Wolves likely roam in region, experts say

If you spot a wolf or wolf tracks, call ODFW at 541-963-2138. For more information, visit www.dfw .state.or.us/Wolves/index.asp.

Last year, a driver snapped a picture of a large wolflike animal that crossed U.S. Highway 20 near Suttle Lake — and this year, a Eugene woman saw a similar animal just a half-mile away.

And people reported spotting a gray wolf west of Wickiup Reservoir last summer, hearing animals howl north of Waldo Lake last fall and seeing large tracks in the snow this winter in the Wickiup area.

“I’m pretty confident from the incident last year and some of the others that we do have some lone wolves moving around in the Central Oregon area,” said John Stephenson, Oregon’s wolf coordinator with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

As wolves have been introduced into other Western states, including Idaho, several have wandered into Oregon, where they had previously been killed off in the 1940s. And Stephenson plans to do tracking surveys this winter in the Wickiup area and in the Maury Mountains area east of Prineville, to try to confirm the new presence of gray wolves.

Biologists are tracking the wolves’ progress across the state, and once the population reaches a certain size — with four breeding pairs together for three consecutive years in Eastern or Western Oregon — the state will consider taking them off Oregon’s endangered species list. Wolves are off the federal list in the eastern third of the state but are still federally protected west of U.S. Highway 395.

Both the state and federal government laws prohibit people from killing the animal, however. And Stephenson said the maximum federal penalty for doing so would be $100,000, a year in prison or both.

Several pairs have been spotted in the state so far. One pair of wolves was seen last year near the Washington border, Stephenson said — but officials don’t know whether they had pups this year.

A separate pack of 10 animals, including six pups, was caught on video last November in the Imnaha Wildlife Management Unit east of Joseph.

“We knew we had a pack there, but to have 10 wolves there is more than we bargained for,” he said.

But those animals haven’t killed any livestock in the Imnaha Valley, Stephenson said, even though livestock were grazing in the area this summer.

It was a better situation than the one in Keating Valley in Baker County, he said. There, a pair of wolves killed 29 sheep. The killings started in the spring, and then after the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife tried to harass the animals over the summer to get them to stay away from the ranch, the wolves returned and killed more sheep in August. The state ended up shooting the wolves from the air.

The Central Oregon Cascades, with deer and elk herds, would make good habitat for gray wolves, Stephenson said. And because the area has fewer grazing allotments and ranches than Eastern Oregon, there could be fewer problems with wolves killing livestock.

“There’s good habitat over here, it’s not suspiring that they’d eventually get here,” he said.

But it is surprising they came so quickly — it’s a long trot from Idaho or Eastern Washington, where the wolves probably originated.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has received reports of wolves in the Cascades for years, said Steven George, wildlife biologist with the agency’s Bend office. But the number of reports, and their potential validity, has increased in the past three or four years, he added.

“Up until the last few years, they really sounded more like a hybrid or domestic (dog) that was released or got loose,” George said of the reports.

This winter, Stephenson will be looking for signs of multiple animals — and the possibility that a pair has decided to stay in the area.

“A single animal wandering — it’s not going to reproduce and create a pack, it’s not going to create a population,” he said. “What we’re most interested in is if we have a population of wolves in the area.”