Oregon monitoring state’s fifth breeding wolf pack

ENDANGERED SPECIES — In case you missed it from last week, Oregon has confirmed its fifth breeding wolf pack after documenting pups in a group roaming the Eagle Cap Wilderness.

Read on for details from the Associated Press.

Associated Press

State biologists have identified a new wolf pack in northeastern Oregon’s Eagle Cap Wilderness.

Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife wolf coordinator Russ Morgan said Friday that the discovery brings to five the number of packs with pups.

If four of those packs still have two pups each by December, that would mark a milestone toward taking wolves off the state endangered species list.

The state wolf plan calls for delisting the gray wolf after four packs successfully produce pups for three years in a row. While achieving that goal would lift the listing statewide, protections would still be exercised for wolves in the western third of the state until wolves establish breeding packs there.

While federal Endangered Species Act protection has been lifted for wolves in Eastern Oregon, the state act still covers them.

Morgan said he was backpacking on the west side of the Eagle Cap Wilderness outside Joseph last weekend when he heard howls, and found two adult wolves with five pups on the west side of the upper Minam River drainage. They will be known as the Minam River Pack.

The pack appears to be a new one, because there were no other adults besides the alpha male and alpha female, he said. He saw no signs of any kills.

Morgan said he and a friend saw the pups wading in a shallow glacial pond, and got within 20 yards of the adults when they we lying down in some grass. They got no photos.

“They saw me and they barked and howled,” he said.

The wilderness is a good place for the wolves, because they are far from cattle, Morgan said. However, the Imnaha Pack, which has been blamed for several attacks on livestock, also spends time there, on the east side. And there is no telling where the new pack may go from here.

A trail camera captured a photo of a lactating female wolf earlier this year on the east side of the lower end of the drainage. But she is not part of the new pack, Morgan said. The lactating wolf was black, and the adults in the new pack are both gray.

The department is still a long way from winning over ranchers to the idea of more wolves, largely because of ranchers’ frustrations that conservation groups have been able to block, at least temporarily, department plans to kill more members of the Imnaha Pack for preying on livestock.

Conservation groups are frustrated, as well, feeling ranchers have not done enough to protect their herds from wolves, short of demanding wolves be shot.

A lawsuit challenging a department order to kill wolves from the Imnaha pack for killing livestock is pending in the Oregon Court of Appeals.