I once saw a wolf, or what I was told was one. It stood on a picnic table in Montana in the late evening sunshine, and 30 or so onlookers gathered around. The wolf was named Kaori. Clipped to a leash attached to her handler’s harness, she was part of an educational program and accustomed […]
Wolves
Posted inWotr
Billboard battles don’t help much
About a year ago, in northeast Oregon, someone shot one of the wolves that ran with the Wenaha Pack. A few months later, the poacher had not yet been caught, and the case was getting cold. To revive interest, conservation groups raised $10,000 for a reward and rented space on a billboard just outside of […]
Posted inOctober 13, 2008: Back to the future
Wildlife wars
They’ve loped to the southern edge of Wyoming’s Wind River Range, and straggled into northwestern Colorado. They’ve filled Montana forests near Missoula, Helena and Bozeman. They’ve crossed the Idaho Panhandle, padding into north-central Washington and eastern Oregon. And despite disease outbreaks and being shot by the feds for devouring the occasional cow, every year since […]
Posted inArticles
Video: Still howling wolf
The passionate and complicated feelings people have about living with wolves in the Northern Rockies
Posted inAugust 4, 2008: Hostile Takeover
Drilling, wolves, guns and plutonium
“Drill here, drill now,” has become something of a political mantra in this election-year summer of high gasoline prices and frustrated consumers. Tack on “pay less,” and it’s the bumper-sticker slogan for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s national campaign to expand domestic energy production. Many Republicans now running for Congress hope their enthusiasm for drilling […]
Posted inArticles
Don’t call plugging wolves hunting
It’s been about three months since wolves in the Northern Rockies were removed from the protection of the Endangered Species Act. To date, at least 20 wolves have been reported killed in Wyoming, where they may legally be shot on sight. That’s an average of one wolf killed every four and half days. Five of […]
Posted inArticles
Agency probes wolf-baiting claims
Already stained by the blood of dead wolves and suffering from a variety of other setbacks, the program to reintroduce endangered Mexican gray wolves to the Southwest is now at the center of two criminal investigations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is formally looking into the disappearance of two wolves in New Mexico and […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2007: Last chance for the Lobo
Last chance for the Lobo
Mexican wolves caught in the crossfire of the battle over public lands.
Posted inWotr
Wolves have a reputation that’s larger than life
Ever since he ate Little Red Riding Hood’s grandma and blew down the houses of two-thirds of the little pigs, the wolf has been Big and Bad. Everyone knows what big teeth he has. But can those gleaming incisors explain the startling decline of elk herds in the Yellowstone area? Some people think so. Hunters […]
Posted inFebruary 19, 2007: One nation, under fire
Two weeks in the West
Forests battered by budget cuts
Posted inApril 17, 2006: The War on Wildfire
Mass wolf kill rests on shaky science
Idaho’s Fish and Game Department wants to boost the Lolo management zone’s dwindling elk herd by killing up to three-quarters of the area’s estimated 58 wolves and maintaining low wolf numbers for the next five years. But some biologists and conservation groups question the science behind the plan — the department’s first attempt to manage […]
Posted inFebruary 6, 2006: The Killing Fields
First fatal wolf attack recorded in North America?
Conservationists have long assuaged the public’s fear of wolves by saying that there have been no documented instances of a healthy wild wolf killing a human being in North America. Until now, that is. On Nov. 8, a search party found the partially consumed body of 22-year-old Kenton Joel Carnegie in the woods of northern […]
Posted inMay 30, 2005: Write-off on the Range
Bringing back the wolf = bringing back the habitat
The wolf today inspires polarized emotions. It is viewed by some as a slavering, rapacious killing machine; by others, as the noble symbol of a lost wilderness. In the fascinating Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone, biologist Douglas Smith and nature writer Gary Ferguson seek to sort myth from reality. They describe […]
Posted inJanuary 24, 2005: Written in the Rings
Feds to hand wolves to states
Idaho and Montana are poised to take greater control of gray wolves, but the Nez Perce Tribe, and some environmentalists, are resisting
Posted inOctober 11, 2004: The First Family of Western Conservation
Wandering into wolf territory
The long-running political battles over wolf reintroduction in the West can seem fixed in amber: Environmentalists usually stand on one side and cattle growers on another, with the state and federal governments suspended somewhere in between. But as historian Jon Coleman makes clear in Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, these positions solidified only recently. […]
Posted inMay 24, 2004: In Search of Solidarity
Wolf foes get medieval
As feds prepare to take wolves off the endangered list, a rash of animal poisonings causes concerns
Posted inFebruary 20, 1995: No more ignoring the obvious: Idaho sucks itself dry
Called on the carpet
Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt was called before the House Resources Committee Jan. 26 to defend the government’s $6.7 million wolf restoration program. Republicans, who now dominate the committee, charged that state and individual rights have been subordinated to the federally protected wolves. “I strongly believe, Mr. Secretary, that not only have your wolves […]
Posted inSeptember 18, 1981: Crying wolf -- restoring the 'rapacious predator' to the Rockies
1981: Crying wolf — restoring the ‘rapacious predator’ to the Rockies
Since the completion of the Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan in 1980, a team of biologists has been working to re-establish breeding populations of wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. To read this article, click the “View a PDF from the original” link below, or download entire issue: http://www.hcn.org/issues/13.18/download-entire-issue This article appeared in the […]