“You have a tremendous amount of backlash so that now you have self-appointed wolf experts misinforming the public and instilling fear that wolves are going to kill your kids, wipe out elk herds and spread diseases.”
Biologists have documented just a couple of dozen wolves that live in eastern Oregon. Nevertheless, the Legislature is considering four bills this session to control them. One state senator e-mailed his Klamath Falls constituents last week that these “vicious, imported predators” killed two pregnant cows outside Enterprise in “the most cruel way imaginable. These sadistic creatures,” wrote Sen. Doug Whitsett, R-Klamath Falls, need to be confronted. He introduced two of the bills “before we are forced to take up arms to protect our communities and our children.”
Cattlemen call them Canadian gray wolves who don’t belong here.
Suzanne Stone of Defenders of Wildlife counters such animosity, saying that three of the bills would upend the 2010 Oregon wolf plan, a broad compromise reached last fall between cattlemen, wool growers, hunters and conservationists on how to manage wolves until they are no longer listed as endangered. “The hardest part of wolf management,” she says, “is people.”
So it takes a big man who would stand between the two sides to explain the astonishing biology and sociology unleashed when wolves were returned to the American West. At 6-foot-6, Carter Niemeyer arrives in Portland just in time to elaborate.
Oregon and Washington were always outside the original reintroduction areas in the northern Rockies, but it was always understood wolves would cross state borders, and they have. As Oregon has become the latest battleground over wolves, Niemeyer emerges with a new and surprising book on how a wolf killer became key to their remarkable return.
The author of “Wolfer, A Memoir” is an unlikely guide, an Iowa farm boy who spent most of his career as the federal government’s hit man against predators. An expert trapper with degrees in wildlife biology, Niemeyer moved to Montana straight out of graduate school at Iowa State University in 1973. He worked as a state trapper and conducted wildlife studies for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before joining an obscure little agency called Animal Damage Control.
Its mission was to kill. The targets: coyotes, foxes and black bears that preyed on the 3 million cows and three-quarters of a million sheep grazing on public and private land in Montana. It was “an entirely cultural and political activity that was such an integral part of the state it warranted its own branch of government,” he writes.
Few people knew such federal intervention existed. But until 1972, when poisoning predators was banned, the agency was placing 100,000 pounds of poisoned horse meat to kill coyotes and scattering poisoned grain to kill rodents. The poison was “spread over public and private lands to kill ground squirrels, prairie dogs, meadow mice, pocket gophers and porcupines.” So much poison, he wrote, that he could not imagine how any birds or other animals could survive.
“Even more unbelievable was the federal campaign against predators was going in every Western state, financed by taxpayers,” he writes.
Meticulous investigator
When Niemeyer joined Animal Damage Control in 1975, his job was to control predators — by trapping, shooting or aerial gunning. The first year alone, he captured more than 149 golden eagles to keep them from attacking lambs, relocating every one of them alive. He worked with trappers to dart and move grizzlies. Then in 1987, ranchers began seeing wolves crossing into Montana from Canada. As the number of sightings grew, a “wolf hysteria” soon followed, with reported kills of sheep and cattle.
As a scientist, Niemeyer wanted to figure out what had happened through forensic field investigations. Instead of parroting claims, he skinned carcasses, studied hemorrhages and examined tracks.
“All large predators have a way they kill,” he writes, “a signature.” The bear bites the top of the head, the wolf attacks from the rear, grabbing the flank, the easiest place to latch on.
He kept meticulous scientific notes, recording information and data, events and conversations. He soon became an expert on what predator took an animal down. The cause of death mattered immensely, as it would determine not only whether a wolf could be shot or trapped and relocated but also whether the Defenders of Wildlife would compensate the livestock owner. Between 1987 and 2009, the nonprofit paid livestock owners $1.4 million for their animals that wildlife authorities like Niemeyer deemed killed by wolves.
By 1990, he was a full-time wolf specialist, investigating and mitigating the wolf problem in Montana. He felt more like a sociologist, mediating between furious landowners and environmentalists, trying to determine whether wolves were responsible for livestock kills. Most of the time, the field investigation showed they were not.
“I felt people pushing me to simply rubber-stamp what they thought was happening and their entitlements,” he says.
His expertise soon took him to Canada on the first team to capture wolves to be reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. He lectured widely, educating trappers, cattlemen and bureaucrats. And increasingly, he was forced to deal with wolf advocates, people “outside my comfort zone.”
“I started realizing there were two sides to this story and the decisions I made had huge ramifications. That gave me the conviction I needed to be more honest, more fair, to dig deeper into why we are doing these things and for what reason,” he said in an interview from his Boise home.
“That is where I started to change.”
He began to look at predator control, at killing of animals, in a different light. But stepping onto middle ground eventually made him a pariah in Animal Damage Control, by then renamed Wildlife Services.
Beyond the Big Bad Wolf
In 2000, he left that agency for an even more contentious position overseeing wolf recovery in Idaho for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He retired in 2006, then spent the next five summers putting radio collars on wolves for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. Today, there are nearly 800 wolves in Idaho and 400 in Montana. In his career, Niemeyer trapped or helicopter-captured more than 300.
For years, people urged him to write his story, a Rooster Cogburn meets Forrest Gump adventure on wolf recovery, with plenty of shooting and skinning. He finally did write the book, spurred on by his wife, and editor, Jenny Long Niemeyer. Dee Lane, political editor at The Oregonian, also contributed to the editing.
But the people he wrote the book for — ranchers, sportsmen and outdoorsmen who love the wild places he does — likely won’t read it, he says.
The wolf issue has become the infuriating symbol of federal intervention in the rural West, leaving many people distrusting or discounting those who have the most scientific knowledge of the subject.
“You have a tremendous amount of backlash so that now you have self-appointed wolf experts misinforming the public and instilling fear that wolves are going to kill your kids, wipe out elk herds and spread diseases.”
None of that is true, he says. Still, he keeps calling for common ground, urging agencies to co-investigate suspected wolf kills, with transparency and oversight. He wants more conversations with ranchers and encourages more nonlethal controls. And he hopes people learn more than the “Little Red Riding Hood” storyline of the Big Bad Wolf.
Last weekend, he took high school kids 90 minutes north of Boise to find wolf tracks in the snow and hear their howling. Tuesday, he’ll speak at the Audubon Society of Portland on the long journey to recovery that wolves in Oregon face. He often thinks it will take the younger generation to appreciate what has been accomplished.
“Wolves are in great shape in the northern Rockies,” he says. “They’re prolific and resilient, and with fair chase-hunting season and regulations, wolves are here to stay.”
— Julie Sullivan
*Special thanks to Julie Sullivan from “OregonLive.com” for providing the information in this article.
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2011/03/former_wolf_hit_man_carter_nie.html
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