Has anyone looked into our situation here in the Bitterroot valley in Montana? Our wolf population is exploding, and you know what? So is our elk population! Our herd here has been expanding slowly for 10-20 years, then they introduced wolves but the elk expansion just keeps picking up steam. We have more elk here than I've ever seen before, and our calf ratios are hitting up around 40 per 100 cows. Biologists believe we have more elk now than at any time in history.

With due respect to everyone here who is going to want to attack me after this post, but I think the wolf is just a handy whipping boy for every day somebody comes out of the woods not having had the success they had hoped. "By gummy, it must be them durned wolves again." If you think about it, some hunters blame wolves in exactly the same fashion that the antis blame hunters. I know because I lived in Seattle for many years, whenever any apparent problem arose with wildlife, the antis immediately jump on their "it's them durned hunters again" bandwagon. We hunters don't appreciate this for obvious reasons, then we turn around and do the same thing to wolves.

Archaeologists have projected that back in the day when Indians had the run of the entire country, they took an annual harvest of deer and elk very comparable to what we hunters do today. The Indians could do this even though they let the wolf alone.

I know that people in central Idaho are currently crying the wolf blues, yet when I went through the wildlife management program at University of Idaho in the late '80s, I remember reading some real interesting science. This science was written in the '70s, and predicted that as the burn areas from the fires of the early part of the 20th century grew back, that we would see dramatic declines in elk numbers throughout much of Idaho.

This prediction has come true, so is the wolf really to blame? We let those burn areas grow back and shut down logging all across the West at the same time. What result would you expect from a situation where dark timber is allowed to grow back at the expense of successional stages of vegetation (brush and grass) that elk like to eat? Why, you're going to see declining elk numbers.

The answer my friend, is habitat. Habitat, habitat, habitat. Lots of fires and lots of logging created great elk forage conditions in the early part of the 20th century. Thus, we saw a nearly nationwide surge in elk numbers from roughly 1930 to 2000. Nowadays, the cumulative effect of shutting down logging and Smokey Bear sniffing out every fire before it started to flame has returned much of the West to a successional stage that is generally less favorable for elk.

The Indians did manage the land, by setting fires to knock back the constant advance of vegetation. And, harking back to the Bitterrroot example I started with, we had those huge "catastrophic" fires in 2000. (I personally was rooting for the fires that year, although I could have done without the smoke and the lost homes.) I predicted then in my little circles that we were going to have an elk boom, damn the wolves. In 2003 and 2004 we have had biologist counts showing up to 40 calves to 100 cows, numbers we could only dream of ten years ago (before wolves), when the number lagged around 25 calves per 100 cows.

In summary, while I grant that in local cases wolves may have some impact, they take a distant back seat to considerations of habitat. Clear out some of that old dark timber, log it or burn as you wish, and watch the elk come back! Our true battle as hunters should be to see sane management practices instituted in our forests, and give the wolves a little bit of a break. Oh yeah, and let's get Wyoming off their silly duffs so they put together a reasonable plan so we can get wolf management where it belongs, with the states.