A long-running wolf research program at Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve has ended because the state of Alaska has killed so many wolves in the area/NPS file photo

During the past decade, Alaska Department of Fish and Game has sponsored a predator control program that has killed at least 90 wolves that had home ranges within Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, according to a report that says the National Park Service was forced to end a more than 20-year research project on predator-prey relationships due to those losses.

As a result of state shoot-on-sight and other lethal removal tactics, NPS concludes that the wolf population in the 2.5-million-acre national preserve is “no longer in a natural state” nor are there enough survivors to maintain a “self-sustaining population," said a release from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

In responding to questions from Rick Steiner, a retired University of Alaska professor and PEER board member, park officials said they had to terminate the predator-prey project due to the loss of 13 radio-collared wolves.

"The loss of collared wolves has reduced our ability to locate packs, observe dens, and conduct spring and fall population estimates," said Greg Dugeon, superintendent of the preserve. "The accummulated effect of losing collared wolves contributed to a NPS decision to suspend our long-running radio-telemetry program.

"... NPS has ceased rigorous monitoring of Yukon-Charley wolves largely in part to the state's intensive management program," the superintendent added. "The expense of collaring and monitoring wolves for research is not sustainable when Alaska Department of Fish and Game culls the same animals when located outside the preserve."

According to PEER officials, the state of Alaska has a goal of reducing wolf populations in the Upper Yukon by 75 percent. To do so, it hires hunters who shoot wolves from helicopters and airplanes, the group said.

"For example in 2013, all 24 members of the Preserve's Seventymile Pack, including two with radio collars, were shot from ADFG-authorized private airplane gunners, eliminating the pack," said PEER. "In 2014, ADFG helicopter gunners shot all 11 members of the Lost Creek Pack, including two collared animals, eliminating that pack as well."

PEER also stated that the state at times will put its own radio collar on a wolf, and then follow it back to its pack, where the animals are killed. Since 2011 nearly 200 wolves have been killed through this process, the group said.

“A clearly excessive and misguided state predator control program has succeeded in destroying the natural character of one of nation's premier natural places. We are aware of no other instance in which a state has so extensively compromised the ecological integrity of a federal conservation area,” said Mr. Steiner, who obtained the documents from NPS and ADFG and who is advocating a five-mile buffer around all Alaska federal conservation lands, in which state predator control activities would be prohibited. “The State of Alaska is foolishly, almost vindictively, squelching a generation of invaluable scientific inquiry into predator-prey dynamics.” 

The state Intensive Management program is supposed to boost game animal populations, principally caribou and moose, by killing wolves and bears, noted PEER. Despite inflicting high mortality on wolf packs, however, even ADFG concedes that the Forty Mile Caribou herd population and calf survival rate has plateaued in the past five years.

“This program appears to be driven by anti-federal ideology rather than sound game management,” said PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, pointing out that ADFG contends that its elaborate predator control efforts are supported entirely by increasingly scarce state dollars but has also rebuffed Park Service requests to reduce its take of wolves and to avoid shooting collared wolves. “Here we have the ridiculous situation of two public agencies spending taxpayer dollars at cross-purposes to the detriment of both a major national park and the balance of nature.”