Commission sets wolf hunting regulations, quotas; units tweaked near Yellowstone

Following pressure from Yellowstone National Park and locals living north of the park boundary, the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission on Friday unanimously adopted an amendment to the wolf and furbearer regulations for the upcoming hunting season that will split Wolf Management Unit 313 – just north of the park boundary – back into two units and only allow three wolves to be killed in each.

The commission also approved another amendment that will again ban the use of telemetry and motion-tracking devices when people are hunting wolves. It had been banned up until the 2021-22 wolf hunting season, when the commission again allowed the practice for wolf hunting, as well as the use of bait and night hunting on private lands.

Both amendments were offered by Region 3 Commissioner Susan Kirby Brooke, who said they came as a result of a year’s worth of meetings with locals and business owners in Park and Gallatin counties, as well as leadership at Yellowstone National Park.

Park Superintendent Cam Sholly sent the commissioners a letter in June directly requesting the two changes and summarizing a host of reasons, which was cited by multiple speakers during public comment Friday, as to why the commission should adopt the changes.

“The public, I think, weighed in in a pretty big way that they did not like the concentrated harvest that close to the city of Gardiner and the impact for the businesses of the wolves being harvested – that many wolves right close to where their businesses are,” Brooke explained to the commission. “And a lot of these people are taking tourist business into these areas, and it hurts their business to have that many wolves taken out of that small of an area.”

Wolf Management Unit 313 will be split into two units, 313 and 316 again for the 2024-25 season, as had previously been the case, and each will have a wolf quota of three for the season. WMU 313 had a six-wolf quota last season, which was reached on Dec. 25 last year. In 2022, the six-wolf quota was reached on Feb. 6. Commissioners and other at Friday’s meeting said 316 was a more difficult and remote area to hunt, while 313 funnels animals down into the valley, making them easy targets.

In his June letter, Sholly said 13 wolves from Yellowstone packs had been killed this past winter, including eight killed legally in Montana, accounting for about 10% of the wolf population in Yellowstone. Six of those eight were killed in WMU 313, and they came from three different Yellowstone packs. Two more Yellowstone wolves were taken in Region 3 near its boundary with WMU 313, and another Yellowstone wolf was poached in WMU 313 in February, Sholly said.

He added that two other collared wolves died this past winter from gunshots the park believes the wolves sustained inside WMU 313 but could not verify.

“In all, these mortalities resulted in the dissolution of three Yellowstone packs that counted toward the 2023 park population,” Sholly wrote to the commissioners.

He said that 20 years of radio collar data shows the Yellowstone packs remain inside the park boundaries at least 96% of the year, and that when hunters in Montana and other states kill breeding wolves and alphas, their deaths have multiple effects for packs and breeding.

“From this information, there are relatively few resident wolves in WMU 313 beyond the transboundary movements of a few Yellowstone packs,” Sholly wrote. “The state population counting methodologies that rely on the iPOM model to estimate wolf abundance and guide harvest recommendations are unable to provide fine-scale wolf abundance metrics in the WMU adjacent to the park.”

Sholly said in some cases, the human-caused death of wolves leads to declining pup production, while in other cases, like in the 2021-22 season when an alpha female from the 8-Mile pack was trapped in WMU 313, three subordinate females started breeding, and 18 pups were born in 2023.

He also asked the commission to ban the use of telemetry for wolf hunting, saying it went against the ethics of fair chase hunting. And he told the commissioners that there have been fewer than 10 livestock depredations caused by wolves during the past 10 years in Park County, meaning one of the state legislature’s primary reasons for setting a goal of having a declining wolf population in Montana was not occurring.

Further, he said, the state’s elk population is at or above the stated objectives in Hunting District 313, in Region 3, and statewide, and more bull elk have been harvested in Hunting District 313 during the past decade than during the previous decade.

“These data suggest that elk are doing well statewide and locally, while living in a landscape with multiple predator species that include wolves, cougars, grizzly bears, black bears, and human hunters,” Sholly wrote.

He said in his letter, and many others noted during Friday’s meeting and in public comments submitted this summer, that wolf watching in Yellowstone brings in around $80 million to local economies in Gardiner and the surrounding area. They said that is critical money for the region that could be jeopardized if the wolf population dips too low or people see wolves being killed near the park, cities and towns.

Greater Yellowstone Coalition wildlife program manager Brooke Shifrin told commissioners at Friday’s meeting the group and others in the region were thankful for the amendments and they felt their voices had been heard by Brooke and the other commissioners.

“She’s demonstrated real impressive leadership in listening to and understanding the perspectives of her local constituents,” Shifrin said. “…I’d like to also just offer that when we’re talking about a geography just outside an iconic national park that draws global and international attention, it’s simply not realistic to think that social considerations would not be a part of the equation.”

Commission moves statewide wolf quota to 334 for season

The commission also agreed to increase the statewide wolf quota to 334 for the upcoming season, up from 313 last year. Hunters and trappers took 286 wolves during the last season and did not meet quotas in Regions 1 or 2, but it was the first season in which wolf trapping was limited to Jan. 1 to Feb. 15 in Regions 1 through 5 because of a court order handed down that said trapping outside that window posed dangers to threatened grizzly bears who might still be outside of their winter dens.

During the full license year, which runs from Sept. 2 through March 15, another 21 wolves were taken through controlled removals, the lowest number during the past five years. Total harvest was up to 307 last season, six more than the prior season, but down 70 wolves from the five-year high of 377 wolves killed in Montana in the 2019-20 season, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks data.

The commission was also presented data, based on the Integrated Patch Occupancy Model (iPOM) that Montana uses to estimate wolf populations, showing how various quota variations could affect wolf populations during the next five years.

The state estimates there were 1,096 wolves in Montana as of Dec. 31 last year, which is when the state performs its annual wolf estimates. That number is also highly disputed by some conservation groups who do not believe the model captures the true population and believe it is actually much lower, perhaps even half the number.

The data shown to the commission presented eight scenarios for Montana’s wolf population based on different harvest quotas and combined with 53 removals each year. The model closest to the quota set for 2024-25 looked at how the wolf population would respond if 331 wolves were harvested each year.

That model showed the state estimates the wolf population could decline to near the low-end threshold of 450 wolves, which would support 15 breeding pairs under the state’s wolf management plan, in 2028. But due to the iPOM estimation range growing each year after 2024, the range for that year is somewhere between 0 wolves and about 1,250.

“Its best predictive quality is really in the next year, and then for every year we go past that, it really starts to get deeply, deeply conservative. To the point where five years out, it says you could go high or low, you know, almost the entire span of the population,” said Region 1 Commissioner Patrick Tabor. “And that’s kind of by design. The way iPOM works is that it’s got a substantive built-in conservatism.”

But several speakers, including Bold Visions Conservation Executive Director Stephen Capra, said Montana’s effort to manage wolves for a consistently declining population will put Montana’s wolf management responsibilities in jeopardy, as well as its hopes for a delisted grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem – a decision which will be made by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by the end of January.

“We have an election coming up in November, and everything’s going to be done here in Montana, and that’s when the feds come and say, ‘We’re re-listing wolves,’” Capra said. “Because you, Idaho, and Wyoming have shown no ability to manage wolves, and now you have the gumption to ask for grizzly bears. We say no.”

The commission did not set wolf trapping season dates and where those will apply at Friday’s meeting; those will be set at the commission’s Oct. 10 meeting. The federal court decision that limited wolf trapping season last year was limited to the 2023-24 season, but the reasons behind the injunction will again have to be considered by the commission in setting dates.