Washington wolf population declines slightly for first time in 16 years
The Department of Fish and Wildlife's 2024 Wolf Conservation and Management Report put the year-end minimum count for 2024 at 230 wolves, a roughly 9% drop from 2023. The number of successful breeding pairs also dropped.
That breaks a longstanding trend of annual growth in the population. The number of breeding pairs across the state also dropped from 24 to to 18.
Ben Maletzke, WDFW's statewide wolf specialist, presented the report to the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission on Saturday. He said the 37 wolf deaths the agency documented last year wasn't significantly higher than recent years, but that the seven illegally killed wolves are concerning.
Some of those killings took place in the southern portion of the Cascade Range, a place where just a handful of wolves have been documented in recent years.
In this year's report, biologists did not find any wolves in that part of the range.
"The wolves we've known about have all been unlawfully harvested in the south Cascades," Maletzke said.
Gray wolves were first rediscovered in Washington in 2008 after being virtually nonexistent for decades. Since resurfacing, the population has enjoyed high growth rates, averaging about 20% a year.
The high mark last year was a minimum count of 254, which WDFW amended down from 260 this week due to a counting error.
Washington's wolves are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act in the western two-thirds of the state. They are delisted in the eastern third, but still protected as endangered under state law.
WDFW staff recommended the commission last year to reduce state-level protections for the wolves but commissioners declined to reduce protections. The decision irked livestock producers and local law enforcement officials in northeastern Washington who feel there are too many wolves.
Some wolf advocates see the report released Saturday as a sign that the commission made the right call. Francisco Santiago-Avila, the science and advocacy director for Washington Wildlife First, said in a statement that the report "underscores the continued fragility of Washington's wolf population and the persistent challenges we face in reaching state recovery goals."
Despite the overall decline this year, WDFW recorded an increase in the number of wolf packs, from 42 to 43. That's the product of the dissolution of two packs in the eastern part of the state and the addition of three in the North Cascades.
Maletzke said that shows that the population in the eastern region — including both the Blue Mountains and the northeastern corner — is starting to stabilize a bit and that the North Cascades population is on the rise.
"It's promising that we're seeing that growth in the North Cascades," he said.
The bulk of the population is still in the northeast, however.
It was an especially busy year for wolf-livestock conflict. A total of 55 cattle were either injured or killed by wolves, as was one domestic dog.
Maletzke said those incidents involved at most 10 of the 43 wolfpacks, meaning 77% of the state's wolves had no run-ins with livestock.
WDFW killed four wolves from two packs in response to repeated cattle attacks.
Idaho estimated its wolf population at about 1,150 in 2023, according to the state Department of Fish and Game.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
It's time to save the whales again
Diving in a kelp forest in Monterey Bay recently, I watched a tubby 200-pound harbor seal follow a fellow diver, nibbling on his flippers. The diver, a graduate student, was using sponges to collect DNA samples from the ocean floor. Curious seals, he told me, can be a nuisance. When he bags his sponges and places them in his collection net, they sometimes bite into them, puncturing the bags and spoiling his samples. Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, coming closer than 50 yards to seals and dolphins is considered harassment, but they're free to harass you, which seems only fair given the centuries of deadly whaling and seal hunting that preceded a generational shift in how we view the world around us. The shift took hold in 1969, the year a massive oil spill coated the Santa Barbara coastline and the Cuyahoga River, in Cleveland, caught fire. Those two events helped spark the first Earth Day, in 1970, and the shutdown of America's last whaling station in 1971. Protecting the environment from pollution and from loss of wilderness and wildlife quickly moved from a protest issue to a societal ethic as America's keystone environmental legislation was passed at around the same time, written by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by a Republican president, Richard Nixon. Those laws include the National Environmental Policy Act (1969) , the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972) and the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), which goes further than the Endangered Species Act (1973) in protecting all marine mammals, not just threatened ones, from harassment, killing or capture by U.S. citizens in U.S. waters and on the high seas. All these 'green' laws and more are under attack by the Trump administration, its congressional minions and longtime corporate opponents of environmental protections, including the oil and gas industry. Republicans' disingenuous argument for weakening the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act is that the legislation has worked so well in rebuilding wildlife populations that it's time to loosen regulations for a better balance between nature and human enterprise. When it comes to marine mammal populations, that premise is wrong. On July 22, at a House Natural Resources subcommittee meeting, Republican Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska introduced draft legislation that would scale back the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Among other things, his proposal would limit the ability of the federal government to take action against 'incidental take,' the killing of whales, dolphins and seals by sonic blasts from oil exploration, ship and boat strikes or by drowning as accidental catch (also known as bycatch) in fishing gear. Begich complained that marine mammal protections interfere with 'essential projects like energy development, port construction, and even fishery operations.' Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), the ranking member on the House Resources Committee, calls the legislation a 'death sentence' for marine mammals. It's true that the marine mammal law has been a success in many ways. Since its passage, no marine mammal has gone extinct and some species have recovered dramatically. The number of northern elephant seals migrating to California beaches to mate and molt grew from 10,000 in 1972 to about 125,000 today. There were an estimated 11,000 gray whales off the West Coast when the Marine Mammal Protection Act became law; by 2016, the population peaked at 27,000. But not all species have thrived. Historically there were about 20,000 North Atlantic right whales off the Eastern Seaboard. They got their name because they were the 'right' whales to harpoon — their bodies floated for easy recovery after they were killed. In 1972 they were down to an estimated 350 individuals. After more than half a century of federal legal protection, the population is estimated at 370. They continue to suffer high mortality rates from ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear and other causes, including noise pollution and greater difficulty finding prey in warming seas. Off Florida, a combination of boat strikes and algal pollution threaten some 8,000-10,000 manatees. The population's recovery (from about 1,000 in 1979) has been significant enough to move them off the endangered species list in 2017, but since the beginning of this year alone, nearly 500 have died. Scientists would like to see them relisted, but at least they're still covered by the Marine Mammal Protection Act. A 2022 study in the Gulf of Mexico found that in areas affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill 12 years earlier, the dolphin population had declined 45% and that it might take 35 years to recover. In the Arctic Ocean off Alaska, loss of sea ice is threatening polar bears (they're considered marine mammals), bowhead and beluga whales, walruses, ringed seals and harp seals. On the West Coast the number of gray whales — a Marine Mammal Act success story and now a cautionary tale — has crashed by more than half in the last decade to fewer than 13,000, according to a recent report by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA, the nation's lead ocean agency, is an endangered species in its own right in the Trump era). Declining prey, including tiny shrimp-like amphipods, in the whales' summer feeding grounds in the Arctic probably caused by warming water are thought to be a major contributor to their starvation deaths and reduced birth rates. The whale's diving numbers are just one signal that climate change alone makes maintaining the Marine Mammal Act urgent. Widespread marine heat waves linked to a warming ocean are contributing to the loss of kelp forests that sea otters and other marine mammals depend on. Algal blooms off California, and for the first time ever, Alaska, supercharged by warmer waters and nutrient pollution, are leading to the deaths of thousands of dolphins and sea lions. What the Trump administration and its antiregulation, anti-environmental-protection supporters fail to recognize is that the loss of marine mammals is an indicator for the declining health of our oceans and the natural world we depend on and are a part of. This time, saving the whales will be about saving ourselves. David Helvarg is executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean policy group. His next book, 'Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp,' is scheduled to be published in 2026.
E&E News
6 days ago
- E&E News
Texas judge removes ESA protections from lesser prairie chicken
A Texas-based federal judge assented to a Trump administration request Tuesday and ended Endangered Species Act protections for the lesser prairie chicken. In an unusual ESA plot twist, U.S. District Judge David Counts vacated the Fish and Wildlife Service's 2022 rule determining the animal needs federal protections after the agency itself said it had found a 'serious defect' in the listing. 'Fish and Wildlife's concession points to serious error at the very foundation of its rule,' Counts reasoned in his opinion, adding that 'mere remand would not cure this error.' Advertisement Environmental groups that support continued federal protections for the lesser prairie chicken had urged the judge to keep the 2022 listing in place while FWS tried to fix the alleged problems. 'It's bitterly disappointing to see a federal judge accept the Trump administration's bad faith rationale for stripping the lesser prairie chicken's urgently needed protections,' said Jason Rylander, the legal director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute. Rylander added that 'this ruling has nothing to do with science or the law and everything to do with kowtowing to the oil and gas industry.' FWS has a policy of not commenting on litigation. The agency could not be immediately reached Wednesday afternoon. Counts was nominated by President Donald Trump to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, where the lesser prairie chicken has long roosted in successive rounds of litigation. FWS first listed the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species under the ESA in 2014. Energy industry groups and others challenged the listing, which was vacated in 2015. Following receipt of another listing petition and further study, FWS in November 2022 listed the northern distinct population segment of the lesser prairie chicken as threatened and the southern population of the species as endangered. The state of Texas joined with industry groups including the Permian Basin Petroleum Association in filing suit against the ESA determination. 'Following the change in federal administration in January 2025, Fish and Wildlife re-evaluated [the challengers'] claims,' Counts observed, adding that 'Fish and Wildlife now believes it erred … and did not provide a sufficient justification' for the division into two distinct population segments. Counts further declared that the federal agency 'commits no handwaving when it also concedes that this failure causes the Final Listing Rule to be 'unlawful'' and therefore subject to being entirely wiped off the books. The lesser prairie chicken's full range extends across parts of five states. The 2022 listing identified the southern segment as extending from New Mexico to West Texas, while the northern population spanned Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma. FWS identified the primary threats in both segments as 'loss of large, connected blocks of grassland and shrubland habitat,' with the southern population facing higher risk of extinction due to the region's hotter climate and vulnerability to prolonged drought. As such, the law places tighter restrictions on activities within the southern population segment than the northern segment. In a previous court filing, the Trump administration said that local conservation efforts would be sufficient to protect the species while a new ESA listing petition and review process was underway. Conservation groups disagree. They blasted the judge's decision, saying it all but dooms the bird. 'Removing protections for the lesser prairie chicken would be devastating news and would effectively sign an extinction warrant for the species,' Andrew Carter, director of conservation policy at Defenders of Wildlife, said in an emailed statement. 'As a bird that once numbered in the millions, it is now down to a fraction of that amount, having lost about 90 percent of its habitat.'
E&E News
07-08-2025
- E&E News
Hunters launch appeal of gray wolf court decision
Three sportsmen's groups on Wednesday filed a lickety-split challenge to a federal judge's order that the Fish and Wildlife Service reconsider Endangered Species Act protections for the gray wolf. The notice of appeal filed by the Sportsmen's Alliance Foundation, Safari Club International and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation means the Fish and Wildlife Service could choose to postpone the gray wolf status reassessment ordered by U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy on Tuesday. By pushing the gray wolf case up to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the sportsmen's groups could also set up a key ruling on some evergreen legal questions, such as how much deference is accorded judges in interpreting ambiguous environmental statutes. Advertisement W. Laird Hamberlin, CEO of Safari Club International, said: 'SCI is frustrated that the court ignored the reality of successful wolf conservation in the Western U.S. and instead ruled in favor of the plaintiffs' arguments that are clearly biased against state wildlife management and counter to the law and the science.'
