Conservation news snapshot April 2004

Alaska:
Alaska contains the largest population of grey wolves in the USA and there are thought to be around 8000 there at the moment. They are not protected by any endangered species law and Alaskan culture has traditionally regarded - and treated - them all as abhorrent trash. They are only protected in about 5% of the state and figures show that around 7500 wolves have been killed for fun by fur trappers and "hunters" in the last five years.

Things have been hotting up recently in Alaska following governor Murkowski's decision to re-legalise shooting of wolves from the air. On November 4'th the hunter and trapper dominated "Alaska Board of Game" approved permits for the shooting of large numbers of wolves from aircraft. This can be done either on sight or after chasing the animals to exhaustion and then landing the aircraft to kill them on foot. The Alaskan public find the practise as abhorrent as everyone else - except the hunters - does and have twice forced the state to ban it.

Originally approved by Murkowski (on the basis of game population guesstimates by hunters) as a means of increasing moose numbers in the McGrath area for fun hunters, the Board is expected to approve a massive expansion of aerial wolf-hunting at its meeting in March 2004. There have been no game population surveys conducted in the McGrath area since 2001 when an incomplete report indicated that there were twice as many moose in the area as the hunters were claiming. The hunters are now claiming that the only accurate data available is their own (verbal and anecdotal) evidence that moose numbers have been permanently plummeting for years due to wolf and bear predation.

The fun-hunting and trapping community in Alaska is renown for its vitriolic hatred of wolves - and just about everything and everyone else as well except moose, deer and caribou - and has always had a strong political presence. Their influence over Alaska's environmental policies had been held in check until recently by public opinion - until the arrival of Murkowski as state Governor. His decision to populate the Game Board entirely with militant, semi-literate fur trappers and hunting guides set the situation back by a decade.

The area currently approved for aerial wolf-hunting amounts to about 2000 square miles of interior Alaska plus a massive area east of Anchorage.

The group Defenders of Wildlife has been busy organising opposition to the re-introduction of aerial hunting and tried to obtain an injunction in the courts to stop it. The injunction was thrown out by a judge in early December and the way is now clear for fun-loving Alaskans to shoot animals from aircraft. Defenders are continuing to organise protests and a series of what they call "howl-ins" - public demonstrations. They are also ready to organise a tourism boycott of the kind which resulted in the re-banning of aerial hunting when it was last re-legalised in the 1990's.

You may be interested to know that Governor Murkowski enjoyed British hospitality and an agreeable shooting holiday in Scotland last winter at one of the big estates.

Defenders website for Alaska is at www.defenders.org/wildlife/wolf/alaska.html


Ethiopian wolves
In late October, an article released by Nature News Service noted that 20 of the mere 500 Ethiopian wolves left in the world had died in a rabies outbreak. The outbreak has hit the population of around 300 which live in the Bale Mountains National Park. A previous outbreak of the disease in 1991 reduced the population to about 120 and the coordinator of the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme (EWCP), Stuart Williams, called immediately for a programme of vaccination to prevent a similar disaster. There has been a vaccination program in force for domestic dogs for the last nine years in the area and it is thought the disease was brought in by a dog from outside the area. In August and September, farmers enter the wolves' territories along with their dogs to graze livestock and this brings the dogs and the woves into some degree of contact. This time of year is also the breeding season for the Ethiopian wolf.

Caludio Sillero of Oxford University, who works with EWCP, commented that the wolves seem to become vulnerable to outbreaks of disease once their population density climbs above one animal per square kilometre.

You can view the whole article on www.nature.com/nsu/031027/031027-2.html


Finland:
On 17'th September 2003 the Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute announced that predator populations in Finland are growing slowly with the exception of bears. Wolves are reported as making inroads into southern and central Finland.

According to census estimates released on Wednesday, the number of wolves, wolverines and lynx increased in 2002. Meanwhile the bear population remained the same or slightly declined. The highest concentrations of bears were in eastern Finland as well as west of Lake Pijnne in central Finland.

The wolf population was also concentrated in the east, but there were also active dens in parts of central and southern Finland. The smaller wolverines are most common in the fells of Lapland, with a small breeding population in western Finland as well.

Last year there was a record number of sightings of large predators, 13800 in total.

At the end of 2002, there were an estimated 870 lynx, 830 bears, 135 wolves and 125 wolverines in Finland. However many of these animals wander across national borders, so no precise figures are available. (http://ww2.yle.fi/pls/show/page?id=231086)



Norway
In autumn 2003, the Norwegian newspaper "Aftenposten" announced that a new wolf pack seems to have formed in eastern Norway. Photogrpahs of the new pack were taken by a group of hunters during a chance sighting in the Oesterdalen valley and experts decided that the pack is basically a new family. It won't be possible to track them until some snow has fallen though. Petter Wabakken, who specializes in studying predators, confirmed that the wolves were the offspring of a pair seen in the area last winter. The new pack has been named the "Julussaflokken" pack.

The Aftenposten article also says that more puppies have been seen this year but does not say where. No wolf-hunting is allowed in the area and the authorities say that the pack will be allowed to establish itself there but in view of the Norwegian authorities reluctance to investigate previous episodes of illegal wolf killing, this may not amount to much of a reassurance. The Norwegian public's attitude is still substantially negative where wolves are concerned - a fact that partly explains the disappearance of the so-called Moss pack which was roaming south of Oslo. It is believed that the pack was illegally hunted and wiped out.

The full article is on www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article.jhtml?articleID=639309



USA
Following Secretary of State Gayle Norton's premature downgrading of wolf protection from "endangered" to "threatened" across the lower 48 states of the USA on May 18'th 2003, seventeen conservation and wildlife protection groups filed a lawsuit on 1'st October to challenge the decision. The lawsuit brought under the Endangered Species Act, was filed in Portland Oregon.

Secretary Norton is renown for her anti-environment stance and the decision to downlist the wolf in the USA has much to do with politics and ranching interests and little to do with science.

Reducing the wolf's status allows individual states to take over the complete management of their own wolf populations and this prospect raises the spectre of rogue states such as Idaho, which has a very high population of militant and irresponsible "hunters", simply exterminating their wolves. Worse, in no less than 16 southern and eastern states, protection was effectively removed completely.

Since wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone and afforded state protection, their population has rebounded in the lower 48 states. There are now about 4000 wolves in lower 48 with around 346 in Idaho, 161in Montana and 240 in Wyoming - all virulently anti-wolf states.

Conservationists are worried that states like Idaho, Wyoming and Montana cannot be trusted to allow their wolf populations to prosper. Kirk Koepsel, director of the Wyoming chapter of the Sierra Club says "the long-term survival of wolves in the Northern Rockies cannot be assured with the poorly conceived and politically tainted wolf management plans emerging from places like Wyoming". Wyoming being the state that has given wolves dual classification allowing them to be shot on sight as predators throughout much of the state whilst being protected only in areas so small that they cannot help but wander outside them and lose their lives in the process.

In an article in the Star Tribune, Michael Scott, executive director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition of conservation groups, is quoted as saying "What this is about is whether or not the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is obliged to help recover a species across its historic range, and whether the Service can arbitrarily change its recovery goals regardless of the underlying science".

You can view the Star Tribune article on
www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2003/10/02/news/wyoming/f5ac226c63df363e63d18359c8b1ef16.txt