Report: 15 wolf packs breeding outside park
By Angus M. Thuermer Jr., Jackson Hole, Wyo.
July 31, 2009
Fifteen wolf packs have denned and produced pups in Wyoming outside Yellowstone National Park this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has reported.
The federal agency, which announced it is continuing to monitor reproduction, did not say in its assessment how many pups might have been born to each pack.
Biologists and field workers have documented breeding packs in the Jackson, Pinedale, Cody and Dubois regions in recent reports. They also say Yellowstone packs are raising litters without any apparent deleterious effects from diseases like mange and parvo virus that have plagued wolves there recently.
Animal control agents also have been struggling to kill at least a pair of wolves suspected in killing 61 sheep in the Bighorn Mountains and are trying to collar other wolves suspected of killing cattle in Sublette County.
Around Jackson, the Chagrin River, Buffalo, Pinnacle Peak, Phantom Springs, Antelope and Pacific Creek packs all have reproduced, according to the report. The packs are named after the geographic location of their home ranges, meaning they are spread out from northern Jackson Hole to near Victor, Idaho, to the Gros Ventre Range.
In the Pinedale area, the Green River, Black Butte and Rim packs all have pups, according to monitors. Around Dubois, the Washakie and East Fork packs have pups, and near Cody, the Beartooth, Absaroka and Hoodoo packs also have young.
In Yellowstone, pup production “appears typical of non-disease years,” the report said. Wolves are moving to higher elevations, following ungulates that also are migrating up-slope as those areas produce new forage. A wet spring and summer have produced the greenest landscape in more than a decade, and bands of elk “appear abundant,” with “robust calf production and survival,” biologists say.
In the Big Horn Mountains, the agency has issued four permits to shepherds to shoot wolves. Trappers had tried to capture the wolves but were unsuccessful and quit. The elusive animals have not been seen nor have any depredations been reported since June 25.
Trappers are also working the Union Pass area near Dubois, where a calf was killed on a public grazing allotment. Last week, a yearling steer was killed by wolves near Bondurant, and biologists are trying to determine which of several packs might be responsible.
