Wolves rebound, lose protections. Now future up to voters
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. (AP) — The saucer-sized footprints in the mud around the bloody, disemboweled bison carcass were unmistakable: wolves.
A pack of 35 named after a nearby snow-dusted promontory, Junction Butte, now were snoozing on a hillside above the carcass. Tourists dressed against the weather watched the pack through spotting scopes from about a mile away.
“Wolves are my main thing. There’s something about their eyes -- it’s mystifying,” said Ann Moore, who came from Ohio to fulfill a life-long wish to glimpse the animals.
Such encounters have become daily occurrences in Yellowstone after gray wolves rebounded in parts of the American West with remarkable speed following their reintroduction 25 years ago.
It started with a few dozen wolves brought in crates from Canada to Yellowstone and central Idaho. Others wandered down into northwest Montana. Thriving on big game herds, the population boomed to more than 300 packs comprising some 2,000 wolves, occupying territory that touches six states and stretches from the edge of the Great Plains to the forests of the Pacific Northwest.
Now the 2020 election offers an opportunity to jumpstart the wolf’s expansion southward into the heart of the Rocky Mountains. A Colorado ballot initiative would reintroduce wolves on the state’s Western Slope. It comes after the Trump administration on Thursday lifted protections for wolves across most of the U.S., including Colorado, putting their future in the hands of state wildlife agencies.
The Colorado effort, if successful, could fill a significant gap in the species’ historical range, creating a bridge between the Northern Rockies gray wolves and Mexican gray wolves in the Southwest.
“Colorado is the mother lode, the final piece,” said Mike Phillips, who led the Yellowstone reintroduction project and now serves in the Montana Senate.
Yet the prospect of wolves is riling Colorado livestock producers, who see them as a threat their forbears vanquished once from the high elevation forests where cattle graze public lands. Hunters worry they’ll decimate herds of elk and deer.
It’s a replay of animosity a quarter-century ago when federal wildlife officials released the first wolves into Yellowstone. The species had been annihilated across most of the contiguous U.S. in the early 1900s by government-sponsored poisoning, trapping and bounty hunting.
Initiative opponents have seized on s ightings of wolves in recent years in northwestern Colorado as evidence the predator already has arrived and reintroduction isn’t necessary.