Steadily rising coyote populations have been causing enough trouble
in North Carolina as it is, but now even management efforts are having
unintended consequences.
The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission adopted a temporary rule on
August 1 which allows night hunting of coyotes with a light. Daytime
hunting without a specific season or limit has been permitted for years,
but some say that night hunting puts the red wolves of North Carolina
in danger.
“They look very close to coyotes,” said Tara Zuardo, legal associate
for the Animal Welfare Institute, one of several organizations that
jointly filed a lawsuit in September against the commission, as well as a
request to end the night hunting.
Eastern North Carolina has the only wild population of red wolves
left in the world, and there’s only about 90 to 110 of them, Zuardo said
in an interview. She said that there are already about seven red wolves
mistakenly killed every year.
“Out of the total population, that’s 7 to 9 percent annually,” Zuardo said. “That’s before the night hunting.”
“If we have those issues in the daytime, we’re definitely going to
have them in the nighttime,” said Kim Wheeler, executive director of the
Red Wolf Coalition, another organization involved in the case. Many
hunters don’t even know that North Carolina has wolves, so they just
assume they’re coyotes, Wheeler said in an interview.
Red wolves were officially declared extinct in the wild in 1980, but
the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service tried to reintroduce them to
several areas in the late 1980s. “This is really the only reintroduction
program that worked,” Zuardo said. “It’s a pretty sensitive
population.”
Wheeler said that shooting even a few wolves can be disastrous. “We
have less than a dozen [mated] pairs of animals,” she said. Not only
that, but shooting coyotes can also hurt the wolves, she said.
Because of interbreeding concerns, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service already sterilizes coyotes within red wolf territories.
A press release issued by the Southern Environmental Law Center, the
Chapel Hill organization that officially filed the complaint against the
commission, said that shooting these coyotes “will undo effective
coyote population control efforts and further jeopardize the native red
wolf population.”
Forrest Orr, enforcement officer for the commission, said that
hunting is necessary for dealing with rising populations of coyotes.
“Coyotes have no natural predators; they’re pretty much the top of
the food chain,” said Orr in an interview. “Hunting and trapping are
really the only management tools that we have.”
Mallory Martin, chief deputy director of the commission, said in an
email interview that coyotes prey on livestock on farms and domestic
pets in urban areas, and they’ve been reported to damage crops like
watermelons as well.
“These are environmental and economic realities for landowners,
farmers, ranchers and others who are directly affected by expanding
coyote populations,” Martin said.
Martin said that night hunting is an important tool for landowners to
have for managing coyotes and their effects on their private land.
“Adoption of this rule recognizes the importance of providing private
landowners a reasonable and full range of options to respond to the
expansion of a non-native predatory species on the landscape,” he said.
Orr said that as the coyote population explodes, “they move into the
more urban areas, and that’s where you start getting more of the
problems,” as coyotes lose their fear of people when you can’t hunt
them.
The Southern Environmental Law Center’s press release said that the
commission also violated state laws when they adopted the night hunting
rule.
“Temporary rules are supposed to be more like emergency rules,”
Zuardo said. “They can be passed when there’s a serious or unforeseen
threat to public health or safety or welfare.
“But in terms of night hunting, that’s not really covered under a temporary rule,” Zuardo said. “It just doesn’t qualify.”
Zuardo said that the legal issue is not the most important issue.
“It’s not just that they went ahead with these rules, it’s that they
didn’t take into account the danger to such a sensitive and endangered
species,” she said. “You could wipe out the population in a night
basically.”
http://campusblueprint.com/2012/10/05/hunting-threatens-last-wild-population-of-red-wolves-in-the-world/
http://www.mnn.com/local-reports/north-carolina/local-blog/red-wolves-endangered-animals-still-at-risk
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