The Company of Wolves (44 page)

Waiting for nature to recharge the system was not in Alaska’s temperament. Hunting was, in the 1960s and 1970s, one of the reasons migrants moved to Alaska. And out-of-state hunters coming for trophy sheep, moose, and caribou brought in money that guides and lodges depended upon. The 1983 study concluded, “Periodic artificial removal of wolves is the most practical option.”

But not all—perhaps not even most—of the wolf-control efforts worked. In the Nelchina Basin, Warren Ballard found that grizzly bears accounted for 91 percent of predation on moose calves, while wolves took as little as 4 percent. “Reduction in wolf numbers,” Ballard concluded, “failed to greatly improve calf survival.” Victor Van Ballenberghe, who studied wolves and prey in Minnesota and in Alaska, and who served on the Alaska Board of Game for three years, says control efforts in the McGrath area similarly showed that removal of wolves did little to increase moose populations. “The only area where they saw a really dramatic response to wolf control,” says Van Ballenberghe, “was Game Management Unit 20A, the Tanana Flats area. And all the ingredients were there: the moose population was low, the bear population was low, there wasn’t a hunting problem because the hunting season had been closed, and winter weather following the wolf control was mild.”

Albert Manville, senior staff wildlife biologist for Defenders of Wildlife, believes even the wolf-control effort in the Tanana Flats
area did not help caribou to increase. The caribou population in the area rose from 2,000 in 1976 to 10,700 in 1989. But Manville points out that, except for the winter of 1984–85, all those winters were mild, five of them the five mildest on record. In the next three years, the Delta caribou herd declined to approximately 4,000, and Manville points out that two of those winters were among the most severe on record and that the summers were extremely dry.

Opponents of the wolf hunts argue that, almost everywhere they have been instituted, predator controls have become long-term and intensive, because human hunters want to keep their newly acquired share of the harvest, and because the predators adjust their birth rates to such human assaults by breeding at younger ages and having larger litters. A study of eighty-nine female wolves shot in various parts of Alaska from 1959 to 1966 found that all but ten of them had been pregnant. The shooting and poisoning may have so upset pack and territorial structures that the breeding rate was abnormally high. Douglas Pimlott found that when wolves were aggressively hunted in Algonquin Provincial Park nearly 60 percent of the females gave birth. Pimlott found that only 15 to 30 percent of the individuals in unhunted wolf populations were pups, whereas more than half the individuals in hunted populations were pups. Mech found in Minnesota that, when wolves reached higher density, 66 percent of the pups were males, but in two areas where wolves were hunted, only 27 percent were males. Clearly, wolf control increases the birth rate in surviving wolves. And when control stops, wolf populations may increase with surprising speed. In 1958, when predator control stopped, there were an estimated 120 wolves in Alaska’s Nelchina Basin. By 1965, despite illegal airborne hunting of those wolves, Department of Fish and Game biologist Robert Rausch estimated there were between 350 and 400.

For ten years, Alaskans debated wolf controls. Ed Bangs, who was working in Alaska in the 1980s, recalls how emotional it was. When a small plane crashed in the bush, injuring the Department of Fish and Game personnel aboard, he heard people say, “Good, they deserved it for gunning down wolves.” The issue was so polarized that in 1986, when Cathie Harms, a young biologist in the Department of Fish and Game, proposed to assemble a public advisory committee to write recommendations to deal with this impasse, a nervous
superior hushed her, looked apprehensively over his shoulder, and told her not to use the word “wolf” around the office.

By 1989, a combination of hard winters, dry summers, human hunting pressure, and predators had brought many of Alaska’s moose and caribou populations to levels that game officials found alarmingly low. Declared department biologist Robert Boertje, “Moose will occur in low densities in Alaska unless wolf or bear populations are manipulated.” The department felt something had to be done. The Board of Game appointed a twelve-member panel of Alaskan citizens to look into the wolf issue and come up with a consensus view of the Alaskan wolves. The panel was chosen to represent the various interest groups—from trappers to birdwatchers—that might have a strong opinion about wolves.

In 1991, the team came up with a report declaring that, as long as this conflict raged, people of extreme views would rush to each new administration to get their interests represented, and there would be no active effort to conserve wolves. It declared, “Wolves have intrinsic value and provide multiple values to society,” that “Wolf populations can sustain harvest, but sustainable harvest levels vary,” and that Alaska has “a special responsibility to ensure that wolves and their habitat are conserved.” It found that wolves can “in some situations keep prey populations at low levels,” and that “human intervention can speed recovery of the prey population in some cases.” It recommended that human harvesting of a declining moose or caribou population should stop before wolf-control programs were put into play, and that management plans be drafted, with population goals for wolves, bears, caribou, and moose, for each of the twenty-six game-management units in Alaska. By the fall of 1992, the department had prepared specific area management plans for the two game management units close to Anchorage and Fairbanks, and it was ready to recommend them to the Board of Game.

Said David Kelleyhouse, director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation in the Department of Fish and Game, “We have bent over backwards and spent a ton of money incorporating all the views on this. Expectations are high. If this process doesn’t work, there’s no process that will.”

• • •

On a snowy night in November 1992, David Kelleyhouse sits at a table in the bar at Fairbanks’ Westmark Hotel, talking with friends about wolf control. Earlier that day, the Alaska Board of Game had begun its deliberations over the first two game-management-unit plans and the proposals contained in them to initiate the first government-operated wolf-removal program in almost ten years. Kelleyhouse is an advocate of predator control, and on the following morning, he will present the proposal to the board. He is feeling expansive. It is clear that he has the votes to win approval.

Kelleyhouse has a jokester’s grin, a dimpled chin, and a drooping mustache that somewhat masks the smile and makes him look older and more field-worn. He came to Alaska in 1976, having completed a master’s thesis on black-bear ecology at California’s Humboldt State University, and went to work for the Fish and Wildlife Service, eliminating introduced fur-farm foxes from Aleutian islands to protect endangered Aleutian Canada geese. This project convinced him that by removing predators, managers could increase prey populations. He says today, “I went back after we had removed those foxes and, man, it was like the Garden of Eden as far as birds. There were petrels and puffins and murrelets and gulls, and they were ground-nesting. Flowers were growing up in the fox trails.” He then took a job with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “When I started at Alaska Fish and Game,” he says, “my very, very first assignment was to go deal with a pack of wolves that had followed the wife of my superior and her dogs.” He went on to participate in the studies that concluded wolf controls increased moose and caribou populations. Today, he believes wolf controls are urgently needed. Says Kelleyhouse, “We’ve got a real emergency situation south of Fairbanks. The Delta caribou herd has collapsed 50 percent in the last three years.” The Fortymile caribou herd numbered fewer than twenty-two thousand.

Fish and Game officials look upon themselves as managers. Though they increasingly understand the need to manage whole ecosystems, most of the effort in game divisions goes to hunted species, because hunters still pay most of the bills. The oil boom of the 1970s brought more hunters to Alaska, but in 1980 the federal Alaska Lands Act set aside one hundred million acres of land as national parks, refuges, and preserves, and gave native Americans priority
rights to hunt there. Native corporations also closed their lands to nonnative hunters. Sport and part-time subsistence hunters were squeezed into smaller and smaller areas. The Nelchina Basin—by virtue of its road access and proximity to Anchorage, where 40 percent of Alaska’s population resides—is heavily hunted. In 1991, there were fourteen thousand applications for hunts in the Nelchina Basin, but the department issued only sixty-five hundred permits. Says Oliver Burris, a former department official and now a spokesman for the Alaska Outdoors Council, which favors wolf controls, “In 1991, the total statewide moose harvest was seven thousand. It would not take much effort at all to produce a harvest of six thousand moose out of the Nelchina Basin alone.” Alaskan game officials feel they must do something to increase moose and caribou populations to meet the demand for hunting. And wolf control, they feel, is something they can do.

To control the wolves, department officials would shoot them from airplanes and helicopters. Though the department has encouraged ground-hunting and trapping, such efforts have never taken more than 15 percent of a wolf population; for control to have an impact, there must be a take of at least 40 percent. Some people argue that it would be more effective and more humane to send department technicians out to remove wolf pups from dens and euthanize them with lethal injections, but the public would not stand for it. Some people suggest a return to poisons. Says Kelleyhouse, “It’s nonselective. I’m not willing to use toxicants.” He would love to be able to use birth control to lower the birth rate of wolves, but there are as yet only unsuccessful efforts to develop a chemical sterilant for dogs; such birth-control technologies for wildlife remain years—perhaps decades—away.

If the department does nothing, and waits for nature to rebuild the herds, Kelleyhouse is convinced the hunters will act on their own. He points to British Columbia, where public outcry also shut down aerial wolf-control efforts. In the absence of government efforts to remove wolves, says Kelleyhouse, “the local people took it into their hands and started lacing the countryside with poisons. It’s out of control. I had the exact same kind of threats coming out of Alaska. Once the people decide to break the law, you’ve really lost it. You have no management of predators.”

Kelleyhouse will propose three wolf-control efforts—one in the Nelchina Basin, one in the area of the Fortymile caribou herd, and one in the area of the Delta caribou herd, south of Fairbanks. The plans aim to increase the Delta caribou herd from its current 5,750 animals to between 7,500 and 8,000; increase the Fortymile caribou herd from 20,000 to 60,000 and the Fortymile moose population from 4,000–4,500 to 8,000–10,000; and increase moose in the Nelchina Basin from 22,000 to about 25,000 and to stabilize caribou in the basin at about 40,000 animals, down from its current 45,000. To do this, the department calculates it will have to remove 70 percent of the wolves in each of these areas for three to five years—longer if necessary.

“The reason you can do wolf control in this state,” Kelleyhouse says, “is, we have an extensive wolf population and it’s like draining water from a well: more will flow in.” Once the moose and caribou populations reach target levels, he says, the controls will stop. Kelleyhouse is confident that wolf populations would recover in a year or two. He adds that hunts are being considered only in these three areas, and “maybe we’re thinking about a small section in one other area. We don’t want to get into a bunch of wolf control.”

Kelleyhouse believes that opponents of the plan simply don’t understand either the plan or wolf biology, and says that biologists who have worked sufficiently with wolves will agree with him. “Biologists working in the field tend to agree very closely about how wolves work,” he says. “Dave Mech would be the first one to tell you what he learned in the sixties is still valid—when prey is abundant and aren’t hard-pressed, they aren’t regulated by predators. But he’d be the first one to tell you, when prey isn’t abundant, predators regulate them.

“There are a few biologists who have not worked with the wolf with hands on who have some opinions, some novel hypotheses, like the multi-equilibrium model of Dr. Haber. Gordon Haber flies over and he looks at these packs, but there’s no study design, there’s no publication. People like that have very strong opinions about wolves and they’ve read a lot of literature about wolves, but they haven’t actually worked with wolves.”

As he says this, Gordon Haber, who has been sitting on the other side of the barroom, comes over to the table and sits down. Haber is
dour and intense, an odd combination of observant and brash. He is not someone who laughs easily.

Haber was drawn to wolves as a young man by reading Lois Crisler’s
Arctic Wild
, then grew more interested in them when, between academic years at Northern Michigan University, he worked summers as a fire lookout on Isle Royale. In 1966, he went to Alaska, in part to meet Adolph Murie, and he stayed to study the same wolf packs Murie had studied twenty-five years before. Haber settled into a graduate program at the University of British Columbia and made the Mount McKinley packs the subject of his Ph.D. thesis. He has been following the wolves of Denali National Park ever since.

Though he hasn’t heard what Kelleyhouse just said, Haber is testy about such criticisms of his work. His research has consisted of observation, rather than manipulation—hence Kelleyhouse’s charges that it has little study design and that he hasn’t “actually worked with wolves.” He hasn’t extensively argued his views in the mainline scientific journals. A good deal of his work has gone into critiques of wolf-control proposals in Alaska and British Columbia. By temperament and his own preference, he is a contrary. “I don’t work for anybody,” he says. Indeed, he funds his own research in Denali National Park. “I’m independent. A lot of what I’m saying is very contrary to the established dogma, but I’m getting all my stuff directly from observation.”