Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Wolf Problems....How bad is it?

"Ask the Gunwriters" tends to be one of the more civilized forums on the Campfire. Some others--not so much....

Civilized and well informed, what a concept for adult conversation!


mike r

i too know when wolves are close to my hunting home in northern Minnesota the deer stay close to my house and the small woods,but those wolves won`t come up by the house. but the huge woods that runs over many many miles maybe 50 or 100 miles ? if you hear the wolves howling in early A.M. before light or see fresh wolf tracks in the snow you won`t see live deer in the big woods to much and if you happen to shoot a deer in evening you gotta take it out that night before the wolves or coyotes will eat that deer up, i have had that happen too.

Not one person has mentioned the Elk Management plan as being problematic for elk populations in MT... much bigger issue than wolves IMO.

the Montana mountains in the west do have a problem ,if the people who make these decisions to have a cow and calf early and long rifle season on private land and are able to take more than one cow or calf elk per person during this long extended season continues ,plus what the wolves kill .Montana will see way less elk available for hunting because the population will be very low. elk are being managed thru politics to keep the ranchers and wolf lovers happy not the hunters who pays for wildlife . the reason fewer elk are in the mountains is the cattle have over grazed public land and with wolves too in the mountains its safer and more food for elk on ranchers land but not all that land is ranchers land either some of it is public land like school sections that do not have any legal excess to this public land.as far as i am concern somehow this needs to change in a peaceful manner, hunters who are buying regular elk and deer licenses to hunt on state and federal land are the ones being robbed on being able to have a good elk hunt. so if your a politician,rancher or even higher up in management working for Montana DNR or rich and own 1,000 `s of acres of land and keep it posted shame on all of you > your the biggest problem !

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that affirms one's prior beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

Sampling Bias

In statistics, sampling bias is a bias in which a sample is collected in such a way that some members of the intended population have a lower sampling probability than others.

Recall Bias

In epidemiological research, recall bias is a systematic error caused by differences in the accuracy or completeness of the recollections retrieved by study participants regarding events or experiences from the past.

Publication Bias

Publication bias is a type of bias that occurs in published academic research. It occurs when the outcome of an experiment or research study influences the decision whether to publish or otherwise distribute it.

These are just as few Bias's. Bias is human error. Now add to that variables. There are many variables when studying wolves. Weather patterns change year to year, disease's come and go year to year. Landscape change, and a list of others that all need to be taken into account.

However it is undeniable that Wolves have had a major impact on ungulates. A 100+ pound animal needs to eat. Wolves are Carnivore's so that means hunting and scavenging. Both of which require a large amount of ground to be covered. Which requires energy, energy = food = animals!

Wolves are not the only Problem, but they are a Problem. They need to be managed and managing wolves is no easy task. Or should I say cheap task either, collaring and shooting requires helicopter time. That is not cheap!

Your all ass.

Brads a liberal sack of shït he has been good at hiding it lately but he’s no friend of a conservative red blooded Americe.
He’s an Elitist sack of shït. One of the 28 lmfao.

Brad can tell us first hand why wolves do not affect game populations. Come on Brad show your ass and tell us all what a liberal pos you are

I would agree with this.....bob

According to hunters in my home town in Lincoln County Montana, moose have been decimated.


The unit here in Idaho, where I have hunted for 28 years, has seen a noticeable change in elk behavior. Fewer small bands of 8-12. They tend to herd up into 1 or 2 large herds, these days.

Park county Wyoming where I live and have hunted for twenty years has experienced all the statements in the previous posts. I would like to add a little observations from my perspective.
The feds lied all the way through their process about wolves. They continue lying.
My little area of the Beartooths is devoid now of elk, deer and moose. Used to be about forty head of mule deer does, now there is none. Moose sightings were common as were elk. None
I used to bear hunt there, havnt seen a black bear track for five years. I hunt bears in Montana now.
Between grizzlys and wolves this area is cleaned out.
We did see five moose in Sunlight drainage this past September!!!!! A decent bull, cow and calf plus two yearlings. Very nice to see.

Park county Wyoming where I live and have hunted for twenty years has experienced all the statements in the previous posts. I would like to add a little observations from my perspective.
The feds lied all the way through their process about wolves. They continue lying.
My little area of the Beartooths is devoid now of elk, deer and moose. Used to be about forty head of mule deer does, now there is none. Moose sightings were common as were elk. None
I used to bear hunt there, havnt seen a black bear track for five years. I hunt bears in Montana now.
Between grizzlys and wolves this area is cleaned out.
We did see five moose in Sunlight drainage this past September!!!!! A decent bull, cow and calf plus two yearlings. Very nice to see.

Agree^^^^^^
Unfortunately elk are a political football in Montana and always come out on the short end..... and us hunters also come up short, they love our money though.

This article is about as spot on as I can find and comes direct from the former cheif of USFW

https://montanapioneer.com/non-nati...CBXrhVJy-nk843d2ijzd_kNkgHk-Erw4X8AOhJvA

Great read thanks for sharing

Ah, here we get it again--the claim that the wolves in the one small area of Alberta are FAR more bloodthirsty than the "original" wolves found in Montana--despite the fact that Lewis and Clark saw wolves preying constantly on bison, which apparently the transplants did not do in Yellowstone for many years--instead preferring elk. Eventually one pack learned to kill bison, but it took several years.

One basic biological fact is that large mammals tend to grow larger further north of the equator, until above the Arctic Circle,where the growing season is much shorter and food less available. This is Bergman's Rule, which not only applies to predators like wolves and grizzly bears, but prey animals such as elk, moose, deer, etc. It occurs because more body mass allows animals to stay warmer during longer, colder winters--and also occurs, for the same reason, at higher elevations further south. The larger average size of the Canadian wolves was not due to anything inherent in their "subspecies" (there is no difference in the DNA of the Canadian wolves) but their environment, just as "brown" bears are larger than inland grizzlies because of their seasonal salmon diet.

Beers was NOT the "head of USFWS," but Chief of National Wildlife Refuge Operations.

MD: So you are OK with the illegal misuse of Pitman-Robertson Funds? Thanks for explaining Bergman's Rule. No sarcasm intended.

As JB states animals tend to get bigger the farther North you go. But these wolves in Montana idaho, and Wypming, don't var I much from the original weights and lengths of the original wolves killed here a century ago. At best there might be a 10% weight increase. One of the problems is that wolves look huge when being held up. As a result, the wolfs weight is greatly inflated. A 100lb wolf is huge, and only about 10% of wolves reach that size. They simply don't live long enough,or have the genetics to reach that size. Only a very few percent grow bigger than that. I once killed a 124lb wolf . It was weighed 6 hours after I shot it by fwp. That wolf was an absolute monster. Hunters have killed a couple more of that size the last 4 years. I know that a couple of wolves in Yellowstone that were collared weighed about 135 lbs. There was also a huge wolf removed in a livestock depredations in idaho that weighed 140 lbs. That is the biggest I have heard of. Killings a wolf over120lbs is about like killing a 400" bull elk on public ground. It is doable but doesnt haopen very often. If hunters weighed the wolves they shot I bet most would overestimate the weights by 30% to 40%.

Bobmn,

I think the whole transplanting episode was a CF from the beginning, for all sorts of reasons--some of which I've already pointed out, such as the fact that the American biologists (who apparently had little or no experience with wolves) were somehow convinced the Yellowstone transplants would concentrate on bison, and not elk.

They were similarly convinced that they'd have to keep planting wolves for years, to build up the population--a notion that soon ended when the wolf population started increasing quickly, due to all the fine nutrition from the elk they ate. This despite the Canadian biologists (who had plenty of experience with wolves) telling them wolves would quickly reproduce and spread.

The Canadians also advised the U.S. contingent NOT to transplant wolves, partly because of the consequent political headaches. This also proved to be true, partly because so-called agreement on how to manage the new wolves was constantly contested in the courts by pro-wolf organizations, some of which had agreed to the basic terms of the transplanting. Some of this no doubt occurred because the pro-wolf people bought the U.S. biologists belief that wolves would always be relatively rare.

But I also grow weary of wolves (or other predators) being blamed for every downturn in big game populations. As noted earlier, Lewis and Clark found the plains full of game--and wolves. The only place they encountered a relative lack of big game (and wolves) was around Fort Mandan, in what is now North Dakota, where they spent the winter on the trip up the Missouri. This because the local tribes were settled farmers, who did not follow the bison herds like horse-culture plains Indians. Instead they hunted around home, which almost cleared the surrounding country of big game--especially after L&C hunted with them early in the winter. As soon as the expedition left the next spring, they again encountered vast numbers of big game--and wolves.

Then there's the claim that the transplanted wolves were more aggressive killers. The moose in both Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks almost disappeared at about the same time, due to wolf predation. But there were no wolf transplants in Glacier, or anywhere close. Instead the Glacier wolves had naturally repopulated the Park by immigrating south from Canada. The results were pretty much identical to Yellowstone's, partly because neither park's moose had even seen a wolf before.

But in my hunting travels have seen plenty of examples of high big game populations where wolves were also abundant. Perhaps the most memorable example occurred in 2002 in northern British Columbia, where there were so many moose I killed a big bull just about a day after I started hunting--the 13th legal bull seen. This was because a forest fire had burned the area about a decade earlier, and the valleys had grown up in perfect moose browse. As a result there were plenty of wolves--and grizzlies. (There were also plenty of elk. I killed a 6x6, again only one of a number seen throughout the hunt.)

I also believe that instead of worrying so much about wolves, American hunters in the West should worry more about chronic wasting disease, which has a far greater potential for destroying our big game.

In one of the more interesting twists, some biologists believe wolves could be one of the reasons CWD is spreading, since they can eat infected animals and introduce the prions into the wild during their wanderings.

However, there are a couple of sidelights to this. First, CWD has also shown up where there aren't any wolves, and here in Montana, elk infected with CWD are rare compared to CWD-infected deer, even though elk hang out in larger herds, which should increase infection rates. But if wolves do prove to be a CWD vector, various agencies may get serious about reducing wolf numbers--and just as important, be able to actually do something about it, despite the pro-wolf faction.