Speak Up for Wolves in the Great Lakes Region

[Omaha Steve]

Take action here: http://action.biologicaldiversity.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=4995

Despite the gray wolf's continuing endangerment, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has repeatedly sought to remove Endangered Species Act protection from existing wolf populations. Most recently, the Service announced that petitions aimed at delisting wolves in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and other Great Lakes states may be warranted. The Service thinks it's done with gray wolf recovery even though wolves are absent from most of the United States.

Endangered Species Act protection allowed wolves in Minnesota to disperse into Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This proves that the Endangered Species Act works, but wolf recovery is still far from complete. Wolves occupy a mere 5 percent of their historic range in the lower 48 and continue to face threats to their survival.

The Center for Biological Diversity and other pro-wolf organizations have successfully used the courts to derail the Service's past efforts to prematurely reduce and remove federal protections from gray wolves. In fact, the Service's misguided plans for the gray wolf have been rebuffed by the courts six times in the past five years. Enough is enough. Please tell the Service to abandon its illegal scheme to remove federal protections from gray wolves.

To view the Federal Register notice visit http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#documentDetail?R=0900006480b4ea43.

Subject: Maintain ESA Protection for Great Lakes Wolves
Your Letter:

Public Comments Processing, Attn: FWS-R3-ES-2010-0062

I am writing to urge the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to maintain federal protection for wolves in the Great Lakes region.

The gray wolf was once one of the most widely distributed land mammals in North America, but concerted human persecution nearly eradicated the species from the lower 48. With the protection of the Endangered Species Act, however, the gray wolf has made progress toward recovery in the western Great Lakes region.

Nevertheless, even today the gray wolf is absent from vast swaths of habitat where wolves once lived and collectively could still recover, including within the Pacific Northwest and California, the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, the southern Rocky Mountains, the Southwest, the Great Plains, and the forests of New England and upstate New York. The gray wolf must remain protected under the Endangered Species Act so that it can someday be recovered to all these areas.

Within the Great Lakes region, wolves are subject to threats that demonstrate that the Endangered Species Act's protections are still necessary. In recent years, disease has killed between 40 and 60 percent of wolf pups. The risk of this threat may be exacerbated by climate change, as warming temperatures can increase pathogen development and disease spread. And upon delisting, wolves would lose all federal protection and would be subjected to intensive state-sponsored predator-control programs. Drastic population decline is a virtual certainty. Without robust monitoring programs, the Great Lakes wolf population could be decimated before the Service even learned of the need for corrective action.

The loss of federal protection for wolves in the Great Lakes region would not only threaten the Great Lakes population, it would also prevent this population from serving as a source of dispersing wolves that could repopulate unoccupied portions of the wolf's range. I urge the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to refocus its efforts on wolf recovery. To that end, Great Lakes wolves must remain protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Your letter will be sent to these recipients:

Public Comments Processing, Attn: FWS-R3-ES-2010-0062
USFWS Division of Policy and Directives Management
4401 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 222
Arlington, VA 22203
Fill in your information, then click to submit your letter.

[joeybee12]

1. KNR...hopefully we can force Obama to put a Democrat in charge of the Dept of the Interior

so this sort of shit stops from the US Fish & Wildlife Dis-service.

[flvegan]

2. Happy to KNR!

[Heywood J]

3. Wolves still exist around the Great Lakes?

I'm very surprised to learn this, the whole region has been heavily settled and urbanized for two hundred years. We should probably be sequencing genomes, as it will eventually come down to that.