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“While the wolf plan is out
of date and under review, we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. Restoring wolves not
only reduced the elk population
but kept elk on the move.
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