A Canid Soup intersection event about to take place in South Dakota?

Wolves from Minnesota have been dispersing into South Dakota for the last decade. The occasional wolf from Wyoming has wandered into the State as well. Are those Wyoming wolves(C.Lupus-Gray Wolves) going to be able to begin hybridizing with the Minnesota wolves who are a genetic continuum of both C. lupus and C. lycaon(Eastern wolves)? Ed Bangs(USFW Wolf Recovery Coordinator) has said that lone wolves leave the natal pack one at a time and almost always have a very difficult chance of encountering a mate in a new territory long stripped of its wolf population. Perhaps the chances for success in South Dakota will increase with dispersers coming into the State from both from the East as well as the West............We root for them finding one of their own and making the Dakotas a permanent residence!

I THANK MY FRIEND HELEN MCGUINNIS OF THE EASTERN COUGAR FOUNDATION FOR TURNING ME ONTO THE ARTICLE BELOW..................ALL ENJOY!

By Mark Watson, Black Hills Pioneer

BLACK HILLS - Wolves are at our door - and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department is preparing for wolves to venture into South Dakota. Some have already passed through the state in recent years.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife reported in 2006 that wolves were in Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains, and local officials are expecting them to wander east, at least in small numbers.

"We are going to start thinking about wolves in South Dakota because we are quite certain that they are coming, and we need to be prepared to manage them when they do get here," said John Kanta, a regional wildlife manager with the GF&P.

Currently the state operates under an August 1994 U.S. Fish and Wildlife contingency plan.

"It's more or less to address depredations with wolves," Kanta said. "What we would like to do is put together a full-blown management plan. In other words, 'Do we want to sustain a population of wolves, and if so how are we going to do that? How are we going to respond to the problems that come with wolves considering that we have a number of ranchers out there who are raising sheep, which can certainly be an issue with wolves.'"

In 2006, according to a report, four wolves lived in the Big Horns.

Ed Bangs, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wolf recovery coordinator, said they are now gone.

"Last year there was one pack there and they lived there for a couple months," Bangs said. "One was killed by a (trap), and the other just disappeared."

Each year, Kanta said the GF&P receives a handful of wolf reports, but there have only been two verified wolf reports. The first was a wolf killed approximately four years ago by a lethal trap set for coyotes in Harding County. DNA testing determined that it traveled from the Minnesota population.

On March 27, 2006, a wolf was killed on Interstate 90 adjacent to the Black Hills National Cemetery. Testing proved that it was related to the wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996.

Dispersing wolves are commonly killed by such incidents, Bangs added.

"When that wolf was killed we got a few reports from ranchers who thought that wolf may have killed their livestock, but several months prior," Kanta said. "What it did was create a little bit of hysteria, so the reports started coming in. We see that with the mountain lions too.

"When the lions are in the news or we remove a mountain lion, you get more reports after than. But we are averaging a handful of reports each year. It's not very many."

Now those sighting may be even more rare as the Fish and Wildlife Service approved Wyoming's wolf management plan, ruling that wolves are predators outside the northwest corner of the state, allowing people to kill any number of wolves, the same as with coyotes.

The plan is slated to take affect in late February and wolves in the Rocky Mountain region will be removed from the threatened species list in late March.