This past October, Forest Watch joined 16 other organizations in a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (USFWS) decision to reduce federal protection for the endangered gray wolf in regions across the country. In the Northeast, where no wolf populations currently exist, but suitable habitat is abundant and public support for wolf recovery is strong, the federal government decided to completely abandon efforts to restore this native species.
Forest Watch strongly objects to the USFWS plan to administratively lump wolf recovery areas in the Great Lakes region with the Northeast. The agency has also proposed to completely remove federal protections for wolves within two years. If the government rule prevails, the only realistic chance for an active wolf recovery program in the Northeast — including reintroduction — will be lost.
Without the shield of the federal Endangered Species Act, wolves wandering into the Northeast U.S. from Canada — an unlikely possibility but not out of the question — will be highly vulnerable. Individual states do not have the legal provisions or political will to enforce strict protections for wolves. In fact, anti-wolf zealots have already attempted to “outlaw” wolves in a number of New England legislatures.
And without significantly reducing mortality rates
of wolves in southeastern Canada, or a reintroduction program in the U.S., the chances of seeing viable, functional wolf populations restored to the Northeast are remote. Wolf numbers just north of the border in Quebec are quite low, and recent survey work in northern Maine and New Hampshire, conducted by National Wildlife Federation volunteers and staff, has turned up no definite signs of wolves. Though the tracking, howling surveys, and scat collection will continue this winter, it appears that natural recolonization from the north is highly improbable.
Yet, numerous surveys show that New Englanders want wolves. And biologists have estimated that the forests of Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont could support roughly 2,000 wolves. Ultimately, the potential for renewed ecological health in the natural landscapes of northern New England and New York may partially depend on the return of this top carnivore.
The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone in 1995, for example, has already altered that ecosystem in significant, positive ways, such as causing prey animals to be less sedentary and more wary, and providing carrion for a large array of scavengers, from bears to foxes.
Wolves were once abundant in the Northeast until habitat destruction, decimation of their prey (deer, moose, woodland caribou, beaver), and human persecution wiped them out by the mid 1800s. Much the same scenario played out across the country as people exterminated wolves on the Great Plains, in the Rocky Mountains, the Southwest, and Northwest, because of societal prejudice and misunderstanding of wolves’ important role in nature.
Wolves, along with catamounts (also known as cougars or mountain lions, and also absent in the Northeast because of human persecution), were essential to keeping prey populations in balance with their food, and with other members of the forest community. Today in northern New England and the Adirondack region, the trees have grown back and deer and moose are prevalent, but the forests still wait for wolves to return.
The best hope for the forests of northern New England and New York to regain the ecological benefits and the sheer wild beauty of wolves is for the federal government to live up to its responsibility under the Endangered Species Act, and for future wolf habitat in the region to be protected and restored.
With success in both these arenas, the day when wolves return to freely roam again the deep woods of Maine or the moose-thick wetlands of the Northeast Kingdom may still be far off, but we can have faith that it will come.
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