Wolves in Washington state, virtually eliminated in the 1930s, have now rebounded to record levels. The first confirmed wolf pack was documented in 2008 and numbers have increased by an average of 28% per year since then. The state released a 2018 report showing there are at least 26 individual wolves, 27 packs, and 15 successful breeding pairs (male and female adults who have raised at least two pups that survived through the end of the year).
The biggest news is documentation of a wolf pack west of the Cascade crest for the first time since the 1930s. A single male was trapped and radio-collared in Skagit County in 2017, and seen traveling in that area with a second wolf in late 2018. The confirmed presence of two wolves together is enough to confer pack status and WDFW biologists chose the name Diobsud Creek. The creek is near Mount Baker in the far northwestern portion of the Cascades. Five other packs formed in 2018 and one pack disbanded due to unknown causes. Pack sizes range from 2 to 11 members with most packs having 3 to 5.
The wolf count reflects the results of field surveys conducted during winter months by state, tribal, and federal wildlife managers. Information is collected from aerial surveys, remote cameras, analysis of wolf tracks, and signals from radio-collared wolves. State, tribal, and federal wildlife managers captured nine wolves (six new wolves and three recaptures) from eight packs during the year and monitored a total of 20 unique radio-collared wolves from 15 different packs.
As in past years, survey results represent "minimum counts" of wolves in the state, due to the difficulty of accounting for every animal – especially lone wolves without a pack. [...]
WDFW documented 12 [wolf] mortalities during 2018, including four removed by the department in response to wolf-caused livestock deaths; six legally killed by tribal hunters; and two other human-caused deaths that remained under investigation when this report was prepared.
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The majority of Washington wolves range across public and private land in the northeast corner of the state, but numbers are increasing in the southeast and north-central region. Cattle and other livestock ranches in these areas have an uneasy relationship with the increasing presence of wolves. In 2018 a rancher shot and injured one member of the Togo Pack, claiming self-defense. Biologists outside WDFW say the rancher tracked the wolf to its den and provoked the behavior by approaching too close to the pups. WDFW ordered the some pack members killed because of the pack’s 6 documented cattle depredations over the previous 10 months.
Two environmental groups, the Center for Biological Diversity and Cascadia Wildlands, filed a lawsuit seeking a restraining order to stop the killing. The lawsuit alleges that WDFW “relied upon a faulty protocol and failed to undergo required environmental analysis.”
WDFW has been criticized by wolf biologists for placating ranchers by using scientifically unsound measures in response to reports of predation on livestock.
If allowed by the judge, WDFW officials will use “humane lethal removal methods,” according to the WDFW release. Department policy calls for incremental removal of pack members. If the pack stops posing a threat to cattle the remainder of the pack could be spared.
Removing members from a pack is not a proven effective deterrent to livestock predation and, at best, might just shift the predation from one ranch to a neighboring ranch.
...(a) killing predators may be perceived as effective because of the benefits to a small minority of farmers, and (b) if neighbors experience side-effects of lethal intervention such as displaced depredations, they may perceive the problem growing and then demand more lethal intervention rather than detecting problems spreading from the first trapping site. Ethical wildlife management guided by the “best scientific and commercial data available” would suggest suspending the standard method of trapping wolves in favor of non-lethal methods (livestock guarding dogs or fladry) that have been proven effective in preventing livestock losses in Michigan and elsewhere.
The 2018 data from WDFW confirms 11 cattle and 1 sheep killed by wolves during the year. Another 29 cattle and 2 sheep were confirmed injured. These depredations involved 5 packs (19% of the total number of packs known to exist then).
WDFW spent a total of $1,217,326 on wolf management activities during the 2018 fiscal year, including $257,421 in reimbursement to 31 livestock producers for Damage Prevention Cooperative Agreements – Livestock (DPCAL) non-lethal conflict prevention expenses (range riding, specialized lighting and fencing, etc.), $241,010 for eight contracted range riders, $7,536 to five producers for livestock losses caused by wolves, $5,950 to one producer for indirect losses, and $705,409 for wolf management and research activities.
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