Three decades after being hunted to near-extinction in the Lower 48 states and 14 years after being reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, gray wolves in the United States have been removed from the Endangered Species List. “We have a recovered wolf population,” said Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “The populations are viable, they are in great shape, they have extreme genetic diversity, and so the Endangered Species Act did its job to bring wolves back.”
Removal from the Endangered Species List means that there will be limited hunting of gray wolves, which now number 4,000 in the Great Lakes region, more than 1,300 in the Rocky Mountain states of Idaho and Montana, and 8,000 to 11,000 in Alaska. Some environmental groups vowed to challenge the action in court, saying populations in the Rocky Mountains region were still too small to be hunted. They cited the example of Wyoming, where the wolves were heavily hunted when they were briefly removed from the Endangered Species List earlier. The gray wolf still remains a protected species in northwestern Wyoming, home to roughly 300 animals.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife