U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delists Wyoming wolves.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Friday that it would delist wolves in Wyoming and approve the state’s management and hunting plans.

Under the ruling, wolves will be hunted and managed in a trophy game area in the northwest corner of the state outside of Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway, the National Elk Refuge and the Wind River Indian Reservation. They can be shot on sight in the rest of the state.

The ruling will be official Sept. 30, said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe.

Hunting season is scheduled to begin Oct. 1.

Wyoming has worked for nearly a decade to delist wolves in the state. Wolves were delisted for about three months in 2008 before a federal judge placed them back on Endangered Species Act protection because of concerns over genetic diversity


Wyoming is the last state in the Northern Rocky Mountains to have wolves removed from the endangered species list.

The state is divided into three areas:

A trophy game area in northwest Wyoming in which wolves will be regulated by hunting.

A small, seasonal-game area in northern Lincoln and Sublette counties in which hunters need licenses for part of the year and can shoot them on sight as predators the other part. Called the “flex zone” it gives more protection to wolves for a portion of the year as they move between Wyoming and Idaho.

In the rest of the state, wolves will be considered predators, meaning they can be shot on sight. The plan allows 52 of the state’s estimated 220 to 230 wolves to be killed this fall in northwest Wyoming outside of Yellowstone, Grand Teton National Park, the John D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway, the National Elk Refuge and the Wind River Reservation.


The Wyoming Legislature set aside $600,000 of general fund money to manage wolves for two years, Nesvik said.

The money will pay for costs including flights to put radio collars on wolves and monitor their distribution. It will also cover manpower needed to check each wolf killed during hunting season for a genetic sample.

No additional staff will be hired to help manage wolves. Game and Fish recently restructured its large carnivore section, combining research specialists and conflict management into one group.

It also has a full-time wolf biologist already in its budget. Managing wolves will mean more responsibility, but the group should be able to accomplish delisting goals, Nesvik said.

Wolf tags will be sold over the counter, similar to black bear and mountain lion tags. Hunters will be required to call a hotline to check on the quota for each area before hunting and report a kill within 24 hours. The areas will close when the quota is reached.

Resident licenses will be $18 and nonresident tags $180.

Wolf season is always open in Idaho
Eric Barker | Posted: Monday, July 2, 2012 5:18 pm

In a move that is sure to please many hunters and anger wolf advocates, Idaho approved new wolf hunting regulations that allow the canine predators to be hunted 365 days a year.

It is not a wide open, general hunt. But if one travels around the state, there will always be a place to pursue Canis lupus.

Idaho had allowed 10 months of wolf hunting during the 2011-2012 season, with the hunt open from Aug. 1 to March 31 in most of the state and Aug. 1 to June 30 in the Lolo and Selway zones.

That means the 2011-2012 wolf hunting season came to a close at sunset on Saturday. But under the new regulations, the 2012-2013 season opened Sunday morning.

Here's a rundown: Wolf hunting opens in the Panhandle Zone, on private land only, July 1. The rest of the zone and the rest of the state will open to wolf hunting on Aug. 1 and all but the Lolo and Selway zones will close on March 31. The Lolo and Selway zones will again be open through June.

Hunters can take up to 5 wolves per calandar year but most zones have a cap of 2 wolves per hunter, per year. The Middle Fork Zone, Dworshak-Elk City, Palouse-Hells Canyon, Lolo, Selway and Panhandle zones allow hunters to kill 5 wolves per calendar year.

So it is possible to hunt wolves year-round by starting on private land in the Panhandle Zone in July and then hunting anywhere in the state starting Aug. 1, moving to the Lolo and Selway zones on April 1 and back to the Panhandle on July 1.

Of course, if a hypothetical hunter were to does this, he or she would also have to balance when and where the wolves were taken to stay within the 5-per-calander-year bag limit and the more restricted bag limits in zones mostly south of the Salmon River.

In the hunting season that started last August and ended Saturday, Idaho hunters took 255 wolves. Trappers killed another 124 wolves in the season that opened Nov. 15 and ran through March.

That is a total of 379 wolves out of an estimated minimum population of between 700 and 1,000. However, Idaho Fish and Game officials believe the population exceeds 1,000 animals.

Delist Wyoming Republicans: more plentful, easier to hunt, tastier due to much higher fat content and DEFINETLY more in need of culling.