Move the wolves

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has proved it can trap wolves.

Now the agency needs to show that its initial success was no fluke.

The wolf situation in Eastern Oregon has changed considerably since the rubber-jawed foothold trap nabbed a 2-year-old male wolf near Keating Valley on May 3.

ODFW workers attached a radio collar to that wolf — the first one trapped in Oregon — and then let it go.

Biologists believe the trapped wolf, along with another wolf that ran away from the trap when the workers approached, killed 24 lambs on one Keating Valley ranch, and one calf on another ranch, during April.

But ODFW had to release the wolf where it was trapped because the animal was still protected under the federal endangered species act.

The next day, though, May 4, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed gray wolves from the federal endangered species list.

Although wolves are still protected under Oregon’s endangered species law, their deletion from the federal list allows ODFW officials to not only trap wolves, but also to move wolves that have attacked livestock.

And moving is precisely what ODFW should do with the two wolves implicated in the Keating lamb and calf killings.

Doing so is necessary if ODFW officials intend to achieve the two goals listed in the state’s 2005 wolf management plan: “Ensure the conservation of gray wolves as required by Oregon law while protecting the social and economic interests of all Oregonians.”

Leaving known livestock-killing wolves to roam private property in Keating Valley accomplishes neither goal.

The best places for wolves, as the state wolf plan acknowledges, are federal wilderness areas.

Wolves that live in such areas are less likely to come across livestock. And if wolves stay away from livestock, there will be less political pressure on ODFW to either move wolves out of Oregon or kill them — bad options both, and neither of which qualifies as “conservation” of wolves in Oregon.

Incidentally, wilderness-dwelling wolves are also less likely to get killed by a car — the fate of one wolf that migrated here from Idaho in 2000 — since motor vehicles are banned from wilderness areas.

Dealing with the pair of Keating wolves — and any others that might be in the area — could require ODFW to make a generous interpretation of the state wolf plan, however.

The plan states that when wolves are relocated, they should be moved “to the nearest wilderness area.”

The trouble with the Keating wolves is that the nearest wilderness — the Eagle Cap — might be too near.

The Eagle Cap’s boundary is about a dozen miles north of where the male wolf was trapped. 

If ODFW were to release Keating wolves in the Eagle Cap, it’s possible, and perhaps even probable, that the wolves would rapidly return to the valley.

In that instance moving the wolves to the Eagle Cap, though it would meet the letter of the wolf plan, would obviously fail to achieve the two aforementioned goals.

The wolf plan doesn’t, however, specify where in the nearest wilderness wolves should be relocated.

And because the Eagle Cap is big — at 361,000 acres it’s Oregon largest wilderness — wolf experts might conclude that the wolves could be released in a section of the Eagle Cap that’s far enough from Keating to serve as an adequate buffer.

But if the experts decide the Eagle Cap is not a suitable site, then they should have the latitude to move the wolves to one of three other sprawling wilderness areas in Northeastern Oregon.

Those are, in order of size: Wenaha-Tucannon, near the Washington border, 177,000 acres; Hells Canyon, 131,000 acres in Oregon (the wilderness includes another 84,000 acres across the Snake River in Idaho); and North Fork John Day, 121,800 acres.

Each of those areas might even have advantages, as wolf habitat, over the Eagle Cap.

All three are in remote areas, many miles from the nearest town. The Eagle Cap, on the other hand, is near populated valleys on three sides: Keating, Pine and Eagle to the south, Wallowa to the north, and Grande Ronde to the west.