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10 CapitalPress.com April 8, 2016 Wolves Wolves CONTINUED from Page 1 to the landscape. It comes on the heels of the ODFW Com- mission’s decision in Novem- ber 2015 to take gray wolves off the state endangered spe- cies list, and just as the com- mission is beginning a review of the Oregon Wolf Plan, the document that governs wolf conservation and manage- ment. Oregon Wild, the Port- land-based conservation group with long involvement in the state’s wolf issue, said shooting wolves should be an “absolute last resort.” “While the wolf plan is out of date and under review, we shouldn’t be taking the most drastic action we can take in wolf management,” Executive Director Sean Stevens said in an email. The commission should not have taken wolves off the state endangered species list in the first place, but it isn’t likely to revisit that decision, Stevens said. The commission should Amaroq Weiss Rob Klavins call upon the department to not shoot more wolves until the plan review is finished, he said. “But, more importantly, they should recognize that de-listing does not mean that we should suddenly swing open the doors to more aggressive manage- ment,” Stevens said. The ongoing wolf plan re- view, which may take nine months, should include science that wasn’t considered in the delisting decision, and the pub- lic’s will, he said. It also should create more clarity on non-le- thal measures to deter wolves, he said. Publicly, at least, no one is celebrating the shootings. The Oregon Cattlemen’s Association, long on the oppo- site side of the argument from Oregon Wild, said ODFW’s ac- tion was authorized by Phase II of the state’s wolf plan. “The problem needed ad- dressed and ODFW handled it correctly,” spokeswoman Kayli Hanley said in an email. “We acknowledge that while this decision was necessary for the sake of species coex- istence, it was a difficult de- cision.” Michael Finley, chair of the ODFW Commission, said the department handled the situation properly. “I feel that the department acted in total good faith,” Fin- ley said. “They followed the letter and the spirit of the wolf plan.” Another conservation group, Defenders of Wildlife, called the shootings “a very sad day for us” but also said it appeared ODFW followed the wolf plan. “The final plan is a com- promise, but it is among the best of all the state plans in that it emphasizes the value of wolves on the landscape, and requires landowners to try non-lethal methods of de- terring wolves before killing them is ever considered,” the group said in a prepared state- ment. Amaroq Weiss, West Coast wolf organizer for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the Imnaha Pack shootings may lead to more poaching, because killing wolves de- creases tolerance of them and leads to a belief that “you have to kill wolves in order to preserve them.” Weiss agreed that coming across a calf or sheep that’s been torn apart and consumed — the skull and hide was all that was left of one calf after the OR-4 group fed on it — must be gut-wrenching for producers. But she said those animals are raised to be killed and eaten. “They don’t die any more a humane death in a slaughterhouse than being killed by a wild animal,” she said. “It’s a hard discussion to find a common place of agree- ment.” She said such losses are the reason Oregon established the compensation program: to pay for livestock losses and to help with the cost of defensive measures that scare wolves away. Weiss said Oregon rushed to move to Phase II of its wolf conservation and management plan in the eastern part of the state, which was prompted by OR-7, Oregon’s famous wandering wolf, shows up on trail camera photo By ERIC MORTENSON Capital Press Oregon’s best known wan- dering wolf, OR-7, was pho- tographed by a remote trail camera in the Rogue Riv- er-Siskiyou National Forest in late February after not being heard from since his tracking collar failed last June. The wolf’s dispersal from the Imnaha Pack in September 2011 attracted international attention as GPS collar data points shared by Oregon De- partment of Fish and Wildlife allowed the public to follow his travels. After leaving Northeast Or- egon’s Wallowa County, OR-7 cut through Oregon on a diag- onal route, traveling southwest through Baker, Grant, Har- ney, Crook, Deschutes, Lake, Klamath, Douglas and Jackson counties. On Dec. 28, 2011, Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service A photo taken by trail camera in February shows wandering wolf OR-7, at left, for the first time since his tracking collar quit working in 2015. He’s the best known disperser from the influential Imnaha Pack of Northeast Oregon. OR-7 gained a national following when he left his home pack in 2011 and ventured into California. He’s now alpha male of his own group, the Rogue Pack. notforsale he entered California, becom- ing the first known wolf in the state since 1924. By then, wildlife biologists estimated he’d traveled 1,062 zig-zag miles. He spent most of 2012 in California, then returned to Or- egon in 2013. In 2014, ODFW announced he’d found a mate, an uncollared and unknown female. They’ve produced two litters of pups in what is now called the Rogue Pack. OR-7 was most likely sired by OR-4, the longtime alpha male of the Imnaha Pack who was among four wolves shot by ODFW March 31 for re- peated livestock attacks. Unlike others from his home Imnaha Pack, OR-7 ap- parently hasn’t bothered cattle or sheep since taking up resi- dence in Southwest Oregon. “He’s behaving himself, I’m happy to report,” said John Stephenson, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who tracks wolves in the west- ern part of the state, where the federal Endangered Species Act listing of gray wolves still is in effect. Stephenson said the trail camera photo was the first di- rect evidence since last year that OR-7, now about 7-years- old, is alive and well. reaching a population goal of four breeding pairs for three consecutive years. That also prompted the ODFW Com- mission to take wolves off the state endangered species list in 2015, although they remain on the federal endangered list in the western two-thirds of the state. Like others, Weiss believes the state should have held off on such changes until it fin- ished the mandated review of the wolf plan. “Under Phase I, Oregon was the state we could all point to” for successfully managing wolves, Weiss said. “I would hope they look at what parts of the wolf plan are working, and look at the parts that are not working.” Politics and policy aside, the shooting of OR-4 gave people pause. He was a big- ger-than-life character; he’d evaded a previous ODFW kill order and had to be re-collared a couple times as he somehow shook off the state’s effort to track him. OR-4’s Imnaha Pack was the state’s second oldest, des- ignated in 2009, and it pro- duced generations of success- ful dispersers. OR-4’s many progeny included Oregon’s best-known wanderer, OR-7, who left the Imnaha Pack in 2011 and zig-zagged his way southwest into California be- fore settling in the Southern Oregon Cascades. OR-25, which killed a calf in Klamath County and now is in Northern California, dis- persed from the Imnaha Pack. The alpha female of the Shas- ta Pack, California’s first, is from the Imnaha Pack as well. Rob Klavins, who lives in Wallowa County and is Or- egon Wild’s field represen- tative in the area, ran across OR-4’s tracks a couple times and saw him once. Despite his fearsome repu- tation, the wolf tucked his tail between his legs, ran behind a nearby tree and barked at Klavins and his hiking group until they left. “Killing animals four or five times your size is a tough way to make a living,” Klavins said. “Some people appreciate OR-4 as a symbol of the te- nacity of wolves, even a lot of folks who dislike wolves have sort of a begrudging respect for him.” ODFW Commission chairman knows wolves By ERIC MORTENSON Capital Press Michael Finley, chair of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Commission, knows wolves, that’s fair to say. He was superintendent of Yellowstone National Park when they were re-introduced in 1995-96. It was controver- sial, as anyone following wolf management issues in the Pa- cific Northwest and Northern California can imagine. The March 31 action by ODFW, in which department staff shot four Imnaha Pack wolves from a helicopter for repeated livestock attacks in northeast Oregon’s Wallowa County, carries similar emo- tional freight. “No one took any joy in this action,” said Finley, who retired from the National Park Service in 2001 and moved back to Medford, Ore., where he grew up. “No one I know on the commission or on the pro- fessional staff wants to see wolves killed, period,” Finley said. “There are just places wolves can’t be and times they can’t be there. It’s a simple fact of wolf management.” Everyone on the commis- sion is working to see wolves recover within their historic Oregon range, Finley said. “We know they probably can’t be in the Willamette Valley; there are certain places they can’t be, the conflict is too great.” But the problems or concern they cause constituents such as ranchers and hunters have to be addressed, he said. It’s a difficult issue to balance when there are groups on opposite sides — ranchers and farmers on one, conservationists and their urban supporters on the other — who see it differently. “They read the (wolf plan) language differ- ently and want to interpret it their way,” he said. Michael “I feel that Finley the department acted in total good faith,” Finley said. “They followed the letter and the spirit of the wolf plan.” Department staff “bent over backwards to benefit wolves” but also recognized, in fairness, that they had to take action on behalf of the ranchers, Finley said. The issues and staked-out positions were much the same in Yellowstone 20 years ago when gray wolves, Canis lupus, were brought to the park from Canada. To throw off potential trou- blemakers, Finley said wildlife officials moved the wolves in two convoys of horse trail- ers, one dummy, one with the wolves. He said he carried the first wolf into the park, where they were kept in acclimation pens for a couple months and fed roadkill. Armed guards were stationed at the pens. The idea of reintroducing an apex predator to Yellowstone came from the “trophic cas- cade” theory of wildlife man- agement. Oregon State Univer- sity researchers William Ripple and Robert Beschta are among the principle’s leading experts and studied the outcome at Yel- lowstone. Wolves had been missing for about 70 years from Yel- lowstone, where management practices included park staff drowning pups, Finley said. Over decades, elk over-grazed the park. 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