Walter Medwid, the new director of the Northwoods Stewardship Center in Charleston, gave a presentation on wolves on March 13 in St. Johnsbury. This pelt is from a wolf that was hit by a car in Minnesota. Photo by Bethany M. Dunbar
ST. JOHNSBURY — When wolves came back to Yellowstone National Park, researchers observed an ecological “cascading effect.”
Walter Medwid, the new executive director of the Northwoods Stewardship Center, told a group at the Fairbanks Museum on Thursday, March 13, that the presence of wolves meant elk were being killed, and the wolves did not eat all the meat. That leftover meat brought more birds and mammals, including grizzly bears, back to the area to feed. It also meant the elk were not always staying in the valleys. To avoid the wolves they would often head for the hills, which meant the valleys were not grazed and browsed as heavily. As a result several plants grew back, including willows, which shaded the river and improved the habitat for fish.
Mr. Medwid’s presentation described what happens as a result of putting an animal on the endangered species list.
Once it is determined that an animal is endangered, the planning process for that animal goes from the state to the federal level. Plans are developed to make that animal viable in the wild again.
For the wolf, three plans were developed. One covered the western Great Lakes, a second the northern Rocky Mountains, and a third plan was developed to help the Mexican wolf recover in the southwestern United States.
“The Mexican wolf did not exist in the wild. It only existed in zoos,” said Mr. Medwid. He said the Mexican wolf was a gray wolf, while one of the other endangered animals was a red wolf.
For a while there was a plan to return wolves to New England and the Adirondacks, but that plan has been dropped. Perhaps because Minnesota never lost all the wolves, he said, there is more tolerance for them there. The recovery program has worked so well that where there were once only 1,200 wolves there are now 3,000.
Those 3,000 wolves will kill 45,000 to 50,000 deer, which someone in the audience said is about three times what hunters in Vermont take in a year.
Hunters take a quarter of a million deer in Minnesota, Mr. Medwid said.
An animal that was part wolf was killed in Troy not long ago, and another was killed in western Massachusetts a couple of weeks ago. These might have been lone animals that were driven out of big packs to find a new pack. The best chance of survival for wolves is if there are multiple packs. Single wolves are often killed by other wolves who belong to a pack, but sometimes a stray wolf is accepted into a new pack.
Asked how someone could tell a wolf and a coyote apart if they see something in the woods, Mr. Medwid said the wolf is usually a lot larger. Also, a coyote has sharper ears and a wolf has a broader snout.
Wolves are still protected by the endangered species act outside of the areas where their population has made a recovery. But there is no longer a federal program working to bring them back. It’s now up to the states.
The only way the federal program might come back is if there was a public groundswell of support, which Mr. Medwid said is not likely.
Some states have reacted to the delisting of wolves from the endangered species act by saying they’re going to have a wolf lottery to get the population back down to where it was at the time they were listed as an endangered species, Mr. Medwid said.
For this reason, delisting a species can be controversial. But Mr. Medwid said the argument in favor of delisting is to show that the endangered species act really works, and that animals can recover to the point where they don’t need federal protection.
Mr. Medwid was on hand in 1995 when 31 wolves were collected in Canada to be crated up and flown back to the United States for the repopulation program. He said it was kind of amazing to see these great big burly guys — biologists who had helped trap the wolves to move them — as the airplane took flight. Some of them were crying.
Wolves are often controversial, Mr. Medwid said, and it’s pretty hard to have a discussion about them in a completely neutral manner.
He started his program by reading an excerpt from “Thinking like a Mountain,” an essay by Aldo Leopold, an early naturalist:
A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world. Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank, to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.
Mr. Medwid came to the Northwoods Stewardship Center in Charleston in October. Before that he was the director of the International Wolf Center in Minnesota for 14 years, according to an article about his departure in the organization’s newsletter.
“During his tenure, the center’s budget grew from slightly over $500,000 to $1.5-million, and employees increased from a handful to 20. A 1996 study showed that the center has a $3-million year annual impact on the local and regional economy of northern Minnesota,” says the article.
In a telephone interview Tuesday, Mr. Medwid said so far his new job and new home are just what he’d hoped.
Mr. Medwid grew up in Connecticut, but spent summers with an aunt in Corinth as a child. He used to help her farmer neighbors with chores and haying, and spent his free time hiking and fishing for brook trout. He’s very excited to get fishing again and has already bought his license.
“As soon as the opener arrives,” he said, “I’m ready to wet a line.”
Mr. Medwid said he doesn’t have plans for major changes at the Northwoods Stewardship Center. Mainly he wants to work towards financial security and to create an endowment fund.
“The major challenge right now is just to make sure the existing programs continue full speed ahead,” he said.
“The Northwoods Stewardship Center is sort of a gem within a gem of the Northeast Kingdom,” he said. He said the people have been incredibly welcoming and every day when he’s driving to work he feels lucky to be here.
“It’s just like driving through a kind of painting.”
