Long-awaited wolf recovery plan drafted
Fish & Wildlife proposal focuses on historic range south of I-40
After repeated failures over decades, U.S. wildlife officials have finally drafted a recovery plan for endangered wolves that once roamed parts of the American Southwest and northern Mexico.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is under a court order to complete the plan for the Mexican gray wolf by the end of November.
The draft document released Thursday calls for focusing recovery of the wolves in core areas of the predators’ historic range. That means south of Interstate 40 in New Mexico and Arizona, and in Mexico.
“At the time of recovery, the
service expects Mexican wolf populations to be stable or increasing in abundance, well-distributed geographically within their historical range, and genetically diverse,” the agency said in a statement.
The recovery plan is a long time coming, as the original guidance for how to restore wolves to the Southwest was adopted in 1982. The lack of a plan has spurred numerous legal challenges by environmentalists as well as skirmishes over states’ rights under the Endangered Species Act.
Acknowledging the discord, regional Fish and Wildlife Service officials say the proposed recovery plan calls for more agreements between states and the federal government regarding how many wolves are released into the wild, where they are released and over what time period.
Fish and Wildlife has suggested that a population of at least 325 Mexican gray wolves would have to survive in the wild over a period of several years before the species can be considered recovered. That’s nearly three times the number of wolves currently in New Mexico and Arizona.
Environmentalists have pushed for years for more captive wolves to be released, but ranchers, elected leaders in rural communities and state officials have pushed back because the predators sometimes attack domestic livestock and wild game.
The most recent annual survey shows at least 113 wolves spread between southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona.
Michael Robinson with the Center for Biological Diversity said the criteria for delisting the species sets the bar too low and goes against previous recommendations that called for establishing populations in the Grand Canyon area and as far north as Colorado.