Wolves

BILLINGS, Mont. -- Aggressive gray wolf hunting and trapping took a toll in much of the Northern Rockies last year as the predator's population saw its most significant decline since being reintroduced to the region two decades ago.

CASPER, Wyo. -- He spends most of his fall outside in the mountains, so finding a wolf was not a matter of if, but when.

Like most hunters, Joe Hargrave bought wolf tag to put in his pocket just in case; he wasn’t wolf hunting, specifically. Hargrave had been elk hunting in early October when he saw wolves lying in a meadow several miles away. It took three hours to sneak up on the pack of seven. Waiting in the trees, he chose one and shot.

SALT LAKE CITY — More than a dozen Utah conservation groups are asking the federal government to continue endangered species protections for wolves in Utah, allowing for gray wolves to migrate naturally into the state from the north and Mexican gray wolves to do the same in southern Utah.

TWIN FALLS . It’s not open everywhere, but Idaho hunters now have the option to kill wolves all year.

This year’s newly approved wolf hunting season allowed hunters to begin killing wolves on private land in the Panhandle Zone starting July 1. The rest of the state will open for wolf hunting on Aug. 30, and most trapping areas will open Nov. 15.

BOISE, Idaho -- Idaho’s lost wolf pup left Boise this morning to head to a new home in Virginia.

BOISE, Idaho --The pup is awaiting his fate at Zoo Boise.

Tracks on Warm Springs Road in the Smoky Mountains northwest of Ketchum appear to show he was part of a wild pack that lived in the area, said Suzanne Stone, a wolf expert with the Defenders of Wildlife.

The two primary breeding females from the best-known wolf pack at Denali National Park -- a pack viewed by tens of thousands of visitors each year -- have been killed, one of them by a trapper operating just outside the boundary of Alaska's premier national park.

The incident has raised an outcry among Alaska conservationists. They're demanding an immediate halt to wolf trapping in what was formerly a buffer zone northeast of the park, an area made famous as the scene of the abandoned school bus in Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild."