Michigan has a lot of wolves—the most in the lower 48 states! Over 4,000 wolves live in the western Great Lakes region. Livestock owners in this area want to share the landscape with wolves. Their losses to wolves are rare only 1%. So who’s lying about livestock losses? Michigan or Idaho? Surely Idaho has as many deer, elk, and moose as Michigan, and livestock ranches and wolf packs share the area just the same. Heck Idaho has Yellowstone Park for the wolves to roam. So what’s wrong with this picture? Because from what I’ve read, the wolves of the Rockies are being hunted because of livestock losses and because as wolf numbers grow they supposedly pose a threat to deer and elk populations.
Michigan has a lot of deer! Cars hit them. They enter buildings. I recently watched a video where a deer waltzed through a diner, in the front door and out the back. So why aren’t 4,000 wolves wiping out our deer population?
The answer lies on Michigan’s Isle Royale, a 45-mile long island off the UP (Copper Harbor) in the western part of Lake Superior. According to an article by Heidi Ridgley of Defenders of Wildlife, “Isle Royale is the least visited National Park in the country.” But it is the lab where the longest ongoing wolf study is being conducted by biologists from Michigan Tech. The co-director of the wolf program at Michigan Tech, Rolf Peterson continues the work pioneered by Durward Allen in 1958, as an “uninterrupted study of a predator and its prey.” There is 51 years of expertise here involving the gray wolf and the moose of Isle Royale. This study produced facts that are inconsistent with the reason for hunting the Great Rockies’ wolves. Wolves prey predominantly on old and/or debilitated animals. And when the prey declines the wolf population also declines. It’s nature’s balance.
So if the Great Rockies’ wolves are as prolific as we’re lead to believe than Idaho’s deer and elk populations should be thriving—and are. That’s what I found to be true when I looked at the state stats of deer and elk populations in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. It simply is not true that the wolves threaten deer and elk populations at this point at all. So that leaves the rancher’s losses and we have to wonder about that reporting because it’s the same type of wolves, same ole cattle, just different states reporting very different loss statistics.
In the meantime, the latest wolf hunts will have detrimental affects on the gray wolf farther down the line than just this hunting season. Oh, the wolves will rebound eventually but fractured wolf pack families, and packs that are disjointed from other wolf packs do not survive well. The study on Isle Royale confirms that wolves will interbreed for survival. The biologists in this study have already found spine and hip deformities in the carcasses of dead wolves from interbreeding on Isle Royale where populations of wolves are endangered as global warming has had a horribly detrimental affect on their main prey, the moose.
The biologists have tracked the summer seasons on this island national park. There have been shorter winters almost every year since 1998 and it shows in the decline of moose populations on Isle Royale. In Minnesota where there is a lot of prairie and scattered trees that does not offer enough shade, “moose numbers have dropped from several thousand to 100 in recent years.” Moose need frigid climates. Frigid climates kill fleas and ticks, another horrible parasitic problem plaguing Isle Royale’s moose that I blogged about.
All I know is that the wolf hunts are political in origin. It’s got little to do with the poor wolf. Big hunting lobbyists were anxious for the wolf hunts and the NRA is never far behind them. They won for now. However, as stated in the Los Angeles Times and quoted in an article in discovermagazine.com ‘Judge Donald Molloy also wrote that the Fish and Wildlife Service, in continuing to list Wyoming wolves under the Endangered Species Act while delisting them in the two neighboring states, “has distinguished a natural population of wolves based on a political line, not the best available science.’
What I’m concerned with is man’s interference with natural balance. Suppose the wolves do interbreed more and more. Can there, will there eventually be wolves mentally impaired and unpredictable as interbred dogs? It gives a whole new meaning to the “Big Bad Wolf.”
Read the whole story about what’s happening up north in Isle Royale:
http://www.defenders.org/newsroom/defenders_magazine/fall_2009/royale_challenge.php.