Five members of the 7-membered
Sheep Mountain Pack were captured in the last week. Four of them are presently being
held in the Nez Perce Pen in Yellowstone while the aversive conditioning
facility at Ted Turner's Flying D Ranch is being prepared.
Unfortunately, one member of the
pack died when the tranquilizer dart punctured her chest. Two wolves
were not captured -- radio-collared female, no. 188F, and one
uncollared member. If captured, they too will be sent to the ranch for
aversive conditioning to livestock.
The Sheep Mountain Pack has
continued to occasionally kill cattle on private land in their territory near
Dome Mountain and Dailey Lake north of Yellowstone Park. This experiment
is being conducted in lieu of terminating the pack. The reconditioned
pack will be released in the fall and will hopefully stay away from livestock
while forestalling the otherwise inevitable occupation of this territory by
some new wolf pack.
Here is the statement from the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The Sheep Mountain pack
killed a yearling and wounded another the night of the 15/16th. WS confirmed
it as a wolf kill and a flight that morning located the Sheep Mountain pack
nearby. In an effort to try something new, this pack will be removed from
the wild and "trained' to avoid livestock as prey. In a cooperative
effort between USDA Wildlife Services (Montana State Office and WS Research
Division), Turner Endangered Species Fund, Yellowstone National Park and the
Service, the pack will be captured and placed in an enclosure on the Flying
D Ranch near Bozeman where the Wildlife Services Research Division will
attempt to condition the wolves to avoid attacking livestock. Capture
efforts could begin next week, but conditioning would not begin late June.
Similar work has been done with some success with coyotes (recently
published in the Wildl. Soc. Bull.), and wolves in Romania and Wisconsin. In
Romania it was reported (this has not been published in a peer review
journal to my knowledge) that the "taught" behavior to avoid
livestock was naturally passed on to their pups. An alpha female wolf that
was treated in Wisconsin went from killing 10,000 dollars worth of livestock
prior to treatment to none the following year after treatment. The female's
pack apparently learned from her and even though she was the only one
treated her avoidance of the farm and livestock were learned by other pack
members. It cannot be overemphasized, however, that this technique is not a
cure-all and may not be successful in the field. It is definitely worth
trying but the only thing we are really counting on is that we will learn
something. If the conditioning appears to have worked, then the pack will be
released back in their territory this fall.
The alpha female of the Sheep
Mountain Pack, no. 16F, is rather famous. She is one of the original
pups borne by no. 9F in 1995. She, and her sister, no. 17F, mated with
no. 34M of the Chief Joseph Pack in 1997; but the two wolves denned
separately. No. 34 attended to 17F, but not number 16F. 17F, however,
was soon killed (impaled on a snag) while she was hunting. Her pups were
adopted by no. 34M and his erstwhile pack member 33F, to become today's Chief
Joseph Pack. Meanwhile, no. 16F was hit by a vehicle on killer road US
191 in the NW of Yellowstone. She recovered from her broken leg, but she
lost that year's litter, although one member survived for a year on its
own. Since then she has had two more litters, and until depredation
control began in the fall of 1999, her Sheep Mountain Pack had become large
and a major wildlife factor to the north of the Park on the edge of the
Paradise Valley.
Hopefully this experiment will
save this famous wolf and her pack.
Here
is an article in the Rocky Mountain News, June 4, about the experiment.
June 19. The four
captured wolves have now been moved to Turner's ranch. Federal wildlife
officials are still trying to capture the two remaining wolves of the Sheep
Mountain Pack. Doug Smith was quoted as saying that one of them has probably
dispersed away from the area.
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