Walden: Move the wolves to wild areas

Congressman also decries efforts of ODFW officials, claiming they responded too slowly to depredations.

Congressman Greg Walden contends wildlife officials failed to warn Baker County ranchers that wolves might be nearby, and he urges officials to move any wolves they trap to a wilderness area.

Walden, the Hood River Republican who represents Eastern Oregon in Congress, wrote a letter this week to officials from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“Relocation is in the best interest of the wolves and the communities of Eastern Oregon, and it is my very strong request that you exercise this option in the quickest possible time frame before another attack on livestock,” Walden wrote.

Walden cited a section in Oregon’s 2005 wolf management plan that authorizes ODFW to trap wolves that kill livestock and move the wolves to the nearest wilderness area.
In the case of the wolves that killed 24 lambs and one calf last month in Keating Valley, the nearest wilderness is the Eagle Cap. Its boundary is about 12 air miles north of Keating Valley.

The Eagle Cap is Oregon’s largest federal wilderness, at 361,000 acres.

In his letter Walden also alleges that ODFW failed to alert local ranchers about reports that wolves might have been in the area two months before the lambs were killed on Curt and Annie Jacobs’ ranch, and the calf killed on Tik Moore’s ranch.

“With lambing and calving season about to begin, local livestock producers should have been notified,” Walden wrote.

According to an ODFW report, wolf tracks were found north of Keating in March. However, Dennehy said those tracks were larger than the ones made by the two wolves that have been seen recently in Keating Valley.

Moving wolves to a wilderness area is an option now, but it wasn’t when ODFW trapped a 2-year-old male wolf on Sunday morning near Keating Valley, said Michelle Dennehy, a spokeswoman for the agency.

That’s because wolves in Eastern Oregon were still protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, Dennehy said. That protection ended the very next day, Monday, and wolves in Eastern Oregon are now the state’s responsibility.

“Should there be another event, ODFW will consider all the options,” Dennehy wrote in an e-mail to the Baker City Herald Friday morning. “Relocation is an option available under the state wolf management plan.”

Dennehy wrote that ODFW officials, while flying over the area Thursday and Friday mornings, saw both the wolf that had been trapped and fitted with a radio collar, and a second wolf.

ODFW workers who released the male wolf from the trap Sunday morning saw another wolf run away from the area when they approached.

The two wolves were on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest both Thursday and Friday mornings when the ODFW officials saw the animals, Dennehy wrote.

The agency has told Moore and Jacobs where the wolves were seen, she wrote.

Sean Stevens of Oregon Wild, a group that supports the return of wolves to Oregon, wrote in an e-mail to the Herald Thursday that “in general, relocating wolves to a wilderness area seems like something that the biologists at ODFW should determine, not politicians.”

Oregon’s wolf plan says, on the subject of moving wolves: “Relocation will occur when a wolf or wolves become inadvertently involved in a situation or are present in an area that could result in conflict with humans or harm to the wolf. Examples could include a wolf found living within or near communities and causing human safety concerns or killing pets.”

According to the plan, moving wolves “must be conducted by state personnel only,” and “wolves will be relocated to the nearest wilderness area at the direction of ODFW.”

The wolf plan also allows landowners to harass, but not physically harm, wolves that are “in close proximity to livestock.”

Harassments techniques listed in the plan include: “firing shots into the air, making loud noises or otherwise confronting the animal(s) without doing bodily harm.”