click on link below to watch video:
Special report: Rise of the gray wolf | Lansing State Journal | lansingstatejournal.com
lansingstatejournal.com
source: Lansing State Journal
Written by Louise Knott Ahern/ Video by Paul Henderson
Michigan’s gray wolf was removed from the federal endangered species list on Jan. 27 after four decades as a protected animal. Its long journey back from near extinction is hailed as one of the greatest wildlife survival stories in U.S. history — flourishing from just six animals in 1973 to nearly 700 today in Michigan alone.
But the story of the gray wolf is far from over. The policies that led to its recovery and now the state’s sensitive balancing act between wolves and humans will have a ripple effect far outside the boundaries of Michigan.
Though the wolves can be found today almost exclusively in the Upper Peninsula, their story resonates throughout the entire state.
And in some ways, advocates say, the story of the wolf strikes at the heart of the very identity of the Great Lakes State. “The wolf is symbolic,” says Michigan State University researcher Michelle Lute. “It forces us to ask, ‘What does it really mean to be a Michigander?’
Great Pyrenees dogs protect sheep from Wolves
From 5,000 feet, the brown-and-white winter landscape of the Upper Peninsula is a reminder there are still untouched lands left to explore, places where there’s so little civilization to see that it’s hard to believe this is a state of 10 million people. A few times a month, Department of Natural Resources pilot Neil Harri flies over these vast miles of aspen and snow to conduct one of the most important but simple pieces of the state’s plan for managing the wolf population. He finds out where they are and counts them.
Harri has a reputation not only for welcoming guests on his monitoring flights but also for carting them back home, green and queasy. Tracking wolves from the air does not make for a smooth flight. He warns people ahead of time that if they need to throw up they should grab the trash bag in the back, and in case of emergency, he’ll try for a tree landing. They’re rarely fatal, he explains.
But he promises you’ll forget everything — the tug of gravity on your stomach, the bumps and jiggles of flying in a small plane, the image of crashing into a tree — the minute the plane’s radar system comes to life with a single, insistent PING. And when it happens, when that sound breaks through the roar of the propeller to announce that a radio-collared wolf is near, Harri transforms from laid-back to alert. He begins turning dials on the instrument panel, trying to pinpoint more closely where the signal is coming from. His eyes scan the ground below, experience training him to watch for movement, not necessarily an animal.
In the distance, he spots a frozen riverbed. Wolves can often be found near those, he explains. They like to travel that way, using the icy creeks as roads through the winter woods. Harri flies lower and lower, turning the plane practically on its side so he can see better. The PING grows louder. And then, yes, over there, in the trees. There’s something over there. One by one, they emerge from the woods. One, two, three, four — seven in all run from their hiding spot to scamper along the ice. And for the few brief minutes they show themselves, they tell a story which some feared would be forever relegated to history
In Michigan, the gray wolf runs again. That these animals exist at all, much less in such a large, vibrant pack, officially makes Michigan one of the only places in the United States where wolves are no longer the stuff of whispered myth but instead a living, breathing part of the ecosystem. Alaska, of course, has always had them. So have Wyoming and Montana. There’s also Yellowstone National Park, home to one of the most famous wolf packs in the country. That Michigan can once again count itself among those places lends some swagger to a state that has stumbled through the past decade. And the wolves’ resurgence is something the majority of Michiganders say they support, at least according to a recent MSU study. More than 80 percent of Michigan residents surveyed last year said they enjoy knowing wolves exist here.
“Wolves are just iconic,” says Brian Roell, a biologist with the DNR and the state’s sort of chief wolf man. “They represent the wild.” Roell knows everything about the animal — what it eats, where it sleeps, why it will stare or pace when scared, what its howl really means, why it likes to travel paths made by others to save its own energy. Mostly he knows that wolves, no matter how a person may feel about them, make Michigan special. “That should be a selling point to Michigan,” he says. “It should be viewed as a resource. There aren’t a lot of places where you can go see wild wolves or moose without traveling to Alaska or Canada.”
But with that unmistakable coolness factor comes a complicated set of challenges. So few endangered species — and certainly no other major predators — have ever recovered enough to no longer need federal protection. That means Michigan and its Great Lakes gray wolf cousins, Minnesota and Wisconsin, find themselves in unchartered waters, balancing the needs and opinions of the almost-too-many-to count stakeholders who want a say in the wolf’s future here.
Conservationists and wildlife defenders are watching how the DNR manages the wolf population — always standing ready to sue if they feel the state goes too far and once again threatens the animal’s existence.Sportsmen wonder when they’ll get a chance to snag one and worry the wolves will trim the deer population if left unchecked.
Biologists fear ignorance will lead to a rash of bad, knee-jerk legislation Farmers wonder what their rights are now when it comes to protecting their livestock from wolf attacks. The DNR says it has attempted to balance the viewpoints of all the various wolf stakeholders in its Wolf Management Plan — an aptly named 100-page document that spells out how the state will handle everything from livestock kills to poaching. Roughly 50 people representing all possible interested organizations — from hunters to American Indian tribal leaders — were invited to help craft the plan in 2006.
Now, with the federal government’s decision to remove the wolf from the endangered species list, it’s up to people like Roell to put that plan into action. “We’re moving into a new phase,” he says. “We’re learning how to live with wolves. And living with wolves requires a different mindset.” Go outside of Marquette — away from the university and the tourists, out to the places where roads are so remote they don’t even appear on maps and where the bars have two entrances, one for cars, the other for snowmobiles — get way out here among the heart of the national forests, and nearly everyone you find has a wolf story. Sometimes it’s their own, but sometimes it’s one they heard from someone else.
They talk about wolf sightings along the side of the road, about near hits while driving at night. They talk about terrified kids running into their parents’ bedrooms at night at the sound of howling in the distance. They talk about deer hunters who haven’t seen a buck in ages from their favorite tree blinds. They talk about letting their dogs out in the morning only to haul them back inside when they spot a lone wolf on a hill, “stalking” their house. Yet they also talk about the awe of seeing one for the first time, about grabbing their cellphones to snap a picture before it can run back into the woods, about calling a neighbor to ask did-you-hear-that at the sound of a pup’s springtime yipping.
And then there are people up here won’t talk about the wolf at all. At least not publicly. Emotions are so strong that coming down on the wrong side of the issue can mean confrontations in the grocery aisle or over a beer at the corner tavern, sparking disputes stronger than a football Sunday when bartenders have to decide whether to put the Packers or the Lions on the big TV.
“We have wolves walking down the main street of our little town,” said 63-year-old Don McLaughlin, a U.P. native from Trout Creek. “They’ve been killing livestock and dogs. There’s a point where this endangered species thing has to come face to face with reality.” Reality, however, at least when it comes to wolves, is often a relative term, says Nancy Warren, a wolf education specialist with an organization called Defenders of Wildlife. She’s a Brooklyn transplant who retired to the U.P. with her husband. Now she goes to schools , civic organizations and anywhere else people will welcome her to teach about what she calls the truth about wolves.
There are only one — perhaps two — documented cases of a wolf attacking a human being in the lower 48 states, despite the belief that they are a danger to human safety. “People feel either good or bad,” Warren says. “It’s so polarized. On the one extreme, people see them as the villain ... and feel the only good wolf is a dead wolf. On the other extreme are people who want to put them on a pedestal. That view is just as harmful to the wolf as the other extreme. Why does one animal generate so much emotion? History may have an answer.
The Objibwe Indians of Michigan have a story about wolves. It’s a story of a half-man, half-spirit who was placed on Earth by the Creator and tasked with giving names to all the living creatures. He soon grew lonely in his journey, noticing that all other living things had a friend or a mate to walk with. He asked for a companion, and the Creator responded. “I will bring you someone to walk, talk and play with,” the Creator said.He sent Maahiingun, the wolf. Forever after, human and wolf were to be linked, brothers in spirit even as they were forced to live apart.
Yet that story and its image of the wolf as a friend to humankind had no place in the attitudes of early European settlers, who saw the wolf as a vicious, bloodthirsty beast. So just as 19th century Western expansion led to the disappearance of the buffalo on the Great Plains, the influx of nonnative people to Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota brought a systematic elimination of the Great Lakes gray wolf. So intent were early Michigan residents on wiping out wolves that the ninth law passed by the first Michigan Legislature was the creation of a bounty for killing them.
“In the early turn of the century, they used practices that would just seem so socially unacceptable today,” Roell says. “They would gas dens of pups. They would use barbed wire like snakes to extract pups from dens. They would lace carcasses with cyanide so the animal would take a bite and die.” The effort worked. By 1935, the wolf had been eliminated from the Lower Peninsula and by 1956, it had all but disappeared from the U.P., as well. Then came the 1960s, when the voices of wildlife advocates found a willing ear in the earth-loving activist generation called the baby boomers, who spearheaded a new conservation movement. In 1965, Michigan ended its bounty program and named the wolf a protected species. Then in 1973, the federal government under President Richard Nixon adopted the Endangered Species Act, adding the wolf a year after that.
In the span of a decade, Michigan went from paying people to kill or trap wolves to making it a crime to do so. Attitudes have not entirely caught up with that speed of change, Roell says. U.P. Dairy farmer Terry Perttula pets his dog, Gracie, a Great Pyrenees that he adopted as a guard dog for his cows. Perttula was part of a pilot program at Central Michigan University that used dogs as a non-lethal way to control wolves around livestock farms. (Louise Knott Ahern
Lansing State Journal)
“Hundreds of years of hating every single wolf,” he says, “now has to change.” Take Terry Perttula, a dairy farmer with U.P. roots going back 100 years. Ten years ago, just after 9/11, Terry and his wife discovered one of their heifers down in the pasture, chewing on cud like she didn’t even know her whole back end was ripped open. Perttula called the DNR. He was almost certain a wolf had attacked her, but even that determination was a point of contention. There was money at stake. Farmers were and still are entitled to compensation by the state if a wolf kills their livestock.
The DNR had to send out a conservation officer to investigate, and his ruling had to be confirmed by another. But finally the DNR ruled yes, a wolf was to blame. Perttula wasn’t the only farmer who’d suffered what they call wolf depredation — the killing of livestock — but he couldn’t find it in himself to polish his shotgun as other U.P. farmers have threatened to do.
Instead, he signed up for a pilot program through Central Michigan University that gave him a pair of Great Pyrenees dogs to live with his cows. Researchers wanted to see if putting large dogs with livestock would scare off predators. Perttula named them Gracie and George, and he raised them alongside his cows to the point where he figures they thought they were one.
He hasn’t had a wolf problem since, he says, even after George died a year ago.The way he sees it, the wolves were here first, long before dairy farmers like himself moved in. And he sees no good reason to get all riled up when there are ways to keep the wolves at bay. You can stick a donkey in a field with sheep and never see another wolf or, for that matter, a coyote, he says. Heck, Gracie won’t even let a Canadian goose fly over.
If people are resentful, it’s not necessarily for the wolf itself, he says. Instead, they resent the heavy hand of government, telling them what they can and can’t do. And maybe now that the federal government isn’t in charge anymore, he wonders if people will start to feel differently. He remembers hearing his grandpa tell of a pack of three wolves that used to trot through the field by the old house. The wolves, he says, have always been here, and they’re doing what they’ve always done.What’s different, he figures, is the human. “They’re here,” he says. “We have to live with it.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment