Scientific petition seeks to have wolves howl across U.S.

BILLINGS, Mont. — Tens of thousands of gray wolves would be returned to the woods of New England, the mountains of California, the wide open Great Plains and the desert West under a scientific petition filed Tuesday with the federal government.

The predators were poisoned and trapped to near-extermination in the United States last century, but have since clawed their way back to some of the most remote wilderness in the lower 48 states.

That recovery was boosted in the 1990s by the reintroduction of 66 wolves in Idaho and Yellowstone National Park. Yet as those first packs have flourished, increased livestock killings and declining big game herds have drawn sharp backlash from ranchers, hunters and officials in the Northern Rockies.

But biologists with the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity want to expand that recovery across the country. A few isolated pockets of wolves, they say, are not enough.

"If the gray wolf is listed as endangered, it should be recovered in all significant portions of its range, not just fragments," said Michael Robinson, who authored the petition. Robinson said the animals occupy less than 5 percent of their historic range in the lower 48 states.

The federal Administrative Procedure Act allows outside parties to petition the government to act when species are in peril. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Chris Tollefson, whose agency received the petition, said there was no deadline by which the agency must respond to the one filed Tuesday, which was signed by Robinson and another biologist, Noah Greenwald.

Tollefson also said an internal review was under way to figure out where wolves once lived and where they might be returned.

"We need to look at what is realistic and where the suitable habitat would be," Tollefson said.

The review will be completed by late 2010 or early 2011 and will contain recommendations but no final decision on whether to create new wolf populations, Tollefson said.

About 6,000 wolves live in the U.S. outside Alaska, with most of those in the Great Lakes and Northern Rockies, with only a few dozen in Arizona and New Mexico. They are listed as endangered except in Alaska, Idaho and Montana.