Montana Group continues to argue wolves have decimated the Yellowstone Elk. Is this likely?

12-23-99 with additions Dec. 28-29, 1999 and Jan. 2 and 6, 2000

There was another article in the Billings Gazette this week refuting claims by the new group "Friends of the Yellowstone Elk Herd" that the wolf packs on the northern range (which extends northward outside the Park) have decimated the elk herd.  In the article, "Wolves' impact on park elk no cause for concern, official says," Doug Smith and Joe Fontaine indicated that the elk herd's is not declining due to wolf predation and that the wolf are doing what they were expected to do, and should do -- "Those wolf packs are doing what they're designed to do, remove the old and unproductive cow elk from the herd," said Fontaine.

No doubt this article will do little to persuade this group from criticism of the wolves and the National Park Service. The group is reportedly composed of Paradise Valley landowners and outfitters, 

Most newspaper articles do not reflect on the history of these controversies, nor speculate as to their origin.

I will speculate.

The origin of this particular controversy seems to be the poor success this fall for the elk hunt north of Yellowstone National Park.  This group formed then with a ready explanation for the lack of elk -- the wolves ate the elk, or more specifically as Don Laubach, a member of the group's board indicates in  the article, the wolves ate the elk calves.

As with many such controversies alternative explanations need to be examined.  There are a number of alternatives that should be considered.

1. It was an autumn that was unusually dry and warm.  The mountains held essentially no snow, even at the highest elevations until in late November.  Elk don't come to lower elevations as part of an annual winter vacation. They descend when snow makes forage harder to obtain. Otherwise they will stay high, where the grass retains more protein. The elk hunt was poor not just north of Yellowstone Park, but generally poor in SW Montana, Wyoming and central Idaho.  The warm, dry weather prevailed there too.

2. Elk know about elk hunting.  ;-)   The elk around Yellowstone and elsewhere do notice the hunt.  They know when it occurs. They know that humans in the woods at that time of year are predators, like wolves, and the elk know which places are safe during the hunt.  The tendency for elk to hang back in Yellowstone National Park, which has always been closed to hunting, has been noticed for at least a hundred years. The milder the weather, the more likely they are to hang back in the Park.  There has not been a controversy among Park visitors that they elk inside the Park have disappeared. The only time one heasr such comments is when tourists show up in the Lamar Valley at noon in August and wonder where the elk have gone.

3. More and more hunters are using noisy ATVs to hunt. It seems like the use of off-road vehicles becomes more controversial by the day in the Western United States. More and more hunters use these noisy little vehicles to not just retrieve their kill, but to cruise around and try to find the animals.   Many other hunters are outraged by the the ATV'ers because elk are not hard of hearing.  

Traditional hunters tell of their disgust when having located the elk and situated themselves for a good shot, the sound of the ATVs (perhaps still several miles away) spooks the elk.  

For those who don't like hunting, promoting the hunting use of these machines, could be a unique tactic.  Update 12-29-99. Some folks misinterpred this. It's a sarcastic comment. I am not anti-hunting, and the net effect of ATVs on most wildlife is probably adverse in a variety of ways.

4. There are more "no hunting" signs.  The Paradise Valley are nearby places are filling up with recreational homes.  Many of these people don't want shooting near their place, and some don't like hunting.  They post their lands.  Like Yellowstone National Park, the elk figure out that certain private lands are safe during the hunt.

5. The northern range herd seems to have grown slightly since the winter of 1996-7. It has not contracted.  The Gazette article says the herd reached a 20-year high of 19,000 elk in the mid-1990s.  Wolves were reintroduced in 1995. The winter of 1996-7 was unusually hard on elk and bison because a January thaw was followed by a freeze which put the grass under a foot or so of solid ice.  Thousands of elk and bison died, many the latter at the hands of Governor Racicot's bison killers when they left the Park in search of grass that was not covered by ice.  The elk count after that winter was just over 10,000.  I note that in the Gazette article that the herd is now reported at about 12,000 elk.  If accurate, this shows an increase of over a thousand in the face of considerable wolf predation.

6. Much of the past criticism of the status of the northern range herd has been too many elk, not too few.  It seems the Park Service is always being criticized for bad management of some sort.  Much of this criticism may reflect the values of the critics more than any objective management direction by the Park.  For some there can't be too many elk. For some of these folks and for others, any excuse to bash the Park Service is welcomed.

Dr. Charles Kay, at Utah State University, and others, have long complained the northern range herd is too large.  Kay cites the decline of aspen, willows, and beaver inside Yellowstone as the result of an "excessive number" of elk.  More recently, he has added to this his view that the original peoples of the area kept elk numbers very low because the human population was much higher than anthropologists previously believed. As a result, the present large elk population is without precedent, and it is changing to ecology of the northern range to something that has never existed before.

I think his hypothesis is interesting, but it is not relevant unless we, today, are under some ethical mandate to restore a condition of ungulate-paucity that might have accompanied a speculative human overpopulation back in 400, 800, 900 or 1200 A.D.

At any rate, during the big winter die-off of 1996-7, critics among the Montana agricultural interest groups were blaming the Park Service for overgrazing. They were not blaming the ice. The Montana DOL still argues that bison wander across the Park boundaries every winter because the the excess of animals in the Park leaves them with little to eat. 

7. Outfitters have an understandable incentive to blame someone other than themselves when they cannot furnish a target for their clients.  If outfitters have a reputation for finding elk for the clients, their business will prosper. The opposite will hurt.  The poor hunt this year, will not help business next year.  Some want an easy mark to place the blame.

In the past the blame for a poor hunt was often put on the state department of Fish and Game.  After the severe winter of 1996-7, and some other bad winters in the early 1990s, which killed deer and elk throughout Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah, some hunters and outfitters attacked their state game management agencies.  While I saw no media recognition of the fact that this happened, the departments in all four states were attacked for mismanagement by some hunters and politicians. The state media treated each controversy without reference to the other states.

Today we have the Internet, and one of the benefits of the Internet is that the narrow reporting of stories by the traditional Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming state media, who fail notice similar controversies in nearby states, can be by-passed.

A current example is the failure of Montana media to notice that the media in Wyoming are reporting too many elk, and blaming the warm weather, not the wolves, for the bad elk hunt there.  Wyoming Governor Jim Geringer even extended the elk hunt so that the number of elk would not become excessive. Some of the Wyoming media even speculated about the need for elk birth control.

8. Elk habitat may be on the decline on the northern end of the northern range.  

Unfortunately, Montana, "the Big Sky State," is becoming the big weed patch.  I have not visited a Western State where the invasion by alien species of plants is more severe than Western Montana, although northern Idaho is getting pretty bad too. Various knapweeds -- spotted knapweed, diffuse knapweed, Russian knapweed, and Yellow starthistle -- have covered millions of acres of rangeland and other lands in Montana. The problem is much more severe outside of the Park than inside, although I have pulled up knapweed right at the Lamar Ranger Station and the Park has a bad infestation of toadflax at Mammoth Hot Springs.  

Inasmuch, as these invaders reduce the forage available to ungulates, we would expect a relative decline of elk in the most infested areas, and that would be north of Yellowstone Park where the hunt takes place. 

No doubt we are all awaiting the winter count of elk on the northern Range. In the absence of some yet-to-unfold calamity, I predict the elk numbers are essentially stable.

Here are two articles that appeared on 12-28 concerning the number of elk and moose and speculation about the effects of wolves.  

12-28-99. Elk really are hard to find, but not enough data to blame on wolves by Scott McMillion. Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

12-28-99. Moose population could be more threatened by wolves says Montana Dept. by Scott McMillion. Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

From the article, it appears the number of "resident" elk north of Yellowstone Park is down, but not the population of the northern range herd in general. Folks should remember that most of the wolves live inside Yellowstone NP, and the elk population there has not declined since the winter die-off of 1996-7.  Only one wolf pack lives entirely north of the Park -- Sheep Mountain Pack.  Its primary prey is probably deer until the the elk migrate north for the winter from Yellowstone.  If prey has become scarce for some reason, wolves north of the Park will die out or move south and compete with Park wolf packs.  

The article is based on recent flights by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. They observed half as many elk by air this December compared to December 1997 on the east side of the Yellowstone River north of the Park. This is the side favored by the Sheep Mountain Pack, although it should be noted, and the article does not, that the Chief Joseph Pack's range does extend up the the other (the west) side of the Yellowstone Valley north of the Park. Here the department reported more elk than in years past.

The issue is complicated because the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, has not gathered good population data in the past.

The apparent cow:calf ratio observed is clearly below replacement, but it is hard to draw conclusions about the future from one year's data. The Park Service has good data on the age breakdown of elk killed on the northern range by wolves in the winter, but they lack data on the number of calves killed in during calving season.  Grizzly bears too prey heavily on elk calves for about a two week period after the birth of the calves. The article does not mention this.

The article says that the entire Northern Range elk population has been stable since the big die-off of 1996-7, but the information I got from the Park Service last winter was that it had increased by about 1000 elk.

My story of 3-11-99, If they don't eat livestock, what do those wolves eat?

Regarding the decline of moose on the northern range, here too there are other explanations. The moose population began to drop well before the wolf reintroduction.  The 1988 fires hurt moose habitat. Folks may recall the CNN article that Yellowstone moose are starving and just not getting pregnant. People who travel throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem will note that the concentration of moose has moved steadily south from the Park. It extended down the Wyoming/Idaho border to Utah, where there is now a substantial moose population.

The winter so far on the northern range has been mild with low snowfall. Unless there is a sharp change in the weather, elk survival to next spring should, therefore, be high. Shifting weather conditions from year to year is one reason why one season of bad elk hunting means little (other than the politics it generates).

12-30-99. I have heard that the head of this "Friends of the Northern Range" is not just a frustrated hunter, but an anti-government type, so it is reasonable to speculate that this group has a hidden agenda unrelated to wolves and elk.

1-6-00. Here are still more articles, this time from the Jan. 6 Billings Gazette providing evidence against the hypothesis that the elk have been wiped out by the wolves.  In addition, the Park Service has just reported that the Yellowstone area wolf population grew hardly at all in 1999.

 

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