Wolf collared, then released, near Baker City

ODFW captured, collared, and released a wolf suspected of the first wolf depredation in Oregon in over 60 years.

Hans Hayden of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife prepares to attach a radio collar to a gray wolf trapped Sunday morning near Baker City.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife on Sunday trapped, and later released, one of the two wolves that biologists believe killed 24 lambs on one Baker County ranch last month and one calf on another nearby ranch.

Russ Morgan, the ODFW’s wolf coordinator, said he and Hans Hayden, a wildlife technician at the agency’s La Grande office, found a young male wolf caught in a foothold trap about 7 a.m. Sunday.

They set that trap last week about two miles north of Tik Moore’s ranch in Keating Valley, Morgan said.

Moore owned the calf that was killed by wolves last month.

Although only one wolf was trapped, Morgan said he and Hayden actually saw two wolves Sunday morning.

As they were driving toward the trap, they saw a smaller wolf run from the area, heading north toward the forest above Keating Valley.

Morgan said that based on its smaller size compared with the trapped male wolf, he believes the wolf that fled is a female that is traveling with the male.

Morgan said wolves sometimes will linger where another wolf has been trapped.

The trapped wolf weighed 87 pounds and is about two years old. The wolf is not capable of breeding now, Morgan said.

After using a syringe-tipped pole to inject the wolf with an immobilizing drug, he and Hayden took blood, tissue and fecal samples, then fitted the wolf with an ear tag and a radio collar.

The drug wore off after about one hour, and the wolf ran away in the same direction as the smaller wolf, Morgan said.

The collar will allow them to track the male wolf’s movements, Morgan said.

ODFW will notify local ranchers if the wolf returns to Keating Valley or moves close to another place where there are homes and livestock, Morgan said.

“We are in regular contact with area ranchers, and not just the two that have had depredation,” he said.

Agency workers also will “actively haze” any wolves that wander into such areas, Morgan said.

“We want the wolves to feel unwanted there,” he said. “The whole idea is to keep (livestock) depredation from happening.”

Morgan said ODFW has been setting traps in several places near Keating Valley since mid-April, when wolves killed two dozen lambs on Curt and Anne Jacobs’ ranch, which is about two miles from Moore’s.

Workers check the traps each morning.

They hadn’t captured anything until Sunday.

“And it happened on the rainiest morning of all,” Morgan said.

He said his truck “barely” made it through the mud to the trap, which was set up in open sagebrush country.

The baited traps have rubber-coated jaws that are designed to capture, but not hurt, wolves.

Morgan said the male wolf trapped Sunday suffered only a minor abrasion to its foot, typical with such traps.

The wolf was “fairly lean,” but healthy, he said.

The second wolf, which biologists watched for about 10 seconds, was distinctly smaller, Morgan said.

He thinks it’s likely that the two wolves are the same pair that a motion-sensing camera photographed inside the lamb pen at the Jacobs Ranch last month.

Morgan said the tracks the wolves made near the trap are the same sizes as tracks he has found at the Jacobs Ranch and elsewhere.

“Those two tracks have become familiar,” he said.

Morgan theorizes that the male wolf was born during the spring of 2007, and that it separated from its mother perhaps six months ago.

Wolves often “disperse” at the age of about a year and a half, he said.

The second wolf might not be related to the male, but it’s also quite possible that the pair are siblings that dispersed at the same time, Morgan said.

The blood samples will show whether the male wolf is related to wolves in Idaho.

Morgan said that’s almost certainly the case.

However, even if it is, the genetic link would not tell biologists whether the trapped male wolf was born in Idaho or in Oregon.

ODFW officials know of only one wolf pack in Oregon — in northern Union County.

Morgan said ODFW will not continue to set wolf traps in the Keating area.

However, biologists might try to capture the second wolf if they see the animal while they’re on an airplane flight searching for the radio signal from the male wolf’s collar.

In that case they might use either a net gun or a dart that injects an immobilizing drug, Morgan said.

If the two wolves are traveling together, however — and Morgan thinks that’s likely — then having one wolf radio-collared is almost as useful as collaring both animals, he said.

In related news, Suzanne Stone of Defenders of Wildlife said Friday that the organization had sent the Jacobses a check for $3,150, the amount the couple requested for the loss of their sheep.