on Earth to spot a Canis lupus in the wild — fear the worst: that the animals killed were members of the Lamar Canyon Pack. It had 11 members at the end of last year.
One wolf advocate says he sought the identity of the wolves killed in area two from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department but didn’t get any answers.
“They’re hiding behind their statute that says they can only release so much information, which is a bogus excuse,” said Marc Cooke, president of Wolves of the Rockies. “They might as well face the reality that there’s a good possibility that wolves killed were from Yellowstone.”
It’s impossible to say if one or more of the five wolves killed over a span of three days last week were Lamar Canyon Pack wolves, Wyoming Game and Fish Department officials said.
“There’s no way to know, we just don’t have that information,” Game and Fish spokesman Alan Dubberley said.
Because none of the animals killed wore radio collars, pinpointing their pack identity is impossible, Dubberley said. It’s also illegal to say precisely where the five wolves in hunt area two, located northeast of Cody, were killed, he said.
The wolves, all killed between Thursday and Sunday, included two males and three females, the spokesman said.
The weekend’s harvest pushed area two one over its 2013 hunt quota of four wolves. Last year, eight wolves were allowed to be killed in area two. Statewide the quota has also been slashed in half — from 52 to 26.
An estimated 277 wolves inhabited Wyoming, including Yellowstone and the Wind River Reservation, at the end of 2012. That’s nearly double the 150 wolves required by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which removed federal protections from the predators last year.
Dave Hallac, Yellowstone’s Center for Resources chief, said that he heard word of the wolf harvests near the park boundary from Game and Fish on Monday.
“They simply let us know there is a reasonable possibility those wolves could be from the Lamar Canyon Pack,” Hallac said. The Lamar Canyon Pack, which contains no radio collared animals, had been documented recently outside of the park, he said.
Game and Fish officials said they were unaware of the communication with Yellowstone.
In fall 2012 Wyoming’s Lamar Canyon Pack attracted international attention when wolf 832F, the pack’s world-famous alpha female, was killed by a hunter during Wyoming’s inaugural regulated hunt. That fall the pack fractured, with some animals returning to Yellowstone and some joining the Hoodoo Pack, which also roams Wyoming wolf hunt area two.
By the time hunting seasons closed, 12 Yellowstone National Park wolves had been legally killed in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.
Natural deaths, run-ins with humans and hunting combined to cut Yellowstone’s wolf numbers by about a quarter.
Wildlife safari guide Howard Goldstein said his business took a hit this summer because the Lamar wolves were harder to find and more wary.
“We get a lot of people who come specifically to see wolves,” said Goldstein, who operates out of Jackson. “Those people are buying guides, buying binoculars, getting hotels.
“They’re generating a tremendous amount of income for communities around Yellowstone,” he said.
Goldstein, like Cooke, lamented not knowing the identities of the wolves killed over the weekend.
“We don’t know if it’s the Lamar Canyon Pack or the Hoodoo Pack, because the state won’t tell us anything,” Goldstein said.
Goldstein called for the state to be more open with the wolf watching community.
“I can understand not giving us the names, addresses and the phone numbers of the hunters who killed the wolves,” Goldstein said, “but to literally give us no information other than the number of wolves killed and the district they were killed in is not OK.”
Wyoming state law restricts what Game and Fish officials can say about any wolf that’s been legally killed.
Details such as age, coloration, breeding status and location are to be kept secret. This fall the state began sharing the sex of animals killed. The statute was established to protect the wolf hunters’ identities.
The law states: “Any information regarding the number or nature of wolves legally taken within the state of Wyoming shall only be released in its aggregate form and no information of a private or confidential nature shall be released without the written consent of the person to whom the information may refer. Information identifying any person legally taking a wolf within this state is solely for the use of the department or appropriate law enforcement offices and is not a public record.”
Game and Fish officials are forward about the restrictive nature of the statute in terms of information dissemination.
“We’re under pretty strict regulations about what we can and can’t say,” Game and Fish large carnivore manager Dan Thompson said.
Pack affiliation for the wolves recently killed in area two will be included in the 2013 gray wolf annual report. The 2012 annual report was released this April, three months after the hunt ended.
Cooke said he wasn’t pleased to have a lengthy wait ahead to find out whether or not the wolves were Lamar Canyon pack animals.
He called for Montana and Wyoming to cut back on already-reduced quotas in hunt areas near Yellowstone’s boundaries.
“Hunters have the whole state to operate in if they want to go kill wolves,” the Wolves of the Rockies president said.
“Wildlife watchers don’t have that luxury,” Cooke said. “We need to give them that luxury.”
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