Some Michigan lawmakers don't think wolves being planted in Isle Royale National Park will be able to dent the park's moose population and want the National Park Service to allow a moose hunt in the park/NPS, Phyllis Green file
Some Michigan lawmakers, apparently unconvinced that wolves transported to Isle Royale National Park can make a dent in the park's burgeoning moose population, want the National Park Service to allow a hunt in the park.
“The increased and unsustainable moose population on Isle Royale has created an ongoing ecological dilemma as the moose feed on the park’s balsam fir trees and other vegetation," reads a resolution the Michigan House of Representatives is being asked to adopt. "The rapidly expanding moose herd will devastate these slow-growing trees and could eliminate them from Isle Royale.”
The three-to-five-year effort to establish 20-30 wolves on Isle Royale is being completed in order to restore predation as a key part of the island ecosystem. Researchers involved in the planning effort recommended this number of wolves from the Great Lakes region. The primary goals of the project are to ensure that wolves form packs, reproduce, and prey on the park’s moose population, which is around 2,000, according to estimates from Michigan Tech University wildlife biologists.
Initial indications show that after just a few short months, the new wolves are starting to travel and hunt together.
In recent years, park managers have discussed wolf management on the 209-square-mile island with wildlife managers and geneticists from across the United States and Canada, and have received input during public meetings and from Native American tribes of the area. Those discussions examined the question of whether wolves should be physically transported to Isle Royale, in large part due to concerns that a loss of the predators would lead to a boom in the moose population that likely would over-browse island vegetation.
But Michigan state Rep. Steven Johnson doesn't believe wolves will get the job done in time to protect the island's forests.
“Unfortunately, we’ve reached the point where the wolf population isn’t sustaining itself well," he told the Great Lakes Echo. "There are too many moose. Adding wolves isn’t going to fix that overnight.”
Park Service officials had considered a hunt to control the moose population, but ruled it out as being "inconsistent with existing laws, policies and regulations.”
"We’re just advocating the Park Service re-look at this. They turned it down but the problem has gotten worse,” said Johnson.
The resolution, if adopted by the Michigan Legislature, doesn't force the Park Service's hand at Isle Royale, but simply asks the agency to reconsider hunting as a means to controlling the moose numbers.
In mid-September four wolves were moved to the national park, but one died shortly thereafter of unknown causes. A necropy was to be performed to determine the cause of death. The three that survived bolstered the island wolf population to 17, which now includes nine males and eight females.
Comments
This is probably what should have been done from the beginning. The cash strapped NPS could have made a little bit of money rather then spending millions for something that may or may not work and to me a more natural solution than flying in wolves who have already shown they difficult time surviving on the island on their own.
I believe the NPS was slow to act on the declining wolf population issue.....That beingvsaid, I am very much in favor of the re-population project that is underway. Keep in mind that the 1st new wolves were released only 1 year ago! After waiting so long to act can't you be patient and see what the next 2 years will bring? The goal was to reestablish multiple wolf packs with enough genetic diversity to sustain themselves. The answer is not to let a bunch of people with guns shoot noise like fish in a barrel!
Has anyone calculated the costs of running a hunting program on the island? How many permits would be offered? Wouldn’t you need hundreds to make a dent in the moose population? How would you keep the hunters safely separated? What about other park users? How would killed moose be removed from the island? What about the gut piles? Hunting might be a more complicated solution than it appears.
There seem to be some misperceptions being spread or allowed to spread about this situation. I know; that's so surprising; but, it's true. Isle Royale really isn't a very big place as ecosystems go. In the past, wolves came and went across the winter ice pack on the lake and there was sufficient genetic mixing to keep the wolf population healthy; however, with warming modern temperatures, the condition of the ice pack has not been reliable enough to entice sufficient migration to sustain genetic health in those wolves and inbreeding problems brought on a decline in the population, to the point where predation could no longer stabilize the moose levels. This is a common problem in wildlife species when their gene pool size is allowed to drop too low. Inbreeding commonly first compromises their immune and neurological systems, then their fertility. In the past, a small wolf population, sustained by natural migration and genetic exchange, was far more than sufficient to stabilize moose levels. Now that human caused climate problems have impacted the winter ice packs enough to compromise that natural migration, reintroducing a small number of new wolves is necesary to revitalize that population; hunting is not. Once huinting is allowed, it will soon become a new and unneeded additional problem, complete with its own poorly educated, but very vocal, "killing for fun" entitlement group, who will, as has already been noted, contribute less than they cost and simply add their own new dimension of perversion to the issue.
@rumpelstiltskin
I wont go down the rabbit hole of man made climate change nor will I try to change your obvious disdain for hunting. I agree with your explanation of lack of ice pack genetic diversity etc.
Where we differ is that reintroducing wolves is necessary or that hunting is not a viable solution. One could easily argue that nature has spoken and not in favor of the wolves survival on the island. Or that hunting is a far more natural than trapping, collaring and flying wolves to a place they have demonstrated they cannot survive on their own. There are also no guarantees that the same problem (lack of new genetics) wont repeat themselves over time.
It is kind of ironic that when the most recent ice bridge was formed, that a wolf chose to leave the island rather than the other way around.
I'm not sure where you get that hunters contribute less than they cost but would be interested in any sources you have.
I'm a pretty firm believer in that old adage "you can't fight mother nature" and that is what the wolf reintroduction feels like to me.
"Has anyone calculated the costs of running a hunting program on the island? How many permits would be offered?"
Good questions. I haven't read anywhere just how much of a reduction they are aiming for (number of moose) or actually how many moose they expect the wolves to take kill per year. That said, my guess is hunters could do it far cheaper and more efficiently than the cost to trap and relocate wolves and make it at worst a break even proposition but more likely provide some income to the NPS. I'm sure there would be a requirement the moose had to be removed from the island. Hunters pay BIG money to hunt moose in Alaska so I doubt they would have a problem filling whatever license quota was deemed safe and productive. I think there are some very good models for conducting a moose hunt in the state of Alaska so not as complicated one might think. Being an Island monitoring would actually be simpler. As for the gut piles I think nature would take care of those relatively quickly, wolves or no wolves.
I think you're being overly optimistic, wild. Isle Royale National Park is on an island 45 miles long and 9 miles wide. It's 99% wilderness, which means any hunter who bags a moose would have to quarter it and carry it out to the nearest dock; no ATV allowed.
The ferry ride from Rock Harbor at Isle Royale to Houghton, Mich., is six hours. From Windigo to Grand Portage, Minn., it's about two hours. Private boats can use the docks, but not only are moose pretty big game (bulls can weigh 1500 pounds), but how would you keep the meat cold for such a long ride? And the ferries stop running in mid-September, though I doubt they'd agree to take a quartered moose.
And then there's the ban against firearms on concession ferries, and the fact that Michigan doesn't currently have a hunting season for moose.
I tried to find NPS discussion of hunting and why they ruled it out, but was unsuccessful.
As to whether wolves can do the job, once upon a time the northern elk herd in Yellowstone numbered about 20,000. When wolves returned to the park in 1995, they began to whittle away at that number, both through killing elk and forcing them out of the park.
Back in January 2011, a Yellowstone release said there had been about a 70 percent drop in the herd's size since 1995, when there were 16,791 elk counted. That was the same year the wolf recovery program came to Yellowstone.
In December 2010, the tally of elk in the northern herd was put at 4,635, a decline of roughly 24 percent from the December 2009 count. At the same time, the wolf population in the park's northern range was just 37. Of course, there also was elk hunting outside the park's boundaries that contributed to the decline, and a hard winter with lots of snow.
https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2011/01/annual-count-shows-huge-decline-yellowstone-national-park-elk-herd-how-accurate-it7458
Bottom line, I'd give a wolf population of ~30 animals (introduced, with who knows how many ensuing offspring) good odds of reducing the roughly 2,000 moose in short order.
Well okay there, wild places, I figured my comments would troll something up and they did. I appreciate you clearly stating, from the outset, that you "wont" go down the "rabbit hole" of man made climate change; that sets the stage for the discussion and we can proceed from there, roughly in the order in which you stated your complaints.
With regard to fantasies about any stereotypical disdain for weapons, I actually grew up around a wide variety of firearms. In the 1950s, almost every little town in the west had a shooting club and a makeshift range where World War II and Korea vets would come, mostly to sight in surplus M1 Garands. My father was one of these vets; but, his training as an engineer soon lured him into reloading and then into hot loads and cartridge modifications. Known at the time and with access to machine shop capabilities, he machined his own dies, rechambered his own barrels, and was one of the early tinkerers involved in "necking down" .30-06 and other large traditional cases into slightly smaller, much higher velocity, flatter trajectory, longer range calibers. My father was not a patient man; he took me up a steep learning curve; and I knew how and why to pick loads and shoot before I left grade school.
During the warmer months, most of those shooting clubs across the west would raise club funds by filling ice chests with some combination of frozen chickens, hams, or turkeys and hosting a chicken shoot, turkey shoot, or whatever. Participants would pay their entry fees and start prone, at a closer target at those clubs that could accommodate multiple ranges, and, as each participant's frozen food winnings accumulated, they had to move to sitting and then standing. At the clubs that could accommodate multiple ranges, they also had to shoot at progressively longer ranges, finally shooting at steel bells hung in the far distance in some cases. As soon as school let out, my father would haul me to those events, all across the west, sign me up, and then start boasting of how his little kid could outshoot the crowd. The crowd was never very bright; the side bets flowed; and, in dozens of outings, my father always made serious money, at least the amounts were serious in those days. We even walked away with rifles, spotting scopes, and other expensive equipment.
With regard to any fantasies about my disdain for hunting, even before I reached puberty, I had taken upland birds, waterfowl, turkeys, coyotes, whitetails, mule deer, elk, several varieties of wild sheep, and even a bison. My father's side of the family has always been adamant about "one shot" kills, both to force you to know how to shoot before you ventured into the field and to promote humane take. Only trying a shot when you know you can reliably hit your target properly and using a large enough caliber to ensure a quick clean kill are fundamental to this ethic. They consistently reject the .223 as an acceptable hunting caliber.
My father has been gone for many years, but had a younger brother who is much closer to me than to my father in age and is still alive. Although I was drifting toward other pursuits by my college years, my uncle had a pompous and obnoxious acquaintance who was an avid bowhunter; he encouraged my uncle to try bowhunting, and my uncle asked me to accompany them on a mule deer hunt. Pointlessly festooned with needless gear and looking like a runway model at a Cabela's fashion show, my uncle's friend tromped out across the landscape; but, I convinced my uncle that the two of us should position ourselves on either side of a saddle overlooking a small pond and just sit down and wait. Within an hour, my uncle had "stuck" a good sized buck that ran back into the juniper. We tracked it for thirty or forty minutes before finding it, blood soaked, clawing in vain to get to its feet, convulsing in obvious pain. After too long of a wait, my uncle finally went in to take a knife to it. Neither of us had ever been squeamish about killing stuff. Both of us eat meat; we both hunted a lot in those days; and I ranched for decades. But, from the look on my uncle's face, I saw that it was only then that he fully came to grips with what bowhunting was actually all about. It involves using a razor blade tipped arrow to cut through an animal, causing as much damage as possible without the use of enough force to quickly put it out of misery, instead forcing it to linger as it slowly bleeds to death. It is one of ways modern "sportsmen" kill for fun.
And, it's not just bowhunting. Too many of today's "sportsmen" go into the field with .223 assault weapons, not because it is an acceptable hunting caliber for the game they hunt, which it is generally not, but because they like the thought of being armed with a "tough guy" weapon. My ranch, private property, had a county road running along one boundary. The boundary was fenced and posted and the elk on the property knew to stay at least four hundred yards or so out from that fence. I used to let the state game warden for that area walk the ranch when he felt the need and, more than once, he had to come up and let me know he either found some dead elk or was forced to euthanize some. When I asked the details, he usually told me they had wounds in the back and I knew exactly what he meant because the local "sportsmen" would pull up along the county road, pull out their AR15-style .223 assault rifles, tilt them up at a forty-five degree angle and, usually laughing, empty their clips, lobbing the short range bullets in an arc toward the distant elk in the hopes that, by flock shooting the herd, they would get to see one or more go down. The extended clips often held thirty or more cartridges. The elk would be hit in the back as the tiny .223 bullets, too small and light to inflict a quick clean kill, rained down on them from above; but, because the .223 bullet is too small and light to inflict a quick clean kill, they would limp into the woods and slowly die from organ damage and internal bleeding. No, I don't actually have any broad disdain for hunting, just for the spoiled "kill for fun" brats that constitute the bulk of today's hunters.
You emphatically assert, "One could easily argue that nature has spoken and not in favor of the wolves survival" on Isle Royale and that "hunting is a far more natural" than periodic genetic revitalization. I take exception on two fronts. First, the ice packs that formerly connected Isle Royale to the broader ecosystem every winter were not declining prior to the anthropogenic climate change that you so cavalierly ignore; that's not really nature at work now is it? Second, I find your "nature has spoken" and it's not my fault style of codependency to be selfish, self-serving, self-dealing, narcissistic, and unethical to the point of being childishly amoral. You assert, with some swagger, "There are also no guarantees that the same problem (lack of new genetics) wont repeat themselves over time." Now that anthropogenic climate change has isolated the island from the genetic exchange mechanisms that served it in the past, most of the wildlife on Isle Royale, including both wolves and moose, surely will gradually suffer inbreeding without genetic exchange assistance. That not the question. The real questions are, first, what is the highest and best use for Isle Royale as a unit of the national park system and, second, how should it be managed in that context. But, the truth is you have neither thought far enough ahead to maturely ponder those questions nor do you really give a crap. You're a "sportsman" and just want an opportunity to kill more stuff for fun. Moose are big and there's bragging rights associated with posing for pictures with something big and dead that you got to kill for fun. You could even stuff its head and and hang it on the wall, if your wife would let you.
You find it "kind of ironic that when the most recent ice bridge was formed, that a wolf chose to leave the island rather than the other way around." I find it kind of ironic that you call yourself "wild places" when you don't even understand that phenomenon. Let me explain. Wolves are social animals; they live together in packs and, especially when the available prey is as large and dangerous as a moose, they are obligated to hunt it in a pack. The history of wolves in Yellowstone demonstrates that packs form and dissolve on a continuous basis. Wolves are always dispersing from packs, joining other packs, or even forming new packs. When a pack dissolves, it seldom means that every remaining member of that pack dies in a single event; it means that, whether due to a decline in the number of able-bodied members or some other weakening of the hunting success of the pack, the pack weakens to the point where it can no longer protect its territory, hunt its prey, or otherwise secure its food supply. When that happens most the remaining healthy wolves, if any, disperse, striking out for new territories where they can find other healthy wolves and can either join their packs or form new ones. Do you see how inbreeding within the wolves of Isle Royale might impact the ability of the packs there to effectively hunt enough moose and, as a result, influence one or more of the remaining healthy ones to try to disperse to find the nearest other healthy wolves? So, if you really have enough experience with or knowledge of the wild to justify using "wild places" as your moniker, why did I have to explain this simple and extremely obvious concept to you? It makes me wonder whether you're just another internet poseur. I might have judged you wrong; do you really even hunt?
As for where I get that hunters contribute less than they cost, I believe Kurt Repanshek has already pretty well stomped you out on that one. As for whether a repaired and revitalized wolf population can handle properly balancing those tick-infested moose on Isle Royale, he did a good job on you there as well. All I can add is my annoyance that, when wolves are present in other places, the spoiled brat "sportsmen" scream and yell about wolves eating everything in sight; but, with regard to this Isle Royale situation, you, assuming you're a hunter at all and not just posing as one, seem to be certain that healthy wolves need your help to hunt. I've spent a lot of time in Yellowstone, including several occasions when I found myself up close and personal with healthy wolves, and I can assure you that they don't. Again, what the heck kind of "wild" have you been around anyway? You know that just watching those "sportsmen" channels on the television doesn't count, don't you?
Finally, you seem all excited to get "hunters" to "pay BIG money to hunt moose" on Isle Royale. That's the kind of stuff you see on those "sportsmen" channels I was talking about. Those kinds of "pay to kill" hunts on an island the size of Isle Royale would be little more than "shooter bull" operations where they raise animals that are sufficiently confined and often habituated enough to be easy to kill ...for fun. Down in Texas, they used to, maybe still do, buy old lions and tigers and other exotic animals from traveling circuses and parking lot carnivals and chain them to trees so "sportsmen" would pay to shoot them ...for fun. The ones in Alaska are canned hunts with highly paid outfitters to put up the tents, cook the food, tuck you in at night, and field dress what you kill ...for fun after they've sighted in your rifle and taken you out to look over your shoulder to aim for you. They're served up for guys whose only exercise is at an exclusive gym where paid escorts walk them from weight station to weight station, then take them back to the sauna and massage them afterward It all sounds too perverse for a national park.
I'm not sure that kind of childish and exploitive "entertainment" is the highest and best use for Isle Royale as a unit of the national park system. I don't want to see it and I'm sure I pay far more in taxes than you do.