Gray wolves and recovery
Conservation Northwest is part of a wolf working group developing a conservation and management plan for wolves returning to Washington State.
Wolves arrive as a recovery plan develops
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife began developing a management and recovery plan to address wolf conservation in Washington. The working group's draft plan is available for public comment.
It was created by a governor-appointed Washington Wolf Working Group, formed to advise the agency, identify wolf population objectives, and outline conservation and management strategies for Washington's wolves. Group stakeholders include people from livestock and timber industries and local government, as well as recreationists and conservationists, including Conservation Northwest.
Transplanting wolves is not part of the recovery plan, nor is there need for it. In July 2008, a reproducing wolf pack was documented in Washington, in Okanogan Valley, reestablishing on its own from over the border in Canada. Another wolf pack has now shown up in Pend Oreille County. It's long been expected too that wolves are also likely to come in from neighboring states like Idaho, which has several hundred animals reestablished.
Wolves coming back
Wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s in Idaho and Montana. Today those packs have reestablished, helping stabilize local ecosystems. The success of wolf recovery prompted the US Fish and Wildlife Service under the Bush administration, to remove, or delist, the Northern Rockies populations of gray wolves from the federal list of endangered species. The Northern Rockies population geographic area includes the northeastern part of Washington State.
Though President Obama first put the proposed delisting on hold, pending review, in March 2009 Interior Secretary Ken Salazar upheld the Bush rule and removed federal endangered species protection from Northern Rockies wolves. Management of Northern Rocky Mountain wolves has now reverted to the states they live in. All, including Washington, must have state-level wolf management plans. As part of their plans, some states like Idaho and Montana have opened hunting on resident wolf packs.
Even though federal Endangered Species Act protection was just removed from Northern Rockies wolves, Washington's wolves retain protection as a state-endangered species. Our Okanogan wolves also lie well west of the boundaries defined for Northern Rocky Mountain wolves and retain federal protection this way.
Read about the effect that wolves can have when lost from an ecosystem, on Washington's Olympic Peninsula
A recent report on the beneficial effect of having wolves back on a landscape.
