Brother Predator

DAVID PARSONS was a young biologist who had as much experience with wolves as you’d expect, growing up in Iowa. His student research focused on birds. Climbing the career ladder at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), he gravitated to whichever postings seemed most interesting.
    As he tells it, one day he got a funding appeal in the mail from a nonprofi t group that wanted to force the government to fund a full-time Mexican wolf recovery program coordinator. He told his wife he was sending in $100, because he wanted that job!
    Six months later, he had it.
    “I was naive enough not to understand the politics,” he says now, white-haired and wise to the minefield he walked into 23 years ago. From 1990 to 1999, Parsons ran one of three federal programs mandated by the Endangered Species Act to save the Gray Wolf from extinction. His area of responsibility was the Mexican Gray Wolf, the most endangered of any in North America. By 1970, this subspecies had been hunted to extinction, with only about 50 animals left in breeding facilities. The plan was to rebuild a population of 100 wolves on national forest land in Arizona and New Mexico by 2006.
    Three decades later, that population still stands at 75, though some 50 wolves have been found illegally shot, trapped, or dead.
    In the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes, wolf recovery has been so successful that the animals are being hunted again, and the FWS is under intense pressure to remove Endangered Species protection. Parsons’ failed battle in the Southwest has thus turned him into a dogged advocate, one who still testifies at every government hearing.
    At an FWS hearing in November, for example, hundreds of people packed a ballroom at the Embassy Suites hotel in Albuquerque to testify on proposed changes to federal wolf policy. Advocates for both sides lined the halls with tables and petitions, and three times the moderator had to warn the crowd to stop applauding and yelling as people spoke.
    We caught up with Dave Parsons a few weeks later to get his take on the wildlife controversy that never seems to end.

Why is it the Mexican wolf pro- gram alone has not succeeded?
     It’s mostly politics. But one primary difference is they had two places in the Northern Rockies that provided safe haven for wolves—Yellowstone National Park and the large wilderness areas in central Idaho. That allowed those wolves an easier start than our Mexican wolves.
    Another key difference was the Mexican Gray Wolf recovery program relied on captive-raised wolves. In the Northern Rockies, they were an experienced population of wild wolves, same as in the Great Lakes. There wasn’t the controversy of putting them in.
    The Mexican Gray Wolf was functionally extinct by 1940, meaning there was no documented breeding. That fi rst recovery team was faced with captive breeding from ten animals. It was not a full roadmap to recovery, but to prevent extinction.

If wolves are, as you and
other biologists say, critically important to the ecosystem, we should see conditions today that result from their long absence.
     Here in the Southwest, we have the complication that our riparian forests were severely degraded by cattle and sheep brought here in huge numbers beginning in the 1800s. We had a jump start on all those effects, so you can’t tag it to the disappearance of wolves. In my talks I show a photo of Yellowstone in the mid-1900s, with the excess of elk and the lack of young trees. In the later photo you see the recovery of the willows (after wolves were put back). now the streams run clearer and cooler, which supports trout. The beavers are returning, and they build ponds that provide habitat for ducks and songbirds.

As far as the public is concerned, comments to the Fish & Wildlife Service seem to run 20 to 1 in favor of wolf recovery. Is the agency bound to consider public opinion?
     Their decision is supposed to be based on science—the best science available. Most of what you see at these public hearings is of little value to the agency. The only comments of value are those that offer a substantive idea of how to do something differently. The rest is mostly for show. But the process creates a situation where both sides feel a need to show up and outshout each other.

This idea that top predators
are essential to the health of ecosystems, how established is it among scientists?
     There are some papers out there that try to make the claim that there is no evidence of a direct effect (on the ecosystem from wolves). I haven’t seen a paper that really proves it. The preponderance of evidence supports the role of top predators—it’s an accepted theory, like evolution.

Since the Mexican wolf program is introducing the wolf to new areas, isn’t there bound to be a problem when a wolf shows up in a residential area, like Corrales?
     I don’t think a wolf would come anywhere near Corrales, because there’s no suitable habitat nearby. Unlike coyotes, wolves don’t have plasticity in their diet, where they can eat everything from berries to midsize animals. Wolves evolved to eat large packages of meat, and their pack structure keeps them from going after small game. The goal has always been to establish wolves on public land, not private. You have to have a good steady supply of things like elk and deer. And public lands like the Gila and Apache national forests, where we introduced the wolves, turned out to be the best areas for that.

What about wolves that have been found killed—who is doing it, and why?
When I was running the program, poaching would peak during hunting season. There are more people in the woods with guns, and the opportunity to see wolves is increased. Plus there’s been a long tradition of shooting coyotes on sight, and the Mexican wolves can look like coyotes—at least, that’s everyone’s excuse who gets caught. Plus there’s widespread trapping in this state. Who knows what happens to a wolf found in a trap, especially one that doesn’t have a radio collar?

Why do you think hatred of wolves persists after all these centuries?
It’s a phenomenon that goes beyond the ability to understand it. There’s no basis for it at all, it’s just an ingrained perception.
    There are odd parallels with Europe. For example, there are some 2,500 wolves in Romania, which is slightly smaller than New Mexico—but those people never experienced living without wolves, so the traditions are there, how you manage livestock. Here, we simply wiped out the predators and established ranching practices based on government- assisted predator control. There are proven ways to coexist with them. There are conservation groups working with ranchers to develop more predator-friendly practices.