Original: http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2010/08/eastern_oregon_wolf_hazing_experiment_tries_to_keep_the_predators_away_from_cattle.html

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JOSEPH -- Jason Cunningham studies the muddy trail ahead for wolf tracks as his horse lopes through a northeastern Oregon mountain canyon.

An actual encounter with a wolf is rare in these mountains, even though the 30-year-old range rider knows from radio telemetry that more than a dozen wolves are nearby. He sees their tracks daily and often hears their mournful howls.

"We're chasing a ghost with tracks," quips the bearded Cunningham as he reins in Drifty , his 10-year-old bay gelding, near the burbling waters of Big Sheep Creek. His panting Catahoula dog, Iris , throws herself down at the horse's feet.

Cunningham's range riding job is sponsored by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the 530,000-member Defenders of Wildlife environmental group.

He's a hazer on horseback, discouraging wolves from dining on Oregon ranchers' beef -- no shooting allowed. He often pounds a saddle for 30 miles a day, changing horses at noon to keep his three horses fresh, then sometimes switching to an ATV for nighttime patrol because wolves tend to be more active after dark.

"It is very much an experiment," says Suzanne Stone , a Defenders of Wildlife spokeswoman in Boise who rode with Cunningham earlier this month. "We don't know if it is going to be an effective tool or not."

The return of Canadian gray wolves to Oregon is regarded by many as one of the greatest conservation success stories of the decade. But having wolves on the high-country summer range allotments worries Wallowa County ranchers, whose calves -- and livelihoods -- face a perilous future if canis lupus gets an idea that livestock is more toothsome than wildlife.

Range riders have successfully reduced livestock depredations in parts of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Alberta, Canada, Stone says. But while wolves are more numerous in those places, the terrain there is relatively open compared with Wallowa County's steep, overgrown river canyons.

Oregon's largest wolf pack, the Imnaha pack, now numbers 14 or so, and at least four more wolves roam the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness on the county's west end. The Imnaha pack killed up to nine calves in the Wallowa Valley near Joseph in May, and rancher Todd Nash , owner of the Marr Flat Cattle Co. near Joseph, suspects the wolves took 15 to 20 calves from his herd last summer and fall on remote federal allotments.

The Imnaha pack has wandered for more than a month between Oregon's Eagle Cap Wilderness and Idaho's Seven Devils Mountains, generally orbiting around Big Sheep Creek, due east of Joseph. The pack's movements have been slowed by four wolf pups born in March or early, Stone says.

"They are little guys, and they won't hunt on their own until they're about 10 months old," she says.

One wolf encounter

Cunningham occasionally hears the pups' yips as he rides through the canyons or sits at a nighttime campfire, he says. The pack's radio-collared, 115-pound alpha male vanished May 31, and biologists say he's dead of unknown causes, his radio collar has malfunctioned or he's departed Oregon on an extended ramble.

Cunningham pauses under a huge Ponderosa pine to dig into his saddlebags for a telemetry receiver that helps him keep track of the pack by monitoring other wolves wearing radio collars.

To his surprise, they're on the move, headed west. Unless they circle, this could mean they're leaving Big Sheep Canyon, he says.

A day earlier, Cunningham found wolf tracks and scat containing four tiny calf elk hooves. That tells him one wolf, at least, prefers dining on elk calves over livestock, he says.

The telemetry also reveals the pack has split, not unusual for these wolves. Individual wolves often take off for a few days of solitary wandering, he says. Sometimes prodigals rejoin the pack at established rendezvous points or reconnect by howling, and then trot off on some new solo adventure, he says.

Cunningham is a part-time horseshoer and professional cowhand with a small cattle herd of his own and a wife and four small children. He's wearing a straw cowboy hat in deference to the August heat, but leather chaps and long-sleeved shirts are necessary here because hawthorn shrubs with inch-long thorns choke much of the canyon.

He also wears a .357-caliber Magnum revolver on his belt, but not for wolves, he says. Then why? He recites a line of dialogue from "Lonesome Dove," one of his favorite western films: "It's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it."

Cunningham has had only one wolf encounter, last spring, about 20 miles north of here. He was riding horseback for a rancher he works for part time, when he came face to face with a large, black wolf, which veered off and soon disappeared.

"I was excited to see it," Cunningham says, adding that about two days later, one of the rancher's 120-pound calves was killed by wolves. "Go figure," he says. "They ate a fair amount of it."

Experiment continues

Part of a range rider's job, says Stone, is to bury livestock that die of natural causes so wolves don't acquire a taste for beef. Cunningham has found none to bury, and Stone believes the Imnaha pack is living on wild prey, probably Rocky Mountain elk and mule deer.

"We define success by not having depredations," says John Stephenson , spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Bend. "We haven't had any depredations lately. We haven't had any reports of livestock carcasses being found."

Still, tension remains high among local ranchers, who know that carcasses can be next to impossible to find in these mountains, with their dense lodgepole thickets, buckbush and hawthorn. A dead animal's remains typically last only two days before being reduced to a few scattered bones by scavengers, they say.

Whether a range rider can persuade wolves to bypass Wallowa County's thousands of livestock on summer range probably won't be known until autumn or early winter, after the cattle are brought in and counted, says rancher Rod Childers .

A 1 percent calf mortality rate isn't unusual, but more than that could suggest wolves are snacking on calves, says Childers, chairman of the Oregon Cattlemen's Association's wolf committee.

Until then, Cunningham plans to continue his horseback marathons, keeping on the lookout for both carcasses and mother cows without calves, another potential indicator that wolves have killed livestock.

While Cunningham has found some dry cows, it's difficult to keep track of how many, and impossible to know if wolves killed their calves, he says. Black bears and cougars also roam the area and feed on livestock.

But for now and until the snow flies, he'll keep tagging along after the wolves, whether they take him onto public or private land.

"Wherever the Imnaha pack goes, I have the OK to go," he says.

-- Richard Cockle