Would it be fair to say that a wolf is to an elk what a coyote is to a deer? A wolf, like a coyote, is a meat-eating predator that team-hunts its prey. An elk, like a deer, is a browsing ruminate, and an ideal, protein-loaded dinner source for an opportunistic predator. If you Google Earth from a Maine deer wintering area to an elk wintering basin in Yellowstone Park, the life and death dramas that play out in these geographically disparate areas are much the same. The Western animals are just larger.

In Maine, coyotes kill deer.

In Yellowstone, wolves kill elk.

The similarities don’t stop here, either. In 1995, there were a record 20,000 elk in the northern end of Yellowstone Park, the largest elk count since U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) started counting heads in 1930. Since 1995, there has been a constantly decreasing number of elk in Yellowstone. In 2010 the USFWS elk census counted just 5,000 elk, a 24 percent decline in one year’s time!

What’s the story? It’s not rocket science. In 1995, USFWS introduced the wolf to Yellowstone. Wolves eat elk. The rest is history. As wolf numbers increased there was a corresponding downward trend in elk numbers. “Recovery” is the term wildlife biologists use to describe the reestablishment of an animal in healthy numbers. Well, thanks to a steady diet of elk steaks, the Yellowstone wolf “recovered” nicely.

And in Maine, thanks to the coyote that came on the scene back in the 1960s, Maine’s deer numbers have also been on a downward spiral. During this free fall of Maine’s north woods deer numbers, most of our state wildlife biologists caution sportsmen not to jump to conclusions, that deer mortality can be attributed as much to winter severity and habitat as predation by coyotes. Fair enough, but aren’t coyotes a variable that can be “managed” easier than winter snows, or spruce budworm epidemics?

Last year, the Feds began to see the light. But when the USFWS attempted to declare the Yellowstone wolf “recovered” and remove it from the endangered species status, animal rights organizations went to court to prevent a delisting! Out West, sportsmen and ranchers are fed up.

In a recent article in Bugle Magazine, Karen Loveless, a Montana wildlife biologist is blaming “predators and drought” for the precipitous decline in Yellowstone elk populations. By predators, she means wolves and bears. A Montana rancher I know who works a good-sized ranch just outside Yellowstone Park just laughs when asked about the effect of the drought on the elk mortality. “Wolves and grizzlies are killing off the elk,” says he “In the spring the bears take a lot of the elk calves and, in winter, the wolves do a job on the winter-weary, rut-weakened elk.”

Of course, in the elk/wolf and coyote/deer debate, the biologists, and other multiple-source theorists, can argue that the predator evidence is purely anecdotal, that a few trapper stories about coyote-ravaged deer in a winter yard doesn’t really tell us much. They have a point. In Montana or Maine, we have no quantifiable data when it comes to how many elk or deer are killed by predators, whether they be bears, coyotes or wolves.

Clearly, though, there is an indisputable cause-and-effect relationship: the more wolves the fewer elk; the more coyotes the fewer deer. So it only follows that the way to have more deer in Maine, or elk in Montana, is to manage the predator populations. In Montana, for the time being, the wolf remains protected at the expense of elk numbers. In Maine, the north woods whitetails are getting more and more scarce, partly due to predation by bears and coyotes. We can’t “manage down” our bear numbers because it has become a critical, rural economic commodity, and we can’t conduct coyote-snaring programs in northwoods deer yards because the state signed off on a consent decree with USFWS not to conduct snaring in lynx habitat.

Believe it or not, there was a time not so long ago, when managing wildlife was predicated mostly on common sense and nuts-and-bolts biology, not politics.

The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WCME-FM 96.7) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected].

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