Feds have new plan for dropping wolf protection in Northland

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today unveiled its re-worked efforts to take timber wolves off the endangered species list in the western Great Lakes and northern Rocky Mountains.

The government made a similar move in 2007, handing wolf control back to individual states and tribes. But that effort was struck-down in September by a federal judge in Washington.

The judge ruled that the government had no legal basis to separate the Great Lakes wolf recovery from other eastern states where wolves still haven't returned.

Under the new proposal, the Great Lakes region includes Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan - where wolves currently roam - and areas of North and South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana where they might show up in the future.

Wolves will remain federally protected in all other areas of the eastern and southern U.S.

The agency says it addressed the judge's concerns by citing legal authority for the agency to separate states where wolves exist or occasionally visit from states where there still are no wolves.

Few people question that wolves have recovered well across the northern Great Lakes - from a few hundred animals confined to far Northeastern Minnesota in the 1970's to about 4,000 wolves across northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

"We believe this is a major success story for conservation,'' said Lynn Scarlett, U.S. Interior deputy secretary, in a telephone press conference. Restoring wolves across the northern Great Lakes and northern Rocky Mountains "ranks among our greatest collective achievements'' in conservation.

But wolf supporters say that several state wolf management plans allow for too much trapping, shooting and possible sport hunting of wolves - activities they say could drive populations down to levels where extinction could again be possible. They also say the plan offers little chance of wolves ever recovering in other states.

Scarlett said state wildlife agencies can best oversee long-term management of the species, saying the time has come to show the Endangered Species Act can work to return wildlife to safe levels, and back to state management, noting the current Great Lakes wolf population is more than double the highest expectations set when wolves were first protected in the 1970s.

The changes will formally take place 30 days after the new plan is printed in the Federal Register later this month.

But it's unclear if judges, or animal rights groups, will accept the changes as enough.

It's also possible that an Obama administration Interior Department could pull-back the plan before it becomes official.

In July, another federal judge in Montana ruled that the federal government could not transfer wolf management to Rocky Mountain states because Wyoming's state management plan didn't protect the animal.

The new plan would remove federal protections in Montana, Idaho and eastern Washington and Oregon but retain federal regulation in Wyoming unless and until the state offers more protections for wolves.