Jim Hayden: Friend of wildlife

Since 1989, Jim Hayden has been a regional wildlife manager with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game for the Panhandle region.

To find what led him here, you have to go back to the beginning. His father was a wildlife research biologist in Pennsylvania.

"We lived at the end of a small rural town in north central Pennsylvania, Wellsboro, in a remote mountainous area," he said. "We lived on the edge of town, so I could walk out the backdoor and go hunting and fishing or trapping, whatever I wanted. It was a wonderful way to grow up. I had a lot of fun as a kid."

Jim recalls rising at 4 a.m., heading out with his father for turkey trapping, hiding in a blind, waiting in the cold, for the birds to come in so he could shoot a net over them.

Not just good times. Great ones.

"I got a lot of neat experiences with him growing up," he said.

His career as a wildlife biologist and manager has given him unique opportunities to study wildlife.

He's flown on helicopters for elk surveys.

He's been on grizzly studies in Yellowstone.

He's lived among mountain goats in southeast Idaho.

He's climbed mountains and camped in the middle of nowhere for the sake of understanding wildlife and their habitat.

"I really enjoy my job. I think I've been in this position longer than anybody else ever has, statewide. Really, it's because I find so many challenges.

"We have so many wildlife species and so many wildlife issues that you never get bored. There's always some puzzles to put together. What's this population doing? There's a lot of challenges figuring what to do with this species, what's the health of that species. It's pretty exciting, really."

How's work these days?

It's a busy job. It's an exceedingly fun job. A lot of variety. I personally like puzzles, and there's lots of puzzles in this job, trying to find where the pieces are and how the pieces fit together to get a picture of how the wildlife populations are doing on one hand and then dealing with the public on the other hand. What's the best management program to try and fit that mix of opinions.

What wildlife are doing well, and not so well, in North Idaho?

We've got a lot of species of wildlife in the Panhandle. People probably don't realize just how rich we are in wildlife.

There's a lot of species doing very, very well. Some species are going to be here forever. Whitetail deer, those guys have been here for a long, long time. There's some species not doing well, just differences in habitat. Things are always changing out there.

How do you deal with the public?

It's a real challenge anytime you have a lot of opinions, and people feel very strongly about wildlife and they don't all feel the same. So one of the real challenges is to find a middle ground. It's maybe the more difficult part of the job. We get into these jobs typically because we like working with wildlife and in the outdoors. As time progresses, the job kind of evolves to where we're working with people, and trying to match people's objectives with the management.

Do you deal much with grizzly bears?

Grizzlies in Yellowstone are different than the grizzlies in northern Idaho. The population down in Yellowstone, you have over 800 bears. From a standpoint of how that population is doing, it's quite healthy.

You once worked on a grizzly study in Yellowstone. What did you learn about them?

What we found was at every camp that we had, a grizzly bear was within a 100 yards of it during each camping trip. A lot of grizzlies are around you, much, much more than you ever dream. We were in a lot of the portions of the park that were closed to the public, so there was maybe a little bit higher density of grizzly bears. There were very few nights we didn't see a grizzly or know one was near because we had the radio collar on it.

How about here?

Most of our grizzlies are in the Selkirks and the Purcell Mountains. We get those that wander through. We had one over in the Silver Valley a couple years ago. We're probably looking at somewhere between 40 and 60 in northern Idaho at any given time, moving back and forth into Canada.

Is that good?

What we do have appears to be healthy and growing, very slowly. Bear populations in general don't produce very rapidly, there's a 5-6 year lag before they become sexually mature. We've seen this gradual improvement in grizzly numbers in the mid-1980s.

What about wolves?

The wolf population is a real controversy. Of all the species I've ever worked with over the course of my career, this is the most polarized. Trying to sort out fact from fiction is the biggest challenge. In northern Idaho, we're at a unique position, even within the state of Idaho.

I went to school in Missoula in the early 1980s. Wolves were just starting to show up in northern Montana outside of Glacier National Park and by the mid-90s, there were about 50 wolves in that portion of Montana. That area is much closer to us here in northern Idaho than was the transplant in central Idaho or much less in Yellowstone. A lot of our influence, not all of it, is from wolves that naturally walked in from Montana and also from Canada, and some degree as well we know, from central Idaho. They cover so much ground that we tend to think everything is the consequence of a transplant, and it's actually a much more complicated situation.

I think the difficulty in wolf management is they're a very mobile animal, a very high reproductive rate.

How is the overall wolf population here?

The population of big game animals in northern Idaho is pretty healthy. We have some areas with elk and to a lesser degree, moose, where we have seen substantial declines due primarily to depredation, primarily to wolves. The upper St. Joe, we've seen declines like we've seen in central Idaho. In other areas, we have very healthy elk herds, areas that traditionally did have a lot of elk, are going very well.

Did you ever think wolves would be a major issue in North Idaho?

I never really thought that wolves would be introduced. I thought that was very unlikely to happen. When they were introduced, it was like 'Now, we're going to see what happens.'

Can wolves survive in Idaho?

I think we have room for wolves in Idaho. I don't have any doubt about that. The key, I think, is management. That's the difficult side of it. Having a managed versus an unmanaged population.

How do you find the balance with such passion from both sides?

I haven't found a good way to balance the two sides. About the only way through it is to try and work with the data, use information that's factual. There's so many theories, there's so may factoids, those we need to ignore and just go with the data that's in hand so we can make a good decision on what to do.

We've dealt with wolves on this continent for 30,000 years and we have a long history of opinions. That probably is part of our very being.

What does it take to be good at your job?

A couple different things. One, it takes a skepticism of what's in front of you. You have to really question everything at all times. I think it takes an interest in putting together pictures from limited amounts of information. Liking a lot to be in the outdoors. And I think it takes getting along with people.

If I was going to pick one thing I think that helped me the most, I think it would be the ability to see other points of view, other perspectives. That's a real important part of this. You have to have technical background, statistics, all the biology stuff, but that's totally worthless if you can't talk to people in an open manner and really try to understand where they're coming from. Everybody out there has formed an opinion based on their own experiences. They're different than yours and you need to listen to them.