Hola
Ahi van noticias en ingles de sarna en Yellowstone y noticias de Italia.
Debajo la traduccion cutre.

Y mas abajo aun, la LARGA historia personal de uno de los lobos de
Idaho, enmarcada en la historia de la reintroduccion de lobos a dicho
estado norteamericano, para el que se aburra.

Saludos
Jorge

---------------------------------------------
4-03-07 Mange found in Yellowstone wolves

Mange, a debilitating disease imported to Montana a century ago to kill
wolves, has returned to Yellowstone Park and the animals reintroduced
there. Biologists identified the disease in a 9-year-old wolf earlier
this winter, The Billings Gazette reported. The wolf, the alpha male in
Mollie's Pack, has disappeared and biologists say he may have died.
Mange is caused by a burrowing mite. It leaves wolves emaciated and
debilitated, vulnerable to other diseases or to harsh conditions. While
other infectious diseases that strike wolves kill those infected and
move on, biologists describe mange as persistent. "Mange would be around
in a messy kind of way every year," said Doug Smith, head of the
Yellowstone Wolf Project. "This is an exotic, introduced disease we want
to eradicate but it may be impractical to do so." In 1905, when wolves
were considered a pest, wildlife officials in Montana began capturing
wolves and coyotes, infecting them with mange and releasing them.


4-03-07
Italy's wolves bounce back


Italy's wolves, once at risk of extinction, have bounced back, but still
are at risk, an expert speaking in Rome said. "There are now between 500
and 1,000 wolves living in Italy and the outlook is far more rosy than
it was 30 years ago when no more than 100 remained in scattered areas,"
said Luigi Boitani, who heads La Sapienza University's Animal and Human
Biology Department, ANSA reported. Boitani said the biggest threat to
the wolves are farmers and hunters. About 100 wolves are killed every
year, he said, ANSA reported. "When we discuss these figures in other
parts of Europe or in North America, they ask us how it is that any
wolves remain in Italy. The credit goes to the Italians, for having
found a balance. "However, the problems start when wolves return to an
area after decades, and the ability to coexist has been forgotten."

-----------------------------------------

Encuentran sarna en lobos de Yellowstone

Mange, una enfermedad debilitante importado a Montana hace uno siglo
para matar a lobos, ha regresado al estacionamiento de Yellowstone y a
los animales volver a presentar allí. Biólogos identificaron la
enfermedad en un lobo de 9 años más temprano este invierno, la gaceta de
Billings informó. El lobo, el macho de alfa en el paquete de Mollie, ha
desaparecido y los biólogos dicen que podría haberse morido. Mange es
causado por un ácaro hacer una madriguera. Deja a lobos escuálido y
debilitado, vulnerable a las otras enfermedades o a las condiciones
severas. Mientras las otras enfermedades contagiosas que golpean a lobos
matan a aquellos infectados y siguen adelante, los biólogos describen
mange como persistente. "Mange estaría por aquí en una sucio tipo de
manera todos los años", Doug Smith, cabeza del proyecto de lobo de
Yellowstone dijo. "Ésta es una enfermedad exótica y presentada que
queremos erradicar pero podría ser poco práctico lo hacer." En 1905,
cuando lobos fueron considerados una plaga, funcionarios de flora y
fauna en Montana empezaron a capturar a lobos y coyotes, contagiar ellos
con mange y soltar ellos.


Los lobos de Italia se recuperan


Los lobos de Italia, una vez en el riesgo de la extinción, se han
recuperado, pero todavía ser en peligro, un experto que hablaba en Roma
dijo. "Ahora hay entre 500 y 1,000 lobos viviente en Italia y el punto
de vista era far más rosado que fue hace 30 años cuando nada más que 100
quedaba en áreas dispersas", dijo a Luigi Boitani, que dirige el
departamento de biología de animal y Human de la La universidad de
Sapienza, ANSA informó. Boitani dijo que la amenaza más grande para los
lobos es agricultores y cazadores. Aproximadamente 100 lobos son matados
todos los años, dijo, ANSA informó. "Cuando hablamos de estas cifras en
otras partes de Europa o en North America, nos preguntan cómo ser que
cualquier lobos quedan en Italia. El crédito va hacia los italianos,
para haber encontrado un balance. "Sin embargo, los problemas empiezan
cuando los lobos regresan a una área después de las décadas, y la
habilidad de coexistir ha sido olvidada."

-------------------------------



http://www.idahostatesman.com/102/story/74229.html

The long life of one wolf embodies the story of wolf recovery in idaho

By Rocky Barker - Idaho Statesman
Edition Date: 03/04/07


A silver-tipped gray wolf found dead along a highway north of Salmon in
January was
likely the last of the 34 original wolves brought to Idaho from Canada
in 1995 and
1996.
His life spanned Idaho's modern experience with wolves. The story of the
wolf known
to scientists as B7 is the story of wolf recovery in Idaho.

His 12 years in Idaho's high country make him perhaps the longest-lived
wild wolf
known to scientists.

Thanks to management, plenty of prey and a vast roadless heart in the
middle of the
state, Idaho is the place where wolves grow old - and plentiful. The
state now has
at least 650 wolves, as many as Montana and Wyoming combined. Three of
the five
oldest wolves ever recorded in the wild - including B7 - have lived in
Idaho since
1995.

"I think B7 would have been dead many years before had he not lived in
Idaho," said
Isaac Babcock, the Nez Perce biologist who knew the wolf best.

As an adolescent, B7 and his longtime mate B11 created chaos among
ranches in Montana's Big Hole Valley.

After a relocation strategy that included months in an enclosure in the
Selway
Wilderness, the pair were released in North Idaho, where they finally
settled down
to a life of raising pups and eating elk in the Lolo Pass area.

B7 was hit by a car and found dead next to a road-killed deer Jan. 8, as
federal
officials were proposing to remove Idaho wolves from the endangered
species list.
Hinton, Alberta, 1993:Born in Canada

B7 was born somewhere in the Oldman River Basin, a heavily wooded area
much like
Idaho on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains near Hinton, Alberta,
Canada, in
1993 or 1994.

Like thousands of wolves across Canada's hinterlands, he lived a
hazardous life. A
wolf can expect to live two to three years on average.

If he wasn't kicked to death by an elk or killed by other members of his
pack competing for food and status, he might have ended up in a
trapper's snare. But fate
intervened.

U.S. biologists were looking for wolves to take to Yellowstone National
Park and
Idaho's Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness - a vast area of
rugged mountains, deep canyons and thick forests in Central Idaho.

A plan to reintroduce wolves to America's Northern Rockies had been in
play since
the early 1980s, but had long been held up because of opposition from
Western congressmen backed by powerful livestock ranchers throughout the
region.

In January 1995, with reintroduction finally approved, the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife
Service gathered wolves in Hinton for shipment.

They divided the wolves into cohesive packs and unconnected singles.

The pack families were destined for Yellowstone, where they would be
kept in acclimation pens for several months - the so-called "soft
release."

The singles would be dumped in Idaho, a "hard release."

B7, then a 60-pound yearling, was captured with a 2-year-old, 72-pound
female from
the same pack. Two wolves weren't enough for a Yellowstone pack, so both
were slated
for Idaho.

"I remember him being so young and small," said Alice Whitelaw, then a
biologist
with the Fish and Wildlife Service. "He would kind of avoid your eyes."

Whitelaw came to know the young gray wolf with a slight silver streak
well in the
days she and other biologists and veterinarians were preparing the
Canadian wolves
for their journey.

It was Whitelaw who attached the ear tag and radio collar that B7 would
wear for the
rest of his life.

Corn Creek, Idaho, 1995:FREe in THE WILDERNEsS

The first five wolves were released Jan. 15, 1995, at Corn Creek along
the Salmon
River north of Salmon. B7 was part of the second group of nine
reintroduced wolves
that were flown by helicopter Jan. 20 from Missoula into the wilderness.

He was flown to the air strip at Indian Creek on the Middle Fork of the
Salmon
River. Ed Bangs, Fish and Wildlife Service wolf recovery coordinator in
Helena,
Mont., was in the helicopter.

"I was sitting there with a bunch of wolves on my lap," he said of the
day he moved
the wolves by air to their new home in Idaho.

After a shot of an antidote to wake them from their drug-induced sleep,
the wolves
staggered into the wilderness.

Alone for the first time, B7 roamed hundreds of miles. In the spring, he
was located
by plane in the Payette National Forest north of Yellow Pine.

Using a radio receiver while driving around the forest near Salmon,
Whitelaw and
biologist Val Asher detected him with a black female, another Canada
transplant
known as B11, the first time the mates were seen together.

"I remember saying to Val, 'Oh, my God, we've got a signal,' " Whitelaw
said.

BIG HOle, Mont., 1996:Horror and romance

The following spring, B7 and B11 followed the elk east out of the Salmon
area,
across the Beaverhead Mountains into the Big Hole Valley in Montana.

It was in this wide-open valley of pastures, ranches and hayfields
bounded by lodgepole pine and aspen that they walked into the life of
rancher Wayne Turner.

Turner first saw the wolves as his cows were calving in April. The pair
he dubbed
"7-11" walked through his herd but stayed out of trouble.

At first.

"I would have thought he was a coyote, he was so small," Turner said.

The young male's size was deceiving. Later that summer, Turner found a
heifer dead.

"It appeared that one of them got ahold of the nose and the other one
got ahold of
the shoulder," Turner said. "They sure must have a lot of power to bring
that animal
down like that."

Two other cows had been hamstrung, with holes in their backsides big
enough for
Turner to stick his hand through.

Turner and his neighbors wanted action. Bangs, the wolf manager, called
in Carter
Niemeyer, then an agent of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife
Services
branch, to catch and move the pair.

Niemeyer had been darting depredating wolves since 1989. Like a
gunslinger of old,
he was the man the service and ranchers called in times of trouble.

"You tell me where you want me to be and what you want caught," he
explained of his
role then.

He found the pair in a rancher's pasture. Niemeyer hit B7 with a dart
filled with
tranquilizer, but the dart bounced off a bone. B7 got away. Niemeyer hit
B11 and
knocked her out.

The black female was flown 160 miles west, deep into Idaho's wilderness.
Within 10
days, she'd returned to Big Hole to rejoin B7.

"It's almost a romance story," said Beverly McDougal, who followed the
pair through
Big Hole with her husband Graeme, a Wildlife Services trapper.

McDougal remembers sitting along a backcountry road soon after B11
returned.

"They were howling together," she said.

But McDougal's romance tale was Turner's horror story. He and other
ranchers reported increased calf losses when they brought their herds in
for the winter. They
called Bangs to a public meeting in Wisdom, where 50 ranchers and
hunters demanded
the wolves be removed.

Niemeyer darted them both in December.

selway-bitterroot, 1997: Teaching restraint

By now, the Nez Perce Tribe was managing wolves in Idaho for the Fish
and Wildlife
Service. Tribal biologists took B7 and B11 to Yellowstone National Park
and placed
them in an acclimation pen there. Biologists hoped that by spending time
in a pen,
the wolves would lose their sense of direction.

In January 1997, biologists moved the wolves to a newly built pen at
Running Creek
Ranch in the middle of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, about 100 miles
northwest
of Big Hole.

They planned to release them into the wilderness in the spring.

B7 had other plans.

He chewed and climbed until he got over the fence but stuck around for
10 days
waiting for B11 to join him. Finally, he left B11, heading east for Big
Hole and
Turner's cattle.

The rancher saw B7 in his calving pasture again. When Niemeyer arrived
by helicopter, B7 was in the midst of a herd of cattle. Niemeyer quickly
darted and
captured the wolf.

Doug Chadwick, a wildlife biologist and author of more than 10 books,
arrived in Big
Hole to research an article for National Geographic.

He helped unload and examine the drugged wolf before B7 was dropped on
his lap as he
and then-tribal biologist Timm Kaminski drove to the building where they
would hold
the wolves overnight.

For Chadwick, who has devoted his life to writing about and studying the
world's
disappearing wildlife, it was a seminal moment.

"I remember having this animal in my lap, feeling it was a joy,"
Chadwick said. "I
didn't think in my lifetime in Montana I would see a wolf, never mind
hold one in my
lap."

But Chadwick was holding the wolves because ranchers couldn't tolerate
them.

That he was holding 100 pounds of wildness in his hands challenged his
deeply held
view of how wolves and humans fit into the ecosystem.

"It's easy to demonize something in a vacuum," Chadwick said. "That's
how the human
mind works. Once you touch hands with fur, you can no longer deny it's a
beautiful
(creature.)"

Wolves, he said, should be shapers of their environment and shaped by
it. They hunt
elk and affect where and how elk live. The availability and wariness of
their prey
shapes the wolves.

And the interplay between predator and prey affects the elk, and the
growth of the
shrubs and the grasses that elk eat, Chadwick said.

But in the agrarian Big Hole Valley, wolves could not be allowed to be
wild.

"Once you have your hands on an animal, its breath steaming in your
face, it's a
different reality," Chadwick said.

During one of the capture trips to the Big Hole, several ranchers
brought their
neighbors and families to see the kenneled wolves.

Those rural families expressed the same awe and wonder as Chadwick.

Turner went to the informal wolf presentation too. He still grumbles
that it was
largely pro-wolf propaganda.

Today, Turner has moved most of his operation out of the Big Hole
Valley. Wolves are
part of the reason, he said. Yet he, too, is careful not to demonize the
wolves.

"I don't hate the animal, I hate the people who reintroduced them," he
said.

north fork, clearwater, 1995: ONE Last chance

B7 and B11 had been given second, third and fourth chances - more than
future Idaho
wolves would get as the numbers grew and problem animals were more
quickly killed.

"Wolves are capable of learning and remembering," said Kaminski, who
today helps
livestock owners cope with wolves. "We can use this to manage them
better both
around livestock and with their traditional prey."

Managers knew "7-11" could never return to the Big Hole again. Any new
incident
would mean their deaths.

So tribal biologists hauled B7 and B11 from the Running Creek Ranch
enclosure to the
North Fork of the Clearwater, where they were released in August 1997.

The wolves had lived longer than the average Alberta wolf. But they'd
survived only
because of the decisions of wildlife managers.

Lolo Pass, 1997:A new life

The wolf couple set up housekeeping near Lolo Pass on the Idaho-Montana
border.

Most of the area is heavily forested wilderness, with lush, high meadows
and a
legendary elk herd that for more than 60 years has drawn hunters from
across America
seeking trophies.

The wolves had their first litter of six pups in 1998. The pair were
seen in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, over the rugged mountains from the
hunting territory
they had established. Niemeyer trapped and collared one of the pups, but
the pair
stayed out of trouble.

Now they were known as the Big Hole Pack, even though they never
returned to that
valley. The multiple captures and months of confinement had worked: The
pack was
never again accused of raiding ranches.

Meanwhile, after just three years, wolf recovery in Idaho was moving
along faster
than anyone predicted.

The original 34 animals reintroduced in 1995 and 1996 and the handful of
native
wolves in the state had grown to 126 in 10 packs.

Well ahead of Montana and Wyoming, Idaho had reached the minimum
population needed
for "recovery" - success as defined by the Endangered Species Act.

W. FORK, LOLO CREEK, MOnt., 1999:ROOM For a three-legged WOLF

No one knew B7 better than Isaac Babcock, a young Nez Perce biologist.
He monitored
the state's wolf packs and put collars on as many animals as possible.

By the time he first saw B7 in 1999, the wolf was full grown, his
distinctive silver
streak more prominent with age.

Near Lolo Creek in Montana, in the spring of 1999, Babcock caught a
large wolf in a
trap in the Big Hole Pack's territory, and it dragged the trap away.

B11 was pregnant with pups at the time, and Babcock worried that his
trap might have
prevented her from delivering her pups or might even have killed her. He
and another
biologist hiked into the area to find out what happened.

They found the pack. Babcock crawled to within 15 feet of B7 and B11,
who stood
together. He could see that neither had any trap damage.

Another time, Babcock was trying to collar other members of the pack. He
crawled up
close to B7 in a violent thunderstorm. The underbrush suddenly opened
up, and B7
stood 15 feet away.

As the wolf caught Babcock's scent, he stepped forward - revealing three
pups the
alpha wolf appeared to be protecting.

"They are jumping for his muzzle and he's looking down at them, then
smelling me,"
Babcock said. "Right at that moment lightning hit hard enough to shake
the ground.
It made my heart bounce."

The wolves fled. Today, the biologist counts the moment as one of the
best of his
life.

In 2001, as Babcock watched the pack for three days, he saw a large
three-legged
wolf - the animal that must have been injured in the trap two years
before.

In Yellowstone or in Canada, an injured wolf either would be killed or
driven out of
the pack. But with little competition for food and space, the Big Hole
Pack had a
place even for a handicapped wolf. Babcock even witnessed the wolf
participating in
pack hunts.

boise, 2001:STATE accepts wolves

By 2001, Idaho had 300 wolves, and the Fish and Wildlife Service was
less charitable
about saving troublesome animals.

Niemeyer, the former hired gun, was now based in Boise as the wolf
coordinator in
Idaho with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The 6-foot-6,
plain-spoken Iowa
native had earned respect from both ranchers and environmentalists for
his efforts
to keep wolves and livestock apart.

But by 2002 he had been forced to kill more wolves - 27 in a 31-month
period in the
White Cloud Mountains alone.

When he decided to kill a pack in the East Fork of the Salmon River, he
did the job
himself. He was inundated with thousands of angry e-mails from
wolf-lovers worldwide.

"I never wanted to shoot another wolf again, but I had to," he said
afterward.

The killings weren't slowing down the wolf population, which was rising
at more than
20 percent a year. But Niemeyer's carefully balanced control tactics -
allowing some
wolves to live - convinced ranchers their best hope for controlling
wolves lay in
delisting the wolf from Endangered Species Act protection and permitting
more aggressive control.

Ranchers convinced the Idaho Legislature to approve a wolf-management
plan in 2001
that satisfied Bangs and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

With the state's wolf numbers far above the recovery goal of 10 breeding
pairs,
hunters took the place of ranchers as the managers' worst critics.

Lolo zone, unit 12, 2004: hunters worry about ELK

The Big Hole Pack's territory covered part of the Idaho Department of
Fish and
Game's Lolo Elk Management Zone. Fires from 1910 to 1934 had burned off
hundreds of
thousands of acres of old-growth forest. This created some of the best
elk habitat
in the country in the second half of the 20th century, and by 1989 as
many as 16,500
elk were counted in the zone.

But the forests grew back. Grassy hillsides and shrublands that provided
elk food
were replaced with thick stands of lodgepole, pine, red fir and Western
cedar, which
do not. By 2000, less than a quarter of the herd living in the 1980s had
survived.

Hunters lobbied Fish and Game through the 1990s to allow them to kill
more black
bears and cougars, which they blamed for dropping elk numbers. As wolf
numbers in
Idaho grew, they became both a perceived and real part of the problem.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Fish and Game officials dramatically
increased the
killing of mountain lions and bears. In 2005, department biologists
suggested they
could help the elk herd by killing wolves.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had granted the state's request to
take over most
of the day-to-day wolf management, including monitoring, control and
education.
Steve Nadeau, who started as a game warden in the territory of the Big
Hole Pack,
replaced Niemeyer as the man in charge of Idaho's wolves in 2006.

Nadeau had traveled the backcountry looking unsuccessfully for wolves
with Kaminski
in the 1980s. He was an expert on large carnivores and the Lolo region.

In 2004, Nadeau and Niemeyer were on a moose hunt near Lolo Pass. After
the three
moose they shot were boned out, the Big Hole Pack came down and picked
the carcasses
clean, Nadeau said.

"We were listening to the presidential debates on our radio and
listening to the
wolves howl in the background," Nadeau said.

Outfitter Rick Martz of Victor, Mont., has 14 camps spread throughout
the Big Hole
Pack's range.

The presence of wolves has scared off clients despite his continued
success at
bringing them to big bulls.

Like most of the outfitters in the area, Martz supported a Fish and Game
proposal to
kill up to 43 wolves in the Lolo zone. The Big Hole Pack itself, which
now dens in
Montana, would have been off-limits, Nadeau said.

The department's research suggests that the elk herd would grow if the
wolf population in the area were reduced 25 to 40 percent.

"They need to be managed," Martz said.

Martz has seen a big black wolf - the color of B11 - walk right into his
camp. Other
times, he's heard elk bugle on one ridge while wolves howl on another.

He too has contradictory feelings about wolves.

"Every night we turn those lanterns down we hear those wolves howling
and it's
cool," Martz said. "When I hear that howling, the skin rises on my neck.
I'm leery
about tethering my horses.

"But that's part of the wilderness."

Lolo Creek, Mont., 2005: The last goodbye

In July 2005, Babcock and a volunteer snuck close after locating the Big
Hole pack
in Montana along the East Fork of Lolo Creek from the collar signal of a
younger
female.

B7 and B11 had outlived their radio collars, which went silent in 2003.
They had
lived long past the life expectancy of most wolves. Only a handful of
the original
34 wolves were still alive.

Babcock doubted he would find the old pair he had come to love. But as
he watched
the pack, he got a surprise.

"B11 and B7 jump up, and they both go running off," Babcock said. "We
turned around
and smiled."

Babcock had seen B7 and B11 for the last time.

Idaho's request to kill wolves in the Lolo was denied by Bangs and the
Fish and
Wildlife Service in 2006. But in December, the agency said it would
propose removing
wolves from the endangered species list in Idaho, Montana, parts of the
Oregon,
Washington and Utah in 2007.

In the lifetime of one old wolf, Idaho wolves had gone from functionally
extinct to
endangered to biologically recovered in Idaho.

The population had risen from less than 20 in 1995 to more than 650.

In 2005, only three of the original 34 wolves was known to be alive.
B11, 1 or 2
years old when she was caught in Alberta in 1994, would be 14 or 15 if
she is alive
today. Nobody knows. B7 was likely a year younger. B9, a white female
the same age
as B11, was last seen in the Chamberlain Basin in 2005.

A typical Yellowstone wolf lives four years. An old wolf there is 9.

SALMON RIVER, 2007: end of an era

On Jan. 8 this year, chukar hunters stumbled across a dead wolf with a
radio collar
in a draw across U.S. 93 from the Salmon River 15 miles north of Salmon.
A car had
hit the wolf, which was eating a road-killed deer.

Now he was roadkill.

The ear tag and collar were worn smooth, so Fish and Game couldn't
identify the
silver-tinged wolf immediately. They sent the collar to the
manufacturer, to check
its unique frequency. The dead wolf was B7.

A week later, Idaho Gov. Butch Otter stood on the steps of the
Statehouse and made
killing Idaho wolves an international issue. Otter told hunters that he
wanted to
bid for the first tag to hunt a wolf once the predators are delisted,
which could be
as soon as 2008.

With delisting, hunting and more aggressive control of the now-thriving
Idaho population, the era of old wolves could die with B7.