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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of Epic. And joining me is Amaroq Weiss, the Senior Wolf Advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. Hey, welcome to the show.

AMAROQ WEISS:

Thank you, Tom. So glad to be back here.

WHEELER:

And we are here because there is exciting wolf news. Maybe we can kind of preview what that is and then we get to it again later. So what, what is the exciting news that we have for wolf lovers in California?

WEISS:

The amazing news is that the wolves are telling us what we've been telling the public all along, what you and I have been telling all along. California is wolf country. Wolves are coming back. They're coming back on their own. They're finding each other. They're forming new families when their pups grow up and get ready to go off on their own. They're finding other wolves from other packs and forming their new families. And so today we have a known nearly 70 wolves in California, which is a gobsmacking thing to think about when you realize that we had our first wolf wander in to check out the state back in 2011. So it's been 14 years and here we are with seven wolf packs, seven families. Almost every one of them are known to have produced pups this year and some have produced in years past. So yeah, we're coming a long way, baby.

WHEELER:

Oh yeah. And something that else also is exciting is that the worst fears that people had about wolves returning, that they're going to attack people, that they're going to be this major predator of livestock have largely not come true. We have some incidental taking of livestock by wolves, but it's not been the catastrophic threat that the Cattlemen's Association presented wolves to be. So they're coming back. It's not a problem. California is accepting them. We've accepted them as a state and that's very exciting. And so we'll get more into that in a sec, but let's, let's kind of ground ourselves and learn a little bit about wolves in California. So wolves are native to California and that has, for some reason, been a controversial fact. Can you tell us about wolves in California before European colonization of this state?

WEISS:

Yes, and we know that wolves were present in the state pre-European contact from a number of sources. One of them is from the indigenous people that lived here for 10,000 or more years across the state in multiple different tribes and populations of their own. That's important as part of the wolf evidence, because when Europeans arrived here, there were at least 100, maybe 125 different tribal dialects spoken throughout the state.

And so many of them, most of them, had distinct words for wolf, fox, dog, and coyote. So they knew these different animals. They knew the differences between them, which itself is a piece of evidence that wolves were here. Some of the tribes include wolves in their creation stories. Some tribes use wolf fur warmth. Some tribes had teenage, adolescent, adult initiation artwork ceremonies in which a key figure that was created out of sand paintings was the wolf. Some tribes were known for their amazing wolf howls. In far northern California, the Yurok and Karuk tribe have a world renewal ceremony, which is a ceremony to rebalance the world. And in that ceremony, there are blinders worn that are made from wolf fur. So wolf was an integral part of balancing the world, which is something we European latecomers are very late to recognizing. So there's that piece of evidence.

We also know from the travel diaries and journals, people who came here as European settlers, either those landing on the shores or those coming from the east into the eastern part of California and then moving west. So the fur traders, the mountain men, the gold miners. So there are historical references to wolves. I think one of the reasons that people think that there weren't wolves in California is that there's so few historical, like skulls, skeletons, bones in any preserved types of museums. At the University of Berkeley, at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, they do have samples from two wolves. The last two known wolves killed in California by European settlers were killed in 1922 in San Bernardino County, in 1924 in Blassen County. And remains, the remains fur and skull and bones are there. But part of the reason that many folks think that there aren't love samples like that from across the state is wolves had mostly been killed off before people began to collect museum specimens. Wolves aren't the only species in California or elsewhere for whom this is true.

For years, agencies and the like thought that beavers weren't throughout California. And we now know that they were from some of the groundbreaking research by Dr. Rick Landman. He just published a paper recently on elk. People thought that elk weren't native to California. And we did have to reintroduce elk here, but they were native to California based on new work that has come out. So it's not surprising that we don't have actual physical evidence. What that means is we do not know historically how many wolves were in California, but we do know they were widely distributed. And again, that's from the records of writings and travel journals and diaries, including of missionaries, but also from the cultural practices and languages of native people throughout the state.

WHEELER:

And as we see wolves come back into California, we kind of have proof that wolves are native here because they fit in so well onto our landscape. They have come back and they've just rehomed themselves so easily. They've so integrated themselves that they naturally fit into our environment. So we have a history of extirpation of wolves and this was a deliberate campaign of wolf slaughter. Can you go into this part of our history? And this is part of not just history of California, but history of the West and of the United States generally of trying to remove wolves. Can you talk about that and how that's impacted wolf populations generally?

WEISS:

Yeah, you're spot on. So when European settlers arrived in this country, there were an estimated 2 million wolves across all of North America. And in fact, scientists estimate that there were up to 380,000 wolves just in the Western U.S., Mexico alone. But as settlers arrived on the shore, they brought with them fear and hatred of wolves, and they began to move westward and inland and cleared the land under the theory of manifest destiny, that it was their God-given right to cleanse nature of anything they thought was a threat. And they cleared the land of not only wolves, grizzly bears, and cougars, but also wild ungulates. Elk deer, I mentioned a moment ago that all the elk had been wiped out here. And that happened in other places as well. Of course, we all know bison were also wiped out across the country. Those animals were replaced with livestock and grain. The few remaining large predators that existed, wolves, grizz, and cougars that were still on the landscape, didn't have much to eat after all those wild ungulates had been wiped out.

And so they did turn to start eating livestock. And then the states began to develop bounty programs, which was fairly successful across the country in wiping out wolves. And Massachusetts enacted the first bounty in 1630. California had a wolf bounty system. Oregon did as well. All the states did. The thing that was most effective in wiping wolves out is that by the early 1900s, the livestock industry lobbied Congress and Congress appropriated funds to a branch of the government called the Biological Survey, which subsequently became U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And this is ironic because the Biological Survey was then tasked with wiping out wolves across the country.

And as we know today, it's aftercursor Agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now charged with recovering the species that it wiped out. But it was really that campaign, that federal campaign to obliterate wolves and other large predators that was very successful. Folks, agents that were called wolfers, literally were out on the ground every day laying poisons, feeding carcasses with poisons. And in that way, they could poison entire wolf families. And so they were very successful by the early 1920s, 1930s. Wolves were largely wiped out from the lower 48 United States by the time the Federal Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973. The only place in the lower 48 that any wolves still existed was far Northeastern Minnesota. And from the Midwest, if you've been through those Midwestern winters, you'll understand when I say, I think the only reason any wolves were still left there is it was just too fricking cold for people to go up into far Northeastern Minnesota and wipe out those last 600 or so wolves.

But yeah, we have created a legacy of eradication. And with the wolf recovery efforts that have happened since wolves got listed in 1974 under the Federal Endangered Species Act, we have had an opportunity to create an exact polar opposite legacy, a legacy of return and redemption and righting a centuries old wrong.

WHEELER:

And one of the core pieces of environmental literature, auto Leopold's thinking like a mountain. He details his experience as a wolf eradicator and the shooting of a wolf. I think it was in New Mexico in his retelling how that changed him and gave him an environmental consciousness. Seeing the green fire die in the eyes of the wolf that he shot radicalized him as it should. That was one of the things that radicalized me reading that piece. And so I'm sure you can find it online and check it out. It's a very interesting account from someone who is there doing the work. So we eradicated wolves from nearly all of the continental United States, small portion left in the upper Midwest. And yet we have wolves returning to California. Where are our wolves coming from and how did they get back to the state of California?

WEISS:

So most of California's wolves are living in the northern counties in Siskiyou, Lassen, Plumas, Sierra Nevada, Modoc, Tehama. We do have one pack that made it all the way down to Tulare County. Bless those Sierra Nevada mountain range, right? How did they come back? So first and foremost, and the most important thing for wolves is having legal protections in place. This is what has allowed, this is what has engendered the return of wolves. In Minnesota, that allowed the small population that was there to begin to expand into neighboring Michigan and Wisconsin. We have to reintroduce wolves there. But out west, wolves did actually initially have to be reintroduced because any wolves that were starting to come across the border from Canada into Montana kept getting killed in Montana. And they did not make their way into Idaho and Wyoming to repopulate that area on their own.

And so an environmental impact statement was drafted, a wolf recovery plan was drafted, and in 95 and 96, wolves were captured by the federal government in Canada, transported by the federal government down to the northern Rockies, and reintroduced, released, into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho. There's a total of 66 wolves over a two-year period. And then another 10 wolves were actually brought in from a pack that had gotten orphaned then in Montana, and the pups needed to be saved. So a total of 76 wolves. From that population, there's now a couple thousand wolves in the northern Rockies. Those wolves had pups, their pups had pups, their pups' pups had pups. And those animals began to make their way west into Washington and then into Oregon, all on their own. They didn't have to be reintroduced because wolves are an animal that naturally will disperse and can disperse safely if there's legal protections in place. The animals that settled in Oregon began to have pups, and those pups began to travel.

And the first wolf litter born in Oregon, up in northeastern Oregon, resulted in the birth of a particular wolf known as OR7, the seventh wolf to have been radio collared by biologists in Oregon. And in late 2011, when he was just about two and a half years old, he made his way away from his birth pack, diagonally across the state of Oregon, down to southern Oregon, and then crossed the border into California, making him the first known wild wolf in the state in 87 years. So he was the start of California's wolf population. He didn't stay here. You'll remember these days when we were campaigning together. He was here for about 15 months, and then he finally returned to Oregon, where he ultimately found a mate, another wolf who had crossed the state of Oregon and landed in the southern part of Oregon as well. But he and she had pups in 2014, and in successive years, and some of their pups began to cross the border and come into California.

And so our very first pack was confirmed in 2015. It was a Shasta pack. They were in Siskiyou County, and they were actually offspring, not from OR7 and his mate, but from OR7's birth family up in northeastern Oregon. They had come across the state. Unfortunately, they disappeared after two months after they'd been implicated in some livestock conflicts and were not comfortable with the fact that they died a natural death. It seems more likely that they fell victim to foul play. But they were just the first, because by 2016, there was another pack that was forming. And the breeding male of that pack was one of OR7's puppies from his 2014 litter. And he met in California a female wolf who'd come here all the way from the northern Rockies population.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report, and we are talking about wolves with Amaruk Weiss.

WEISS:

And so then they formed California's second known pack and a hundred years Alaskan pack. Since then we've had the Whale Backpack form, the Beckworth Pack, the Antelope Pack, the Bamseo Pack, the Harvey Pack, and the Alumnae Pack. And then in addition to those seven packs, as I mentioned, there's three other areas of the state in rural California that at least two wolves have been seen. So those may be the beginnings of more packs. So this is a story of legal protections that allowed a comeback and then having protections remain in place so wolves could safely travel, as they naturally do, to find new places to set up packs and territory of their own.

WHEELER:

So this is a story of legal protections. So that same story of legal protections enabling the return of wolves. There's also the story of the pushback against those legal protections led by conservative States like Idaho who are opposed to wolves being in their state. We've, we've touched on a little bit of, of the importance of federal protections, but perhaps you could talk about the threat of this rollback of the endangered species act. These attempts by both Republican and democratic administrations to delist the wolf from the federal endangered species act and the consequences of delisting on wolf recovery.

WEISS:

There's two factors in those federal laws that are really a threat to wolves, and one is, as you mentioned, just the general attempts to dismantle the Endangered Species Act itself. Of course that would affect wolves, and it would affect every other wildlife species and plant species that's in peril that we all want to protect because they're all so precious. So any attempts to amend the Federal Endangered Species Act could have a drastic effect on wolves and other species. And yet those attempts come up under every administration, under every Congress. Specific to wolves, there are also, almost every Congress, if not every congressional session, attempts by some Congress people to specifically strip protections from wolves from the Endangered Species Act. To pass laws or to add riders as amendments to appropriations measures would get snuck in there that would remove protections for wolves.

And we actually have seen these attempts to strip protections of wolves going back for 20-some years. Although wolves were listed in 1974, it wasn't until 20 years later that we even got them reintroduced. So that tells you what kind of a political battle that was to get a species that got protection to get them back. And then after the reintroductions in the Northern Rockies in 95 and 96, it was only in 2000, just five years later, that in Congress attempts were made to strip protections. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was already proposing to strip wolves of protections throughout the lower 48, even though they hadn't yet recovered wolves in other places. And every time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would issue a proposed rule, it would go out for public comment. And the public would overwhelmingly oppose that and say, the science doesn't support it. Your policy for recovery doesn't support it. The Endangered Species Act language doesn't support it. And yet the service would go ahead, finalize the rule, and then groups like the Center for Biological Diversity and EPIC and others would file lawsuits challenging those decisions. And the federal courts would always find that we were right, that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was violating the Endangered Species Act, that wolves were not yet recovered in significant portions of their range. Places that were planning to strip them of protections would affect whether or not wolves would ever get back in other parts of the country.

And so the one time that we weren't able to be successful in court was in 2011, where we had been successful in court and settlement discussions were underway between conservation groups and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reach some kind of agreement about whether or not protection should be lifted in the northern Rockies. And then Congress stepped in. For the first time ever, Congress made a ruling, passed a rider on the Department of Defense Appropriations Bill that ordered U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reinstate their delisting rule for the northern Rockies, ordered them to strip rules of protection in that area, and made it so it was not able to be challenged in court. So we didn't have a way to appeal that. That has had repercussions for wolf recovery across the West, because what that has meant that the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming have taken over wolf management. And because many parts of their population, the human population, are so opposed to wolves, as livestock owners and hunters often are mistakenly, those states have passed really draconian, barbaric laws and regulations to allow much greater expansion of where women and how wolves can be killed. And that has resulted in far fewer wolves being available to walk out of those states on their own and then to repopulate other states, like Utah, or to make it all the way to Colorado and survive, and then more of them keep coming, or Nevada. And so that has had that kind of repercussion.

And most recently, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, during the Trump administration, did strip rules of federal protections across the lower 48 groups, challenged that decision, and got it overturned. So back in 2022, a federal district court said, no, that was illegal, wolves aren't recovered, you need to protect them again. But devastatingly, just this last week, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has filed an appeal of that case. And it's very puzzling to all of us that have been working on these legal protections, because just a year before, we had one huge legal victory in which U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed that it would develop a national wolf recovery plan. It agreed that it had never done so, and it was required to do so by the language of the Endangered Species Act. So we don't know what's going on with this latest move, because you can't both promise to do a national wolf recovery plan and, you know, a year later say, we want to strip wolves of all protection everywhere. So what this says to us, and big message to the public here, is do not get battle fatigue over wolves. This happens to be a controversial species that needs us by its side every minute, every year, for the years to come. We're all in it for the long haul, and we hope you are too.

WHEELER:

So one of the ways I got to know you was working on a listing petition under state law. California has its own Endangered Species Act. I think that our previous discussion about the flaws of delisting that Idaho and other states have kind of this barbaric wolf management regime that they are reducing wolf populations and then there are fewer wolves to help recover in other areas kind of speaks to the limitation though of state protections for wolves and reemphasizes the importance of having federal protections because this is a federal issue. This is a multi-state issue. Wolves from Idaho are really important to wolf recovery in California but it's still a bit of a belt and suspenders approach where we are trying to protect wolves at both the federal level but also increasing protections at a state level. Why are wolves important? Why should we be excited about their return? What can they do for our ecosystems or why are they necessary to have back on our landscape?

WEISS:

I'll answer that, but first I just want to note the comment you made about the state protections. I think it's really important for the public to understand that in California, we're super fortunate to have the State Endangered Species Act that is as protective as it is. It's nearly as protective as the Federal Endangered Species Act. California is the only State Endangered Species Act where right now, if you took away the federal protections, you still could not kill wolves for livestock conflicts in California when there's such a low population number. Yes, 70 wolves sounds like a lot, but don't forget that the studies that have been done have shown we have such a great amount of wolf habitat here that the state could support nearly 500 wolves. That's just north of I-80. They haven't even done the studies yet to figure out how much they could support south of I-80. Unlike in other states that have quote-unquote protections for wolves under their state laws, they're not nearly as protective as California. California actually has a real opportunity to show the other states that we can live with wolves without killing them. We can learn to coexist because we recognize the intrinsic value of their own, no matter what we think of them, because it's so amazing that a native species is walking back here on its own without us having to reintroduce them, and because they are so important for the ecological health of any region they inhabit. Which brings me to your question that yes, we know that top-level predators are so important in any ecosystems. And if you think about it, scientists have given them a number of names, these top-level predators that help you picture why they're important. So on the one hand, wolves are called keystone species, and that term comes from architecture, where the keystone of a building or an arch is what supports everything else. And this is true with wolves. You take wolves out of the ecosystem and that archway begins to crumble. It may not be evident at first, but not too long after, a decade, two decades, you begin to see things like overpopulation of wild ungulates, and then those deer and elk, they're so overpopulated, they can contract disease from each other because there's just too many of them. God knows we don't want to have chronic wasting disease, have a big buildup in our state. I think that they just had the first evidence of chronic wasting disease in California just in the last couple of months. We don't want that. That's a terrible disease that hunters who eat deer and elk, you don't want to be eating an animal that's infected with that. We know that scientists also call wolves like umbrella species, because if you protect them and their habitat, you're actually also protecting the habitat of all the other species that live in that environment. And then we call them top predators because they're at the top of, if you want a picture like a three-level food web, predators at the top, and there's their wild ungulate prey, deer, elk, moose, bison, caribou that they eat, and then there's the vegetation that those wild ungulates consume. And if you have too many of the wild ungulates, they will over-browse that vegetation, which has a detrimental effect on other species. If you bring wolves back, it keeps those wild ungulates on the move, because now they're wary of having wolves in the area. Being on the move means they're not over-browsing. That allows riparian vegetation to grow back like willow and aspen, which are really important building materials for beaver. If you have beaver back, they use those building materials to create dams, which create cool, deep ponds that juvenile fish and frogs need to thrive. So yes, there's a connection between wolves and fish. If you're a fly fisherman, you ought to be really thrilled that wolves are back. And if you're a hunter and you hunt elk and deer, you should be thrilled that wolves are back because elk and deer got to be as magnificent and robust and fast and as agile as they are because they evolved with top-level predators like wolves. It's a system that works really well together if all the parts are there. I think it was Aldo Leopold, who you mentioned before, who also gave that famous phrase, the first law of intelligent tinkering, save all the parts. Don't throw away the parts that you don't understand or that you think are bad. They're not bad. Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't valuable. They're valuable.

WHEELER:

But I'm curious, you are a person who spent so much of your career fighting for wolves. You think about wolves all the time. We're doing this by Zoom. I can see over your shoulder, you have a book about wolves, and then there is a framed picture of a wolf. You are a wolf person to your core. What is it about wolves that you love so much? Why is this the thing that is motivating your career, your life?

WEISS:

I grew up in Iowa, which was prairie country once upon a time. And I had the benefit of having some really great teachers. And when they would take us out to the remnant prairies, they would say, close your eyes. Imagine there were once wolves here. There were once grizzly bears here. There were once bison here. Now open your eyes and imagine if we could have that again. And I think that that has always stuck with me. We could have it here again. I also tell you, I have always just been a canid person. My parents tell me that when I was about four years old, I bounced into the living room one day and announced that I was never having babies. I was only having puppies. And so I think I was just kind of destined for this and really, really fortunate to go on to get degrees in science and biology and then in law and then realize that I could put those both to work on behalf of wolves. I read two really important books. In college, I read Barry Lopez's book of Wolves and Men. And I recommend it to anybody today. It's a 40 year old book. It's as good as it gets. It will open your eyes to what wolves are about, how we have wronged them and that we need to bring them back. And then in 95, I read Hank Fisher's book, Wolf Wars, which described the 20 years of political battles it took to get wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone and Idaho. At that point, I said, I'm a biologist, I'm a lawyer, and I love wolves. I wanna be in this fight. And I've just been fortunate to be in the fight and to be fighting for so long and to be fighting with folks like you.

WHEELER:

Well, we are fortunate to have you and to have you in the fight. Amaroq, thank you so much for joining the Econews Report. I look forward to more positive news in the near future where we have more wolf pups, more wolf families and more expansion of wolves here in California. And a lot of that is because of your work. So thank you.

WEISS:

WHEELER:

A terrible and wonderful pun to end the show on.

WEISS:

Okay, thanks Tom. Bye now.

WHEELER:

Thank you listeners for joining us and you can join us next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.