High wolf hunt quotas not justified

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks recently presented their 2012 Montana Wolf Hunting Season Proposal at Flathead Valley Community College in Kalispell. It included a striking graph of a generally year-to-year increase in Montana’s wolf population 1979-2011 that was used to justify maintaining a high wolf harvest level in 2012.

However, the graph cannot be considered scientifically based and as a result is misleading. The problem is that different counting efforts and methods were employed over the years to generate the data in the graph, resulting in a kind of apples and oranges yearly data comparison of wolf population.

FWP notes in their “Hunting Season/Quota Change/Supporting Information” handout at the meeting that different counting efforts/methods were used. They also note that in recent years, counting efforts have increased the most. So not surprisingly, FWP “saw” more wolves in recent years (only the wolves “seen,” called “minimum number of wolves” by FWP, are included on the graph).

Simply put, under these circumstances more looking had a better chance of finding more wolves — whether the actual wolf population was stable, increasing or decreasing — and it did.

Not knowing how many wolves are in Montana makes the FWP proposal to maintain the same wolf hunting quota in 2012 as in 2011 and to recommend trapping a risky FWP policy for wolves — not science-based policy, as it was repeatedly stated to be in the recent Kalispell public meeting, and not consistent with FWP’s charter to be a steward of Montana wildlife.

Instead, with ungulate populations generally healthy and livestock losses due to wolves much fewer than due to other predators and natural causes (and in a downtrend), wolf hunting and proposed trapping should be suspended until a scientifically validated wolf population and population trend can be determined.

Then a reasoned decision on wolf management for all citizens can be made based on real population trends, FWP’s charter of stewardship recognizing the valuable ecological role of wolves in our Northern Rockies ecosystems, and the fact that wolves have a significant economic benefit to Montana (a University of Montana study found people who visit the Yellowstone region hoping to see a wolf in the wild spend around $35 million annually in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, which then multiplies to further boost the state’s economies).

R. Eugene Curtis lives in Columbia Falls.