Call of the wild

Pack confirmed in state; protected status restored

It has been a howlingly fine week for the gray wolf, and for the many Oregonians who yearn for the magnificent animal’s revival in this state.

Last week a federal judge in Montana issued a temporary injunction reinstating Endangered Species Act protections for the wolves in the northern Rockies, as well as eastern Oregon and Washington. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy ruled that environmental groups, including Oregon Wild and Cascadia Wildlands Project, were likely to prevail in their arguments that the federal government’s decision to drop protections could cause irreparable harm to wolf populations.

Molloy’s ruling came as Idaho, Wyoming and Montana were planning public wolf hunts for the fall, even though wolf populations in those states are less than half what many scientists say are needed to ensure long-term sustainability.

Federal officials prematurely removed the wolves from the endangered species list in March after a highly controversial two-decade effort to re-establish gray wolf populations in northern Rocky Mountain states.

The delisting was viewed by environmentalists as a devastating setback for Oregon’s recovery efforts. That’s because any significant reduction in Idaho’s still-­modest wolf population diminished the prospect that wolves would move west into Oregon. Their concerns intensified when Idaho’s governor, C.L. “Butch” Otter, vowed to cull 80 percent of his state’s wolf population through hunting.

The judge’s ruling offers new hope for the re-establishment of wolves in Oregon and northern Rockies states, where they were largely eradicated in the early 20th century. In the mid-1990s, officials seeded central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park with 66 wolves, and their population has grown to more than 1,500.

There was more encouraging news on Friday when two state wildlife biologists in northeast Oregon heard the howls of at least two adult wolves and two pups in the Umatilla National Forest in northern Union County — evidence that Oregon has its first reproducing wolf pack in many decades.

The excitement that announcement generated across Oregon marks an extraordinary turnaround in the state’s historical approach to wolves. In the 1930s, state officials were so intent on eliminating wolves that they were still paying bounties to wolf hunters with the goal of completely wiping out a species that was wrongly regarded as a threat to humans and incompatible with livestock ranching.

Wildlife biologists — and, increasingly, the general public — now understand the balancing effects that wolves have on ecosystems. Among other things, they are predators that play a critical role in the food chain by suppressing coyote and cougar populations; by benefiting grizzlies and other animals that feed on wolf kills, and by culling the sick and dying from deer and elk herds and restoring their natural foraging patterns.

Before the federal delisting, an Oregon coalition of scientists, ranchers, economists, conservationists and hunters crafted a thoughtful and carefully balanced wolf management plan. It called for gradual reintroduction of the species, with a long-term goal of four breeding pairs in both the western and eastern parts of the state.

Based on the heartening predawn howls from the Umatilla National Forest, part of that plan may already have been realized. The reinstatement of federal protection offers hope that wolves will be allowed to complete their remarkable, but still unfinished, comeback.