Commission sets wolf hunting regulations, quotas for season; units tweaked near Yellowstone

Following pressure from Yellowstone National Park and locals living north of the park boundary, the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission on Friday unanimously adopted an amendment to the wolf and furbearer regulations for the upcoming hunting season that will split Wolf Management Unit 313 – just north of the park boundary – back into two units and only allow three wolves to be killed in each.

The commission also approved another amendment that will again ban the use of telemetry and motion-tracking devices when people are hunting wolves. It had been banned up until the 2021-22 wolf hunting season, when the commission again allowed the practice for wolf hunting, as well as the use of bait and night hunting on private lands.

Both amendments were offered by Region 3 Commissioner Susan Kirby Brooke, who said they came as a result of a year’s worth of meetings with locals and business owners in Montana’s Park and Gallatin counties, as well as leadership at Yellowstone National Park.

Park Superintendent Cam Sholly sent the commissioners a letter in June directly requesting the two changes and summarizing a host of reasons, which was cited by multiple speakers during public comment Friday, as to why the commission should adopt the changes.

“The public, I think, weighed in in a pretty big way that they did not like the concentrated harvest that close to the city of Gardiner and the impact for the businesses of the wolves being harvested — that many wolves right close to where their businesses are,” Brooke explained to the commission. “And a lot of these people are taking tourist business into these areas, and it hurts their business to have that many wolves taken out of that small of an area.”

How hunting affects Yellowstone’s wolf population

Wolf Management Unit 313 will be split into two units, 313 and 316 again for the 2024-25 season, as had previously been the case, and each will have a wolf quota of three for the season. Wolf Management Unit 313 had a six-wolf quota last season, which was reached Dec. 25 last year. In 2022, the six-wolf quota was reached Feb. 6. Commissioners and others at Friday’s meeting said 316 was a more difficult and remote area to hunt, while 313 funnels animals down into the valley, making them easy targets.

In his June letter, Sholly said 13 wolves from Yellowstone packs had been killed this past winter, including eight killed legally in Montana, accounting for about 10% of the wolf population in Yellowstone. Six of those eight were killed in WMU 313, and they came from three different Yellowstone packs. Two more Yellowstone wolves were taken in Region 3 near its boundary with WMU 313, and another Yellowstone wolf was poached in WMU 313 in February, Sholly said.

He added that two other collared wolves died this past winter from gunshots the park believes the wolves sustained inside WMU 313 but could not verify.

“In all, these mortalities resulted in the dissolution of three Yellowstone packs that counted toward the 2023 park population,” Sholly wrote to the commissioners.

He said 20 years of radio collar data shows the Yellowstone packs remain inside the park boundaries at least 96% of the year, and that when hunters in Montana and other states kill breeding wolves and alphas, their deaths have multiple effects for packs and breeding.

“From this information, there are relatively few resident wolves in WMU 313 beyond the transboundary movements of a few Yellowstone packs,” Sholly wrote. “The state population counting methodologies that rely on the (Integrated Patch Occupancy Model) to estimate wolf abundance and guide harvest recommendations are unable to provide fine-scale wolf abundance metrics in the WMU adjacent to the park.”

Sholly said in some cases, the human-caused death of wolves leads to declining pup production, while in other cases, like in the 2021-22 season when an alpha female from the 8-Mile pack was trapped in WMU 313, three subordinate females started breeding, and 18 pups were born in 2023.

He also asked the commission to ban the use of telemetry for wolf hunting, saying it went against the ethics of fair chase hunting. And he told the commissioners that there have been fewer than 10 livestock depredations caused by wolves during the past 10 years in Park County, meaning one of the state Legislature’s primary reasons for setting a goal of having a declining wolf population in Montana was not occurring.

Further, he said, the state’s elk population is at or above the stated objectives in Hunting District 313, in Region 3, and statewide, and more bull elk have been harvested in Hunting District 313 during the past decade than during the previous decade.

“These data suggest that elk are doing well statewide and locally, while living in a landscape with multiple predator species that include wolves, cougars, grizzly bears, black bears, and human hunters,” Sholly wrote.

He said in his letter, and many others noted during Friday’s meeting and in public comments submitted this summer, that wolf watching in Yellowstone brings in around $80 million to local economies in Gardiner and the surrounding area. They said that is critical money for the region that could be jeopardized if the wolf population dips too low or people see wolves being killed near the park, cities and towns.

Greater Yellowstone Coalition wildlife program manager Brooke Shifrin told commissioners at Friday’s meeting the group and others in the region were thankful for the amendments and they felt their voices had been heard by Brooke and the other commissioners.

“She’s demonstrated real impressive leadership in listening to and understanding the perspectives of her local constituents,” Shifrin said. “… I’d like to also just offer that when we’re talking about a geography just outside an iconic national park that draws global and international attention, it’s simply not realistic to think that social considerations would not be a part of the equation.”