Conservation news snapshot Summer 2007

ALASKA: When governor Murkowski lost the primary elections in August 2006, it looked as though Alaskan wildlife might get a break from persecution but his successor, Sarah Palin who took office in December 2006 hasn’t shown much promise. Far from sacking the motley crew of gun extremists, wolf-haters and environmental illiterates that Murkowski was pleased to call a “Game Board”, she became the first State Governor to instigate a bounty on wolves ($150). The bounty was immediately challenged in court by the Alaska Chapter of the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife but the judge rules that it was only illegal for the state fish and game department to issue bounties, not for the local state game board.

USA GREAT LAKES: About 4000 wolves have finally been removed from the endangered species list in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. This is the main area where the last remnants of the US wolf population clung on in the face of mass eradication that reduced the entire population of the lower 48 states to around 300 by the 1970’s. Although strong enough to withstand some controlled public hunting, the current populations will be protected from it for up to five years yet.

NORTHERN ROCKIES: All wolf populations in the Northern Rockies area will be removed from the endangered species list before 2008 and exposed substantially to controlled public hunting. Before this process can be complete though, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming have to produce wolf management plans which satisfy the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The process is now nearly complete even though Wyoming has consistently dragged its heels and the other two weren’t exactly eager to co-operate either. With around 1200 wolves spread around the are at present, each of the states are required to maintain a minimum population of 100 wolves which must consist of at least 10 breeding pairs. The group Defenders of Wildlife are seriously concerned about lack of goodwill on the part of the states concerned and also the inability for state agencies to restore protection in time should those states decide to re-enact their own version of the continental eradication. Extremist hunting groups such as the ludicrous “Friends of the Yellowstone Elk Herd” have promised nothing but wholesale slaughter of wolves the moment they can legally start it and are mixed up in a stew of lawsuits designed to sue wolves out of existence.

MEXICAN WOLVES: The US Fish and Wildlife Service now estimates that there are 59 Mexican Gray wolves in South-western New Mexico and east-central Arizona. This is up on last year’s total of about 49 although it is thought that the figure is not entirely honest or accurate. The Fish and Wildlife Service in that part of the USA is keen not to upset the local ranchers too much and what the local ranchers most want to do is kill wolves – all of them, everywhere. The survey alleged that there were seven breeding pairs when in fact at least one of those so-called pairs - in a pack called the Bluestem pack – isn’t a breeding pair at all. The reasoning behind the exaggeration is that ranchers can only get permits to kill wolves on public land when there are more than six breeding pairs and ranchers really, really want those permits (even though they don’t actually need them). You have to remember that this actually means that there are just 6 breeding pairs on the planet and that’s all, there are no more Mexican Gray wolves anywhere else.

Mexican wolves were released in 1998 in the Blue Range and Gila Wilderness regions but the program has been hopelessly compromised by rancher politics since the outset. The Center for Biological Diversity started a law suit against the Fish and Wildlife Service on December 14, 2006 to save the Mexican wolf from so-called “predator control” and broad mismanagement but the case has not been heard yet.

FINLAND: Since the EU took Finland to court last October for allowing excessive wolf hunting, Finland’s gun-lovers and farmers have inevitably started accusing Finland’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of being excessively reluctant to issue wolf-hunting permits. The Finish Ministry is now considering asking the EU to grant an exemption from the endangered species directives for wolves in Finland so that farmers and hunters can carry on killing them all just the way they always have. The narrow mindedness of this clique worldwide is a perennial source of amazement; Finland’s gunmen are not alone in failing to understand what the words “endangered” and “species” actually mean. The gun lobbies in Idaho and Lithuania have both also tried this same trick.

ROME: Whilst modern Italy is home to around 1000 wolves (with humans only killing about 100 per year), ancient Italy – Rome – was home to many more and according to legend, Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome were abandoned near the Tiber river and found and raised by a she-wolf in a cave. During recent excavations on the ruins of the palace of the emperor Augustus on the Palatine hill, an elaborately decorated cave was found which is thought to have been the “lupercale” of legend – the cave in which Romulus and Remus were raised. The archaeological dig was being conducted by the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Rome Municipality and they were delighted to have stumbled upon the cave. Unfortunately, the cave is not in good shape and there simply isn’t enough money to do it up. They are also still trying to find the official entrance to it so you are unlikely to be able to see it for a while yet, if at all.

SCANDINAVIA: The entire current resident population of about 150 wolves in the Scandinavian Peninsula dates back to just three individual animals which re-colonised the area from Russia during the 1980’s. Because of this fact, biologists have for a long time, been concerned about the genetic diversity and viability of the Scandinavian population. New blood is very difficult to get into the gene pool because it can only come from more Russian wolves crossing into Scandinavia via the Northern Finnish / Lap corridor but it is almost impossible for any wolf to make the journey without being spotted and killed by the Finns or Lapps.A study carried out by Swedish and Norwegian researchers lead by Staffan Bensch and completed last year gives some encouraging news though. It seems that inbreeding carries its own discouraging mechanism in that litters tend to get smaller when their parents are inbred already and also wolves tend to prefer non-inbred mates – which implies that they can somehow tell an inbred wolf from a non-inbred one. The results of the study implied that a small and isolated population of wolves can actually remain viable for many more years without new genes entering the line than was previously thought.

SOUTH KOREA: A team led by Lee Byung-Chun and Shin Nam-Shik, veterinary professors at Seoul National University, claimed that they had managed to clone wolves  in the laboratory in October 2005 but within a month or two of their claim emerging, serious questions were being asked about the validity and accuracy of the science. At the time of writing, various senior academic figures are attempting to determine whether the claims are genuine or not. Some of the pictures and stories about the animals which emerged in Spring 2007 certainly seemed rather odd and did not seem to give any impression that the researchers knew what they were doing.

SCOTLAND: At the end of January, a study published by the Royal Society proposed, as have many such studies and discussion documents before it, that wolves should be re-introduced to Scotland in order to control the burgeoning red deer population. What was new about this study was that it made a serious attempt to estimate the effects of the presence of wolves on red deer numbers rather than simply discussing the likely effects. The big problem with Red deer in Scotland is that there are so vastly many of them now that even if you gave free guns and ammunition to everyone in Scotland and told them to shoot every deer they could find, you would still not make any serious dent in the population. There are thought to be well in excess of half a million of them there. It has to be said that you don’t need to be Einstein to forsee this problem when you take the top predator out of the situation. The people who, historically, slaughtered their way gaily through the Scottish wolf population fondly believed that they could take their place as the controlling influence in Nature but predictably, it hasn’t worked. Wolves do what wolves do much better than humans can do it.

The question now is can there be a future for wild wolves in Scotland ? As far as the authority which has the final word is concerned – Scottish National Heritage - the answer is No. No matter how much benefit and even lack of opposition there may appear to be in re-introducing them, the biggest single barrier is in the internationally agreed convention on deliberate re-introductions which basically rules out any attempt to put a species back into a place where humans once deliberately wiped it out. The thinking is that it is pointless trying to put something back where people don’t want it. This might not be entirely correct in the case of Scotland but other factors help to bias the odds against re-introduction and the biggest single one is that wolves don’t stay where you put them – they travel around. A wolf released in Scotland might just decide that property values are more attractive in the South, East, West or North instead. This means that whilst you might like your wolves to chomp their way through Scotland’s Red deer, they have a tendency to make up their own minds about what is on the menu and how good life could be somewhere else and that would mean wolves getting into the heavily populated and industrialised urban South and that would be a major problem. Wolves and humans simply don’t mix in that context.

Whilst the Scottish Wildlife Trust and the RSPB raise some valid objections to the study and seemed less than impressed, it was welcomed by the group “Tress for Life” which has been a vocal supporter of wolf reintroduction for many years in the face of the amount of damage that deer do to the millions of tress it has planted to re-forest and mend the landscapes of Scotland and other places. The group is currently involved in a long term project to substantially resurrect the old Caledonian forest which once stretched unbroken across Scotland but now only exists in a few isolated patches.

Scottish National Heritage seems to be more in favour of re-introducing things like the Sea Eagle and Beaver at the moment and it looks as though the Wild Boar and the Lynx might well subsequently get a toehold in Scotland before wolves ever do.