US Fish and Wildlife and the US Forest Service is planning on reintroducing wolves to specific areas of WV and Va despite the objections of many folks over concerns of the impact it will have on local farmers and local people period. They say it is to help control the so called over population of deer, but we are overloaded with coyotes and bears now. There is a problem locally with chronic wasting disease, but I think the problem period is more from people having their lands posted up and not allowing hunting. It allows the deer population to grow which in turn, allows for easier transmission of disease. I can remember a time of being able to go out into the woods and not have to carry a gun in case you ran into something that was thinking you were their next meal. Over the last few years, I’ve run into quite a few bear and hear coyotes all over the place, esp at night. I don’t go out now unless I carry because the chances of running into something are quite high now.
I think this is a bad idea to release these wolves and that it will have a very negative impact on things. I wanted to see what other people here have to say with their experiences with wolves in their areas. I’ve read a bit on it and imagine that people that have actual experience dealing with this will agree that it isn’t good.
There have allegedly been some red wolves spotted in Daniel Boone in KY that I assume would have came from this.
Surprised they included the nailing calves mention. WBIR used to have a show called The Heartland Series about eastern Tennessee that mentioned that in the 1990’s, but NPS stuff typically claims the opposite.
I don’t think it’s really necessary , as coyotes have steadily expanded their range north and East to fill the void left vacant after wolves were wiped out, so there is already something filling the niche of a large-ish Canine predator. But on the other hand if we stopped wiping things out in the first place, maybe we wouldn’t need to agonize over whether or not to reintroduce them.
Again, I don’t think there’s any real point to doing so, but I highly doubt that if wolves are reintroduced, the forests of Virginia and West Virginia are suddenly going to become killing fields, with ravenous packs of wolves devouring travelers and pursuing horse-drawn troikas through the snow.
We’ve got bears and coyotes in the woods where I live in Maine (and our coyotes are big and have a lot of wolf genes from hybridizing with them in eastern Canada ) plus the occasional cougar sighting. Hell I get coyotes thirty yards behind my house on my trail camera, personally I think it’s cool. I carry anytime I’m in the woods, but I carry anytime I’m in Walmart or registering my car at the town office too. If wolves showed up in my state I wouldn’t suddenly become uneasy in the outdoors.
The Mexican Gray Wolf was introduced into southern New Mexico around a decade ago, much to the chagrin of regional ranchers. So far the impact has been minimal, with the occasional calf falling victim. The advantage is they maintain a balance in keeping the coyote and smaller rodent population down. We have seen a couple in this area so they are migrating to a lesser extent up in the northern part of the State. More will be introduced later this year.
Prepare yourself for a big decline in deer population/hunting success. Already happened out here in Oregon after they banned cougar hunting with dogs and introduced wolves to NE Oregon. Now there are reports of wolves in NW Oregon and one of the wolves, OR#7, travelled all the way to California before making its way to southern Oregon. I have heard that the bull elk will not bugle anymore in the NE hunting units. I don’t know if that is true but I have never heard an elk bugle while hunting those areas.
Wolves got reintroduced to northern Michigan (UP) about 6-10 years ago. They are almost entirely in two forest areas at opposite ends of the UP. It was and remains a big controversy, with a lot of admirers and defenders among the crowd who have a kindergarten level understanding of nature, and a lot of skepticism, including some plain hostility, among the older and rural crowd. By far the biggest boosters of wolves are people who live hundreds of miles away, who view my area as their summer theme park and have thinly disguised contempt for the actual residents here. Locals who are ecologically minded recognize that the wolves bring problems even if they might benefit the ecosystem.
The deer herd is way down, and just in the last three years I’ve gone from seeing 5-6 deer daily on our land to rarely seeing any. Hunting success is down like 20% year over year. There are multiple factors for that including luck and differing winters, but the wolves are part of it. It’s basically pointless to try deer hunting here or anywhere in the wolf reintroduction areas. (There is plenty of forest with deer in areas outside the wolves’ current range, but that starts 100 miles from here.)
Most people don’t see the wolves, but some cattle farmers have had major predation issues. People who keep hunting dogs lose them almost routinely now, both at home and on hunts. Wolves view domestic dogs as both competition and prey, so they attack and eat them given any opportunity.
No confirmed human attacks in this area, but a number in Wisconsin to our south. We also had a hunter disappear two years ago in an area he’d been hunting for decades, still hasn’t been found after repeated searches. I imagine his rusted rifle will be found 40 years from now. No idea if wolves got him, but he disappeared at a time when there were no major hazards. A forester who walked our land to appraise tree value met a wolf face to face, it didn’t attack him but didn’t leave quickly either, it was not afraid of him. He sees wolves daily in the deep woods and told us he always carries, but didn’t that day because he was so close to town (2 miles in one direction, 3 in another) he didn’t see any risk of wolf encounters. I have seen large wolves within 1/4 mile of my house, and a medium sized wolf eating a live deer on the state highway two miles from my house.
So ya, enjoy your new wolf-pets, and keep your actual pets indoors.
Here’s one of our big wolfish Maine coyotes. That’s my shed and the corner of my house in the background. I live in a semi-suburban/rural neighborhood so I’m not way out in the sticks or something.
Even if we had actual wolves in Maine I doubt they would come this close to civilization, they are a lot less tolerant of proximity to humans than their smaller cousins.
Where I grew up in Maine was actually more rural (Rt 27 on the peninsula), and there was a wolf-dog breeder a couple properties back from us. Would very rarely hear them howl a bit.
On a separate note, I think there is some argument whether coyotes and wolves are even separate species. I imagine there’s a fair amount of interbreeding. But not an expert.
Dealing with predators is a way of life in ranching. Last year we lost calves to a Mountain Lion (Puma Concolor). We brought in a tracker with hounds and chased it up on to some rugged mesas where it ventured over to the neighboring ranch. It was never caught. Here’s a pic of two of our calves killed last year by the Lion. It’s apparent the Lion fed for a short time but never finished:
The interbreeding has been debated, and the general consensus is yes, they do. We know this due to genetics.
However, coyotes and wolves are different species physically, behavioraly, and genetically.
As to re-introducing wolves? Yes. Their extermination from much of the U.S. was a mistake that has caused a lot of unforseen consequences. While that cat is out of the bag, the first step to remedying this is to re-introduce natural predators.
I forget the details, but there was actually a recent genetic study that suggested that wolves and coyotes only diverged about 50,000 years ago (Contrary to some previously held theories and assumptions about wolf and coyote evolution and their relation to each other) and this, and some other stuff in the study, raised the possibility that coyotes might be more properly considered a subspecies of wolf vs a distinct species, personally I’m skeptical about this but I’m also not a geneticist or evolutionary biologist.
I’ve seen this in the news. The news, like all pop science articles, is vague. Reading the primary source paper, the authors state that specific North American wolves have coyote ancestry, and that the LCA may be much closer than previously believed between NA wolves. The study does not conjecture that coyotes are wolves. Indeed, their study shows a distinctness between the true “gray wolf” and coyotes, but red wolves and great-lakes wolves are coyote-wolf hybrids arising ~50,000 years ago.
I’m probably in the minority on this board, but coyotes are actually one of my favorite animals. In part because of their aptitude for thriving despite all attempts to wipe them off the face of the earth. Not only do they persist, but they actually expand their range, move into new areas, and live under our very noses. They are fantastically smart and have really succeeded under circumstances and in habitats where wolves just can’t.
Except for the wolves we domesticated and turned into dogs of course.
