With 1,500 gray wolves now roaming Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moved to drop them from the endangered species list in March. If the change can weather the lawsuits that have since followed, it will clear the way for states to begin managing the species as a game animal and instituting wolf hunting seasons. Montana has already set season dates for 2008.

	The poet Robinson Jeffers wrote, What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine/The fleet limbs of the antelope? Save for a gap from 1926-’95, wolves and elk in the northern Rockies have been honing one another’s bodies and senses since the last Ice Age. Photo by Larry Thorngren

After wolves were largely eliminated 80 years ago, their numbers have climbed 25 percent every year in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming—despite hundreds of wolves being killed for livestock damages or other reasons. The federal government released 66 Canadian wolves to the greater Yellowstone region in 1995. Biologists set the threshold for delisting at 300—100 in each of the three states—which was eclipsed in 2002.

Eleven groups have brought suit against delisting, including Defenders of Wildlife, the Natural Resource Defense Council and the Humane Society of the United States. Although these groups fear wolf populations aren’t yet recovered and that states will decimate wolf numbers under the new rules, Ed Bangs, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist that led the wolf recovery effort, disagrees, holding that the states have proven themselves able to manage large predator populations and have pledged to maintain wolves well above the minimum federal mandate.

“The process is pretty rigorous,” Bangs says. “You can’t kill wolves simply because you want fewer of them. By no means is it open season on wolves.”

Federal rules mandate a minimum of 300 wolves and 30 breeding pairs be maintained, split equally among Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. State management plans, though, point to wolf numbers more likely being maintained at 900 to 1,250 wolves into the near future, federal officials say.

If a court injunction does delay delisting, a January revision to the previous regulations (called the 10(j) rule) will give states and ranchers more flexibility to cull wolf numbers in problem areas. That rule change doesn’t include hunting, however, and has also spawned lawsuits by the same groups that are suing the delisting plan.

“If delisting is held up a couple of years in court, this would give the states some flexibility to manage wolf numbers,” Bangs says. But he is optimistic that sound science behind both the rule and delisting decisions will prevail.

“We’re rock solid,” says Bangs “The Endangered Species Act did its job. It’s time to move on.”