Standing in a snowy meadow in Wilmington, a wolf lifts
its head and howls,
breaking the near silence on a cold winter day. Just a
few feet away Steve
Hall watches the scene, a leash in his hand.
The wolf on the other end of the leash is one of three
owned by Hall and
his wife, Wendy, a wildlife rehabilitator. The couple
owns Adirondack
Wildlife Refuge, and the animals are used for education,
including popular “wolf walks.” During the walks, visitors
hike with Hall and the wolves. Hall hopes the walks will
give people a better understanding of animals that are
commonly feared even though they rarely attack humans.
Hall yearns for a day that wild wolves return to the
Adirondacks. He sees the wolf not only as filling an
important role in the ecosystem as a keystone predator,
but also as a tourist draw.
“We publicize the Adirondacks for summer hiking,
fishing, hunting, winter sports, stuff like that, but also
it could be a good place to see wildlife,” Hall said.
“I think we should position the Adirondacks as
another place to see wildlife a la Algonquin Park
[in Ontario]. We’d start to open up to a whole
new type of tourist.”
Hall is one of numerous wildlife advocates who
are hoping state and federal wildlife
agencies will work to facilitate the wolf’s return
to the Northeast. Wolves
disappeared from New York State around
1900 as a result of habitat
destruction and unregulated hunting. Between
1871 and 1897,
ninety-eight wolves were killed for bounties
in the state, according
to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Gray wolves are listed as endangered in the
Lower 48 states,
but largely because they have made a
comeback out west, the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service has proposed delisting
them. Wolves also are on New
York State’s list of endangered species.
In December, however, the state
Department of Environmental Conservation
dropped cougars, lynx, and
wolves from its proposed list of Species
of Greatest Conservation Need
. In the past, extirpated species had been
on that list, which is part of the
state’s Wildlife Action Plan.
“We feel that our conservation work is better
directed at retaining viable
populations of the species that are currently
present in New York,”
said DEC biologist Joe Racette, coordinator
of the Wildlife Action Plan.
At this time, DEC has no interest in
reintroducing wolves to the state.
Gordon Batcheller, DEC’s chief wildlife
biologist, told the Adirondack
Explorer that the department lacks the
staff and funding to reintroduce
or aid the recovery of large predators such
as mountain lions and wolves.
He also said the department already has
its hands full with hundreds of
other species in need of protection.
Furthermore, he said reintroducing
cougars or wolves would be a complex
undertaking, requiring the cooperation
of nearby states and support from a wide
range of stakeholders.
“We just aren’t able to take this one on
right now because it’s so huge,” he said
. “We don’t have the capacity to deal with
it, and it would take an awful lot of
analysis and evaluation and public
engagement before we even got out of
the gate.”
Peter Nye, who headed the DEC
Endangered Species Unit before retiring
in
2010, said wolves didn’t have the public’s
support in the 1990s, when there
was a campaign to bring them back, and
doubts that they do now. “We
didn’t actively have any programs to
even think about bringing wolves back
,” Nye said. “It was just too contentious.”
Both Batcheller and Nye said wolves
probably would migrate beyond the
Adirondack Park to low-lying areas
where deer are more plentiful. “That
would immediately, of course, set up a
problem for the animals in terms of
people interactions,” Nye said.
Wolves are known to prey on livestock,
and like other predators, they
have a reputation for being dangerous
to humans, even though only a
handful of fatal wolf attacks have been
recorded in North America.
Cristina Eisenberg, scientist for
Earthwatch, an international nonprofit,
lived in northern Montana and observed
wolves recolonizing that area.
“Wolves are not at all dangerous to
humans in my experience,” she said.
“I’ve been around hundreds of wild
wolves at very close range and they don’t
see us as prey.”
“The only wolves that are dangerous,
that have been documented attacking
or killing people, are wolves that are
habituated by humans to human food,”
she added.
Even if DEC won’t reintroduce wolves,
wildlife advocates are hopeful that
someday the predators will recolonize
the Adirondacks on their own. Over
the years, there have been a number
of reported wolf sightings, but physical
evidence has generally been lacking.
Scientists did confirm that a wild wolf
was killed in Day, north of the Great
Sacandaga Lake, in December 2001.
Wolf populations have rebounded and
expanded out west. In the Grea
t Lakes region – Minnesota, Wisconsin,
and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula –
there are now 4,500 animals and tens
of thousands of wolves live in Canada.
“One of the amazing things about the past
few years is all these animals—
cougars or wolves or what have you – are
just really showing us that their
wildways do exist, these corridors, and
most of these animals, they roam,”
said Maggie Howell, executive director
of the Wolf Conservation Center in
downstate New York and coordinator of
the Northeast Wolf Coalition, which
was formed last year by scientists and
environmental groups.
Wildlife advocates believe the wolf
stands a better chance than the cougar
of returning to the Adirondacks. Ontario’s
Algonquin Provincial Park, which
lies a couple of hundred miles to the
northwest, has a few hundred wolve
s and even sponsors wolf howls for
tourists.
Wolves from Algonquin are the most
likely to disperse to the Adirondacks,
according to many observers.
Nevertheless, there are obstacles.
“The eastern wolf is really close, but
there is very aggressive hunting and
trapping between here and Algonquin
Park,” Howell said. In addition, wolves
must cross numerous roads, including
Highway 401 in southern Ontario,
a fragmented landscape, and the St.
Lawrence River.
Yet there is evidence that Canadian
wolves can make it across the border.
In addition to the animal killed in Day
in 2001, two wolves were shot in
Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom in
1998 and 2006, presumably after
migrating south from Quebec.
“And these are only the ones we
know of because we killed them,”
said
Eisenberg, who is writing a book on
eastern carnivore conservation.
“From what I know, this is the tip of
the iceberg, that there are many
more that are making their way down,
likely down from Canada, although
some may be dispersing from the
upper Midwest.”
Evidently, New York State has plenty
of habitat and prey to support a wolf
population.
The Eastern Wolf Status Assessment
Report, prepared for the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2011
concluded that “sizeable
areas of potential wolf habitat exists in
this state, especially in the
area of the Adirondacks.” The report
refers to several studies that
reached the same conclusion, including
one that estimated that the
state could have supported up to 460
wolves in 2000.
If wolves do return to the Adirondacks,
one concern is that hunters
will mistake them for coyotes and
shoot them. Like many states,
New York has a liberal coyote-hunting
season, lasting from fall to
spring. Moreover, the state allows
hunters to kill an unlimited number
of coyotes and doesn’t require hunters
to report their kills.
The Northeast Wolf Coalition argues
that one reason DEC need
s a wolf-recovery plan is to protect
dispersing wolves from coyote hunters.
“There is evidence that wolves have
attempted to naturally recolonize
the region,” Howell said. “But because
states in the region sanction
policies that encourage the
unregulated killing of canids,
this evidence
is in the form of dead wolves.
New York needs a management
plan to address
the potential return of wolves, to
promote wolf recovery, educate
the public,
and have a plan in place to protect
wolves from being killed accidentally
or intentionally.”
In the 2005 version of the state’s
Wildlife Action Plan, which is being
updated, DEC took more interest
in the wolf. The report noted tha
t wolves from Algonquin Park range
to within fifty miles of the New York
border. The report also discussed
the need for surveying public
opinion about wolf recovery, adding
that identifying the wolf as a
Species of Greatest Conservation
Need “will facilitate the evaluation
.” DEC never conducted the survey,
and Racette said it is not a high priority
now.
“It is possible that wolves will be
able to naturally expand their range
to New York from nearby populations
in Canada, and if that does
occur we will conduct outreach to
help people learn how to coexist
with wolves,” Racette told the Explorer.
Howell says the Northeast Wolf
Coalition hopes to conduct its own
survey, but she couldn’t provide
any details because it’s still in the
early planning stages.
Wildlife advocates contend that if
wolves return, they will have
a beneficial impact on the
environment. “In pretty much any
system where you have active
predation, you will have higher
biodiversity than in one where
you don’t. This has been observed
in oceans, coral reefs, savannahs,
worldwide in many different
types of ecosystems,” Eisenberg
said.
Yet scientists debate what,
exactly, the wolf’s ecological
role would
be and which wolf would fill it.
Because canids interbreed, the
wolf
gene pool has become
complicated. Algonquin Park
has some
gray wolves, which are also
found in the Great Lakes region
, but the majority of them are
smaller eastern wolves, which
may or may not be a separate
species.
In addition, the eastern coyote,
which lives in the Adirondacks,
has some wolf genes as a result
of interbreeding.
“Wolf taxonomy right now is a
mess,” Eisenberg said. “The
experts
don’t agree about what an
eastern wolf is.” Indeed, it’s uncertain
what wolf originally lived in New
York State.
In the Adirondacks, hybridization
would likely occur between dispersing
eastern wolves and the resident
coyotes, according to DEC biologist
Jenny Murtaugh. In contrast, scientists
believe that gray wolve
s, such as those in the Great Lakes,
do not breed with coyotes
in the wild and displace them instead.
“Thus, dispersing gray wolves from
Quebec and Ontario
may have a higher probability of
avoiding genetic
swamping from eastern coyotes
and establishing
a viable population in New York,”
Murtaugh wrote for the
forthcoming Wildlife Action Plan.
Steve Hall, the owner of the
Adirondack Wildlife Refuge,
acknowledges that wolves may
breed with coyotes in the
Adirondacks, but he still argues
that their presence would
make the Park a wilder place.
“I don’t really go along with the
idea that we have to have pure
gray wolves, pure Canadian wolves,
” Hall said. “We have an
animal we call the coy-wolf, who
is rather impressive and rather
beautiful, and I think if we let wolves
come back you’ll see larger coy-wolves.”
Hall said wolves would benefit the
region economically, noting that
tourists visit Algonquin Park,
northern Minnesota, and Yellowstone
Park to hear or see wolves.
In Yellowstone, where wolves were
reintroduced in the mid-1990s, wolf
tourism translates into $35 million a
year in visitor spending, according
to a 2006 report prepared for the
Yellowstone Park Foundation.
Lake Placid resident Larry Master,
a former chief zoologist for the
Nature Conservancy and an
Adirondack Explorer board member,
has visited Yellowstone Park to
photograph wolves. “My god, I would
love to hear wolf packs,” Master said.
“People camp for weeks on
end in late May, early June in camper
vans with telescopes and
spotting scopes with the hope of
seeing a wolf, or wolf packs hunting
. It’s an enormous economic boon
for that area.”
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