Federal wolf leader for Wyoming nears finish line
CHRIS MERRILL Star-Tribune environment reporter | Posted: Monday, March 24, 2008 12:00 am
LANDER - Once you've finally emerged from the wilderness in the Canadian Rockies - when it's 10 below zero, you're grubby, you have a beard and you haven't eaten for two days - it can be tough to get somebody to stop his car and give you a lift.
Mike Jimenez knows this from experience.
You can aim your frostbitten thumb toward town as the cars hum by, but you don't have time to explain that you're not exactly crazy - you're just a graduate student from Montana studying wolves.
"That wasn't a well-thought-out backcountry trip," Jimenez said with a laugh recently, describing his early wolf research work, more than 20 years ago. "I'd never let a grad student go out into the sticks alone like that, nowadays. But back then, we weren't thinking about that stuff."
Jimenez would eventually become Wyoming's wolf recovery project leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, after the canines were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s.
Because wolves are set to lose their protection under the federal Endangered Species Act Friday, Wyoming will take over management of the animals. Jimenez's job will be phased out in September, after almost a decade in the state.
In the mid-1980s, Jimenez got his start with wolves when he spent three summers and two winters in the remote mountain woods of British Columbia, tracking the animals and trying to catalog their interactions with livestock, deer and other wildlife.
Now, after nine years of "wearing out trucks," traveling all over Wyoming's wolf country - tracking and trapping them in the summer, darting them from helicopters in the winter, investigating livestock conflicts and doing research into wolves' eating habits - Jimenez's job has a definite expiration date.
Twenty-two years after his first winter with the wolves, the canines have been successfully reintroduced to the Northern Rockies. Their population has grown from just a handful in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho to more than 1,500 now roaming in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.
At age 60, and with two kids still in college, Jimenez said he's not yet ready to retire, but he's also not sure what he'll do next.
Since 1986 it's been "nonstop wolves," he said, and it's hard to imagine doing anything else.
Controversial post
You don't go into wildlife research to become a public figure, Jimenez said.
But once the federal government reintroduced wolves into Yellowstone and central Idaho in the mid-1990s, those charged with executing the federal recovery plan became controversial figures almost instantly.
While wildlife enthusiasts and conservationists applauded the decision to return wolves to the area, many livestock producers and sportsmen in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming were infuriated.
From the perspective of many locals, officials in Washington, D.C., had forced wolves onto the states, whether the people living there wanted them or not.
The recovery of wolf populations in the Northern Rockies has remained an emotionally and politically charged issue for more than a decade, and as the leader of the recovery project for the Cowboy State, Jimenez was not immune to the controversy.
"Wolves become a vehicle to carry agendas for a whole slew of other issues," he said. "I've tried to keep focused on using science and biology, and to be objective. And I've also tried to stay open to walking in the other person's shoes. Both sides will hate you a little bit, but there's also some credibility there."
While many people in and out of the state have been thrilled by the success of the wolf recovery program, Jimenez has also faced persistent anger about the federal project.
Four years ago, while chasing a pack of wolves by helicopter in order to dart and collar them, Jimenez and his crew accidentally ended up on private land when they made the capture. The chase started on Bureau of Land Management property, and when they darted the wolves they didn't know they had crossed over to private land.
The landowner found Jimenez and his crew with the captured wolves on his property, and the Park County attorney proceeded to file a trespassing charge against Jimenez. That charge was later dismissed in federal court, as appeals judges determined the prosecution was more an "attempt to hinder a locally unpopular federal program" than a "bona fide effort to punish a violation of Wyoming trespass law."
Cooperation
Although the return of wolves was undesirable for most ranchers in Wyoming, livestock producers have largely been gracious to Jimenez, he said, and important collaborators in the management of wolves throughout reintroduction and recovery.
"You know, it's not in the interest of the agricultural community here to have wolves running around, but for the most part they've been very cordial, and very nice," he said. "They just don't want to be left holding the bag for themselves."
The hardest thing about managing wolves, Jimenez said, is to keep the animals in perspective. Even though they have become iconic, a powerful symbol for both wolf advocates and wolf detractors, they are no different from any other animal, he said.
"They're a predator, and they have a niche that they fill. They can fit into a lot of places, but they're not good everywhere. The sooner we can look at wolves within that paradigm, the better," he said.
Truman Julian, a rancher near Kemmerer, said Jimenez has been flexible in his dealings with ranchers and has worked to understand their concerns.
"I think Mike has done an excellent job," Julian said. "… He's been very cooperative. If you can verify kills (of livestock by wolves), he'll issue a kill permit. He also believes that wolves shouldn't be everywhere."
Sweetwater County rancher Bill Taliaferro said although some of the federal employees higher up the management chain from Jimenez are "goofy," Jimenez, himself, has at least tried to work with ranchers.
'We need to be responsible'
Wolf recovery started with just a handful of Fish and Wildlife personnel, and it has grown into a multi-agency, multi-interest collaboration, Jimenez said. A great number of people have made the operation work.
"It's not just one guy here," said Jimenez, who now lives in Wilson but at one time was based in Lander. "There are a lot of different people, a lot of different agencies working together."
Although the protection and survival of wolves in this country has a lot to do with biology, Jimenez said, working on wolf recovery has also been a continuous lesson in human psychology.
"Dealing with people on the different sides of the issue has been really interesting," Jimenez said. "How do you find common ground between two very different, very distinct ways of looking at life? But if you have people trying to work to compromise, it's all very doable. I think we've proven that. Even though it takes a great deal of work, coming up with a compromise is doable."
After two decades of working with wolves, he said, one thing has become clear to him: Wolves are resilient.
If they have room to move about, if they are reasonably protected and if they have sufficient prey, they will do well, he said.
"On the other hand, wolves do cause problems," Jimenez said. "I'm proud of all the people that have been involved and I'm proud of the success, but it's important to be responsible with that success. If wolves are causing problems, we need to be responsible and protect people's property and interests."
Environment reporter Chris Merrill can be reached at chris.merrill@trib.com or at (307) 267-6722.
* Last we knew: The federal government is removing wolves from Endangered Species Act protection.
* The latest: The duties of Mike Jimenez, Wyoming's wolf recovery project leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, will be turned over to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department Friday.
* What's next: Jimenez's job will be phased out in September.]]->
Mike Jimenez said he learned many important lessons about wolves back in the 1980s as a graduate student. And he learned those lessons the hard way - after watching all of his electronic and motorized equipment be humbled by the wintertime Canadian Rockies.
"Everything that could go wrong, went wrong," he said. "All of the radio collars would fail. It became an endless game of trying to keep up with a pack of wolves. I'd spend all day trying to find tracks, and then I'd be going all night long."
To get to his far-flung research area that first winter, Jimenez drove a truck off the main road as far as he could, and then took a snowmobile deep into the woods. After getting to the little cabin he used as home base, the snowmobile broke. The truck, he later discovered, also couldn't be revived.
"It was a real education," Jimenez said. "If something goes wrong in the Canadian Rockies, you're by yourself. It took me two days to get out of there, snow-shoeing and cross-country skiing. The truck froze up and broke. I was dehydrated, hypothermic. I literally went into the bushes and dug a hole in the snow to be protected from the wind, and it was like, 'Now what?"'
It's a funny story now, he said, but it wasn't at the time.
Regardless, he went back the following winter to continue his research, and again his truck died. That year an energy company was doing oil exploration in British Columbia and workers plowed open the forest road for their equipment; they didn't see his truck on the side of the road, and they totaled it.
Working in the field in Wyoming has been gentle by comparison, he said.
- Chris Merrill
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