Of Bears.. and Wolves

[RonandJon]

And you thought it was a hot topic here? From today's NYTimes:

As France Shops for Bears, Shepherds Feel Threatened
Francis Dejean/ColibriWith the brown bear nearly extinct in the Pyrenees, France plans to import five females from Slovenia next spring. Sheep herders are not thrilled.


By JOHN TAGLIABUE
Published: August 29, 2005
ARBAS, France - Alain Reynes planned a late August trip to Slovenia to shop for bears.

Some of the farmers up around this Pyrenean hamlet probably wish he would stay there.

Mr. Reynes is president of an organization whose aim is to restore the population of bears, now near extinction, in the Pyrenees mountains, which separate Spain and France. The French delegation to Slovenia is seeking five female bears to be let free in the mountains above Arbas next spring.

Mr. Reynes's adversaries are local people who raise sheep in the high mountain passes, where the rich vegetation and steep slopes provide the nourishment and exercise necessary to produce particularly delectable lamb. It is especially delectable, the farmers point out, to bears.

The mountain sheep are "smaller in size, but their meat has more flavor," said Jean Pierre Mirouz, 39, a fireplug of a man and the fourth generation of his family in this business. He lost 180 sheep in June after an attack by a bear stampeded his herd. More bears, he said in the kitchen of his mountain farmhouse, would be "a catastrophe."

The dispute over the bears injects one more note of tension into a region already fraught with problems. Mr. Mirouz's lamb faces competition from cheaper lamb from New Zealand. Local industry is often inefficient and costly. A big aluminum plant of the Pechiney group that once provided jobs is being closed now that the company has been taken over by Alcan of Canada.

The drive to return bears to the Pyrenees goes back a decade or so. By the mid-1990's, the number of native brown bears, diminished by human population growth and hunting, had dwindled to about a dozen. Then in 1996, two Slovenian bears, Mellba and Ziva, were transported to France and let free to roam the Pyrenees. The program suffered a setback in September 1997 when a teen-age hunter shot and killed Mellba.

To hear Mr. Reynes, 38, tell it, the survival of bears in the Pyrenees is tantamount to a litmus test of the region's overall environmental health. "Ecologically, the bear is not indispensable," he said. But the region requires, he added, "an equilibrium of man and nature."

The bears don't come cheap. The average price, depending on age and size, is about 7,500 euros, or about $9,200. The French government will foot the bill, though in some cases bears are given as presents, as a diplomatic gesture, from state to state.

Mr. Reynes points to a regional survey earlier this year in which 68 percent replied that they favored more bears as an economic asset. The resistance, he says, is a "psychological problem, a cultural problem."

The movement to bring back the bears gained momentum last November, when a hunter shot and killed one of the few remaining native bears, a female named Cannelle, or Cinnamon. Cannelle's death shook not only the pro-bear faction in the mountains, but the entire nation. President Jacques Chirac, in a statement, called it a "great loss for biodiversity in France and in Europe."

The imported bears do not necessarily have to be from Slovenia, though that tiny Balkan country has, for Europe, become to bears what Japan once was to transistor radios. Countries that have taken in Slovenian bears in recent years include Italy, Switzerland and Austria, in addition to France.

The pro-bear momentum, however, was of short duration.

The attack on Mr. Mirouz's sheep, which were grazing on high mountain slopes, came in June. Details are disputed, but Mr. Mirouz said his father and brother had earlier spotted the bear in a pasture. The bear attacked while his father looked on helplessly through binoculars, killing some of the sheep and stampeding the others. In the end, Mr. Mirouz counted 180 or so dead sheep.

The government was quick to pay an indemnity for the dead sheep, amounting to more than the income he could have expected by selling them.

Still, soon after the attack, 150 farmers - most of them sheep herders like Mr. Mirouz - demonstrated along the route of the Tour de France bicycle race, holding banners aloft with the words, "The endangered species is us."

The government, made uncertain, postponed the release of the other bears while it studied the attack and its implications. With 580,000 sheep in the Pyrenees, almost as many as there are people, the government is treading lightly.

Mr. Reynes, surrounded in his office by a life-size stuffed bear and brochures promoting the merits of a healthy bear population, contends that accidents like the death of Mr. Mirouz's sheep could be avoided if the farmers made better use of government subsidies to pay for shepherds and sheep dogs.

Bears, he says, are timid by nature, and dogs or shepherds usually suffice to keep the bears at bay.

"The heart of the question for the sheep farmers," he said, "is to teach them to protect their flocks. And the bear is a tiny part of the problem."

Most of the political leaders in the region are against the bears, he conceded. Their argument, as Mr. Reynes sums it up, is: "It's tough enough to be a farmer in these mountains. Let's not add any difficulties."

Now some in the environmental movement have begun talking about reintroducing the wolf, which has all but disappeared from the Pyrenees, with the exception of their western reaches.

When asked about wolves, Mr. Mirouz threw up his hands.

"That would be the end," he said.

[kurtteej]

Based on my understanding on what's going on in Europe -- the depopulation of the continent due to slow/low birthrate has started the NATURAL repopulation of mountainous regions by bears and wolves. There are sections in what used to be East Germany as well as Austria that have increasing bear populations where there were NONE for over a century. There are a lot of sections in Germany that will be going wild (far from the beer halls) as the older generation dies out.

[RonandJon]

Wolves in Wyoming

from the NYTimes:

January 2, 2008
A Divide as Wolves Rebound in a Changing West
By KIRK JOHNSON
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Sheltered for many years by federal species protection law, the gray wolves of the West are about to step out onto the high wire of life in the real world, when their status as endangered animals formally comes to an end early this year.

The so-called delisting is scheduled to begin in late March, almost five years later than federal wildlife managers first proposed, mainly because of human tussles here in Wyoming over the politics of managing the wolves.

Now changes during that time are likely to make the transition even more complicated. As the federal government and the State of Wyoming sparred in court over whether Wyoming’s hard-edged management plan was really a recipe for wolf eradication, as some critics said, the wolf population soared. (The reworked plan was approved by the federal government in November.)

During that period, many parts of the human West were changing, too. Where unsentimental rancher attitudes — that wolves were unwelcome predators, threatening the cattle economy — once prevailed, thousands of newcomers have moved in, buying up homesteads as rural retreats, especially near Yellowstone National Park, where the wolves began their recovery in 1995 and from which they have spread far and wide.

The result is that there are far more wolves to manage today than there once would have been five years ago — which could mean, biologists say, more killing of wolves just to keep the population in check. And that blood-letting might not be quite as popular as it once was.

“If they’d delisted when the numbers were smaller, the states would have been seen as heroes and good managers,” said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery coordinator at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. “Now people will say they’re murderers.”

Wolves are intelligent, adaptable, highly mobile in staking out new territory, and capable of rapid reproduction rates if food sources are good and humans with rifles or poison are kept in check by government gridlock — and that is precisely what happened.

From the 41 animals that were released inside Yellowstone from 1995 to 1997, mostly from Canada, the population grew to 650 wolves in 2002 and more than 1,500 today in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. The wolves have spread across an area twice the size of New York State and are growing at a rate of about 24 percent a year, according to federal wolf-counts.

Human head counts have also climbed in the same turf. From 1995 to 2005, a 25-county area, in three states, that centers on Yellowstone grew by 12 percent, to about 691,000 people, according to a report earlier this year by the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana. That compares to a 6 percent growth rate for Wyoming as a whole in that period, 7.5 percent for all of Montana, and 19 percent for Idaho. The wolf population has grown faster in Idaho than any place else in the region, doubling to about 800 in the past four years.

The director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Terry Cleveland, said changes in economics and attitude were creating a profound wrinkle in the outlook for human-wolf relations. Mr. Cleveland, a 39-year-veteran with the department, said that many newcomers, who are more interested in breath-taking vistas than the price of feed-grain and calves, do not see wolves the way older residents do.

In the public comment period for Wyoming’s wolf plan, sizable majorities of residents in the counties near Yellowstone expressed opposition. Teton County, around Jackson Hole, led the way, with more than 95 percent of negative comment about the plan, according an analysis by the state. Many respondents feared that the plan would lead to more killing of wolves than necessary.

“It used to be, ‘Yeah, we live near wild animals,’ now it’s like, ‘Gosh, we need to manage them, and it’s the job of the state to do that,’ ” said Meg Daly, a writer in Jackson, who submitted a comment opposing the wolf plan and recently spoke to a reporter by telephone. Ms. Daly said she had lived in Wyoming as a child and moved back last year.

Many new land owners around Yellowstone have also barred the hunting of animals like elk on their property, sometimes, in a single pen stroke, closing off thousands of acres that Wyoming hunters had used for decades. Mr. Cleveland said he expected that those same “no trespassing” signs would be up and in force, creating de facto wolf sanctuaries, when wolf hunters or state wildlife managers started coming around this year. But the trend of land enclosure, Mr. Cleveland said, is probably not in the wolf’s long-term interest.

“As large ranches become less economically viable, the alternative is 40-acre subdivisions,” he said, “and that is not compatible with any kind of wildlife.”

Some advocates of wolf protection say that for all the talk of moderation and the nods to a changing ethos, old attitudes will take over once the gray wolf is delisted.

“I think it’s going to be open season,” said Suzanne Stone, a wolf specialist at Defenders of Wildlife, a national conservation group.

Ms. Stone said she thought the changes that led to federal approval of Wyoming’s wolf plan were mostly cosmetic.

Ms. Stone and others are concerned that the plan grants Wyoming something that no other state in the Yellowstone region received: the right to kill wolves at any time by any means across most of the state.

In the northwest corner near Yellowstone and in Idaho and Montana, wolves will be classified as trophy game animals and may be killed only in strictly controlled numbers by licensed hunters. In the 80 percent of Wyoming outside the Yellowstone area, however, wolves will be labeled predators, with no limits and no permits required to kill them.

The state has pledged to maintain at least 15 breeding pairs, or about 150 animals, in a five-county region around the park. The state now has about 362 wolves, according to the most recent estimates in late September.

That formulation sounds just about right to Chip Clouse.

“I support no wolves on private land, and right now we have wolves running rampant,” said Mr. Clouse, a rancher and a former outfitter in Cody, just east of Yellowstone, who has lived in Wyoming for 37 years. “They brought the wolves in for people to see on the public lands, in the park, and what has happened is that they have grown so many packs that they’re now impeding on people who are just trying to live and make a living on their own property.”

Joel DiPaola, a chef at a Jackson ski resort who arrived in Wyoming from Connecticut in the early 1990s, just before the wolves, said he thought much of the huffing and puffing about the animals was emotional and would make little difference.

“As the state was dragging its feet, the wolves were breeding and expanding,” Mr. DiPaola said. “It’s now going to be almost impossible to get rid of them even if they try. Once they seem to get a foothold and have a refuge in the parks, they’re here.”

[redhawk]

The cause of the problem was that Ranchers wanted the "delisting" to be a cover for eradication. Had they gone along with the original concept of management, there wouldn't be thiss problem now.

The other problem is the "private land" argument. many of the ranchers have sweetheart leases of BLM (Public) land to graze their stock. They lease thousands of acres for a mere pittance, and they consider that land "Theirs", which of course it isn't. That's the basis behind many of the issues in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho not just the wolf issue.

There is still a lot of trespassing on Nez Perce Land in Idaho, and attempts to eradicate the Nez Perce pack and illegal killing of wolves. It'a a 19th century mentaliy among the Ranchers out there that Indian Land is the domain of the "civilized" people. They're right of course, they just don't see who really is and isn't "civilized".

Hawk

[dmartenvt]

I fail to see how the populations of wolves as quoted was a) unexpected after re-introduction and is b) creating a massive problem. It is clearly hysteria by people who believe that predators other than themselves have no right to exist in this country.