The State of Wyoming has been feeding elk during the winter at several locations on the Bridger-Teton National Forest for decades. Environmental plaintiffs challenged a 2016 decision to authorize the continued use of the Alkali Creek Feedground, and the court remanded the decision because of NEPA violations, as described here.
Rather than appealing or spending years studying the feedground’s impacts to address the judge’s concerns, the Forest Service and Wyoming wildlife managers came up with a plan that will allow emergency elk feeding on a smaller area for five years and then end the operation by 2024 (with a possible extension). That plan is now being “scoped” and is open for public comment. The scoping letter is attached to this article.
This is an example of how litigation may lead to a better decision (after the appropriate public review process). It appears to have made the State take a closer look at whether it really needed this feedground. However, plaintiffs don’t appear to have been involved in the new proposal yet. It’s also interesting that the original decision was based on an EIS/ROD, which the court found to be inadequate, but this is being proposed as a categorical exclusion (so maybe the Forest has an idea that they are not going to be challenged on it?).
The 2012 Planning Rule requires that forest plan revisions address wildlife habitat connectivity. In fact it is one of the “dominant ecological characteristics” that must occur with the “natural range of variation” in order to meet the substantive regulatory requirement for “ecological integrity” and the NFMA statutory requirement for “plant and animal diversity.” The Rio Grande National Forest doesn’t seem to want to take this seriously in its revised forest plan, as recounted here:
“At the federal level, New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall and others have proposed a Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act to create more tools for protecting migration routes. Our neighbors in New Mexico passed a state wildlife corridors act earlier this year. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has emphasized the need to ratchet up awareness and protection of corridors. And even former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke issued an order to conserve big-game migration corridors and winter range.
“Hence, with all of this activity agitating for increased concern and elevated action to protect wildlife corridors, the new management plan just announced by the Rio Grande National Forest is astonishingly tone deaf. Our national forest neighbors to the east finalized their long-awaited 20-year vision and ignored widespread calls for action to elevate wildlife corridors.
“It’s a disappointing example of compartmentalization taken to the extreme. Immediately adjacent across the state line in New Mexico, the Carson National Forest unveiled its draft plan and highlighted extraordinary wildlife values there around San Antonio Mountain with a dedicated Wildlife Management Area. But it’s as though an administrative wall exists at the state line.”
“Having the Interior Department and state wildlife agencies and elected officials and some national forests all calling for action to protect wildlife corridors isn’t enough if one critical player, like the Rio Grande National Forest, is missing in action.”
It only takes one bad actor to ruin a wildlife corridor. That is a reason why connectivity was given such a high profile in national forest planning for diversity (I was there). The Rio Grand is currently taking objections to its final revised plan, which will be reviewed by someone at the regional level to determine if the Forest is meeting its connectivity/diversity obligations. However, this is a cross-regional problem (Region 2 and Region 3), which is why the national office of the Forest Service needs to look at why forests in two regions can’t get their acts together on what conditions are needed for connectivity.
Maybe they should also take a look at a recent example in Region 4. This is a case where a state-recognized wildlife corridor led to changes in a trail project on the Bridger-Teton National Forest.
“The now-scrapped trail could have interfered specifically with the Red Desert-to-Hoback mule deer migration corridor, which was the first route designated by the state of Wyoming. An estimated 4,000 to 5,000 deer pass through the narrow bottleneck at the Fremont Lake outflow, according to a 2016 assessment of the migration path.”
‘The “desired future conditions” — a U.S. Forest Service equivalent for zoning — for where the trail would have gone are “developed and administrative sites” and “special use/recreation.” Those classifications would have allowed for new trails, and the Bridger-Teton’s forest plan easily predates the discovery of the migration route, which wasn’t until 2013. Outside of those processes, the forest sought input before proceeding with the plans.”
It’s great that the project decision is considering this new information and the new state designation. I hope the Forest also recognizes the implications for any future projects in this area where it looks like they have decided that the desired condition is now something else. The discovery of the migration route should have led to another look at the forest plan desired condition, and a plan amendment if they are deciding that it is no longer appropriate based on this new information.
Some interesting wildlife research from New Scientist. The article is about Australia and cane toads, but had some tidbits of interest to us.
Also in 2011, the US Fish & Wildlife Service began a trial involving endangered Mexican wolves, the rarest subspecies of grey wolf in North America. Like lions, these wolves have a taste for livestock that incurs the ire of farmers. This time there was a different problem. “In the captive facility, we were able to generate an aversion for wolves to livestock bait,” says Colby Gardner of the Mexican wolf recovery programme. “But once we let them go, we couldn’t say whether or not they were killing livestock.” Without hard evidence that the experiment was working, the initiative eventually fell by the wayside.
Nevertheless, a recent project leaves no doubt that conditioned taste aversion has great potential in conservation. Researchers in Richard Golightly’s lab at Humboldt State University, California, were looking for a way to stop Steller’s jays eating the eggs of the endangered marbled murrelet. Pia Gabriel had a crazy idea of training the clever corvids to dislike the eggs, says Golightly. “Then we researched it a bit and realised maybe it wasn’t so crazy.”
So they painted small chicken eggs to mimic the green-blue hue of murrelet eggs and injected them with a nausea-inducing chemical. Sure enough, after taking the bait and vomiting, jays learned to avoid the eggs. The team then began scattering fake murrelet eggs throughout California’s Santa Cruz mountains, where the murrelets nest. The results were dramatic. Once aversion kicked in, it seemed to persist – jays even appeared to train their offspring to keep away from murrelet eggs. In 2017, after four years, the project ended because the murrelet population had recovered from near-collapse.
So I looked the murrelets up and found this interesting link about park management and how the park folks worked on messaging to people combined with taste aversion.
At Redwood National and State Parks, adaptive management principles have been utilized to conserve the endangered marbled murrelet, seabirds which nest in old-growth forest. Marbled murrelets spend much of the year feeding in waters along the Pacific northwest coast. Their nesting behavior was essentially unknown until the 1970s when a nest was discovered high in a redwood
tree. It is now known that the majority of California’s marbled murrelets nest within Redwood National and State Parks (RNSP). In general, logging is a major threat to this species. However, protected areas such as RNSP have experienced unexplained marbled murrelet population declines.
Recently, park-permitted research using nest cameras revealed high rates of nest predation by corvids (members of the crow family), primarily Steller’s jays (Cyancitta stelleri; Marzluff and
Erik Neatherlin 2006). In addition, elevated Steller’s jay densities, and subsequent elevated rates of predation on marbled murrelets, were shown to occur near high-use visitor areas (e.g., campgrounds and picnic areas) because of supplemental food supplied by park visitors (Marzluff and Erik Neatherlin 2006). An increasingly intensive corvid management program that uses visitor
education, wildlife-proofing campground infrastructure, and conditioned taste aversion (CTA)has significantly changed over the past seven years, based on feedback from biological and sociological monitoring data as well as numerous targeted scientific studies.
I found this article about using aversion with Mexican wolves but don’t know how that turned out. Sounds like perhaps none of the trained wolves were released.
Elk stand in an open field in 2014 between the Eagle River and Interstate 70 just east of the town of Eagle, Colorado, near Vail, Colorado. Photograph: Richard Spitzer/The Guardian The headline is seriously overstated, but that seems par for the course these days. Here’s the link. The same story is in High Country News.
Biologists used to count over 1,000 head of elk from the air near Vail, Colorado. The majestic brown animals, a symbol of the American west, dotted hundreds of square miles of slopes and valleys.
But when researchers flew the same area in February for an annual elk count, they saw only 53.
“Very few elk, not even many tracks,” their notes read. “Lots of backcountry skiing tracks.”
The surprising culprit isn’t expanding fossil-fuel development, herd mismanagement by state agencies or predators, wildlife managers say. It’s increasing numbers of outdoor recreationists – everything from hikers, mountain bikers and backcountry skiers to Jeep, all-terrain vehicle and motorcycle riders. Researchers are now starting to understand why.
Outdoor recreation has long been popular in Colorado, but trail use near Vail has more than doubled since 2009. Some trails host as many as 170,000 people in a year.
Recreation continues nearly 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, said Bill Andree, who retired as Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Vail district wildlife manager in 2018. Night trail use in some areas has also gone up 30% in the past decade. People are traveling even deeper into woods and higher up peaks in part because of improved technology, and in part to escape crowds.
The elk in unit 45, as it’s called, live between 7,000 and 11,000 feet on the pine, spruce and aspen-covered hillsides and peaks of the Colorado Rockies, about 100 miles from Denver. Their numbers have been dropping precipitously since the early 2010s.
Outdoor recreation has long been popular in Colorado, but trail use near Vail has more than doubled since 2009. Some trails host as many as 170,000 people in a year.
Recreation continues nearly 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, said Bill Andree, who retired as Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Vail district wildlife manager in 2018. Night trail use in some areas has also gone up 30% in the past decade. People are traveling even deeper into woods and higher up peaks in part because of improved technology, and in part to escape crowds.
The elk in unit 45, as it’s called, live between 7,000 and 11,000 feet on the pine, spruce and aspen-covered hillsides and peaks of the Colorado Rockies, about 100 miles from Denver. Their numbers have been dropping precipitously since the early 2010s.
To measure the impact on calves, he deliberately sent eight people hiking into calving areas until radio-collared elk showed signs of disturbance, such as standing up or walking away. The consequences were startling. About 30% of the elk calves died when their mothers were disturbed an average of seven times during calving. Models showed that if each cow elk was bothered 10 times during calving, all their calves would die.
When disturbances stopped, the number of calves bounced back.
Why, exactly, elk calves die after human activity as mellow as hiking is not entirely clear. Some likely perish because the mothers, startled by passing humans and their canine companions, run too far away for the calves to catch up, weakening the young and making them more susceptible to starvation or predation from lions or bears. Other times it may be that stress from passing recreationists results in the mother making less milk.
“If you’ve ever had a pregnant wife, and in the third trimester you chase her around the house in two feet of snow, you’ll get an idea of what she thinks about it,” Andree said.
Andree wrote a letter explaining the dire impact of constant recreation on elk. Even if certain trails were closed during calving season, he said, elk would still be disturbed because some people simply disregarded instructions for them to keep out.
“Generally when you ask people to stay out of the area no matter what the reason is, 80-90% obey you,” Andree said. “But if you get 10% who don’t obey you, you haven’t done any good.”
The recreation community acknowledges its impact on wildlife as well as other development, said Ernest Saeger, the executive director of the mountain trails alliance. Many people don’t understand the significance of the closures. Others, he acknowledged, just don’t care.
So the group formed a trail ambassador program to post more informative signs at closures and even place volunteers at trailheads to explain why trails are closed. The scheme reduced closure violations in 2018, according to Forest Service numbers.
If trail building and closure violations in critical habitat continue, Devin Duval, Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s district wildlife manager in the area, anticipates the worst.
“It will be a biological desert,” he said.
Some thoughts: (1) Night trail use, I didn’t know about that, let alone it increasing. Maybe others can shed some light (so to speak) on that.
(2) Since most recreationists take gas powered vehicles to get to trail heads, perhaps there should be a moratorium on driving to outdoor recreation?
(3) How do these increasing numbers of people fit in with the “nature deficit” idea that still holds some sway?
(4) Are there better ways than harassing animals to study this problem?
(5) I’d be interested in how much is due to humans and how much to off-leash dogs (no, I am not suggesting a similar experiment with dogs).
For a long time, the best available science has shown that the worst thing for grizzly bears is to mix them with people. That has led the Forest Service to restrict access and otherwise manage human activities in grizzly bear habitat. Now the Flathead has decided that it is more important to get people into grizzly bear habitat, and it is issuing special use permits for long-distance running races and mountain biking shuttles.
Here’s the forest supervisor’s rationale:
“There’s a broad public out there with needs to be served and not just the needs of the few,” Weber said. “We think that greater good for the greatest number will be served. That fosters connectivity with wildlands and a united group of people that can support conservation. And the best conservation for bears is served by figuring out how to have these human activities in ways that are as safe as they can be, understanding you can never make anything perfectly safe.”
Here’s the opposing argument:
“Weber has set up a straw man here, as though this debate is about ending mountain biking or trail running on public lands,” Hammer said. “What it’s about is educating the public to act responsibly if they choose to engage in those activities. It’s not about letting the public do these activities if that’s what their choice is. It’s about sending the wrong message through special-use permits for risky behavior and the government endorses it.”
“It increases risk that results in bad public attitudes toward bears and increases risk of injury or death to people and bears,” Hammer said. “That’s not conservation. People are free to ignore the advice, but they shouldn’t be getting a special-use permit from the Forest Service that allows them to make money running 200 or 300 people through bear habitat, and using that commercial promotion to imply that’s safe and appropriate activity in bear habitat when the experts, including the supervisor’s own staff, have said this is not responsible behavior.”
A key question here seems to be whether a special use permit is viewed as an “endorsement.” In any case, this is the kind of hard decision forest supervisors get paid the big bucks for. It’s unfortunate that this one misinterprets the opposition as being about “the needs of the few” (and also about “a narrowly focused, discriminatory and exclusionary agenda lacking in intellectual and philosophical integrity”). This is actually about his duty under the Endangered Species Act to “carry out programs for the conservation of” listed species like grizzly bears, which according to Congress are of great value “to the Nation and its people.” With his anti-bear bias, he is starting in the wrong place to make a well-reasoned decision.
The Beaver Creek Landscape Restoration Project on the Flathead National Forest was presented here when the district court upheld the decision (Friends of the Wild Swan v. Kehr). The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court on May 10 on three claims that the project was inconsistent with the forest plan. Two of the claims involved road density requirements for grizzly bears where the court found the project would “result in a net gain towards” objectives for one subunit and that roads would be properly reclaimed in another.
Here is the court’s holding on the third claim (emphasis added):
Finally, appellants argue that the Forest Service violated NFMA and NEPA by failing to demonstrate compliance with the Forest Plan’s road density standards for elk habitat in the Beaver Creek Project area. While this argument has significant force, we ultimately conclude that the Forest Service demonstrated compliance with the Forest Plan. The Forest Plan contains a standard that requires “[a]reas with `moist sites'” to be managed “with open road densities that average 1 mile or less per square mile” during the elk use period. Moist sites are defined as sites “found at the heads of drainages, bordering streams or marshy meadows, or occupying moist swales or benches.” The Forest Service admits that the Project’s Environmental Assessment (“EA”) did not expressly provide a specific determination about road density in areas near elk moist sites. Indeed, the Forest Service did not identify specific locations of elk moist sites. Ultimately, we conclude that the Project satisfies the Forest Plan based on the fact that a large portion of the Beaver Creek subunit has an open road density of less than one mile per square mile and the Forest Service’s explanation in the EA that “moist sites occur primarily . . . in roadless and wilderness areas[.]” While the Forest Service could have done a better job demonstrating its compliance with the elk habitat road density standards by mapping moist sites and showing that open road densities near those moist sites will meet the Forest Plan’s standard, we nevertheless conclude that the Forest Service did just enough to comply with the Forest Plan, NFMA, and NEPA.
The lesson here is “don’t try this at home, folks.” This particular circuit panel (1 Clinton, 1 Bush and 1 Obama via Sarah Palin, if you wondered) went out of its way to construct a rationale for compliance which basically said there was a low probability of noncompliance, or the amount of noncompliance would be small. NFMA does not say that projects must be “probably or mostly consistent” with the forest plan. If the forest plan says certain kinds of areas must meet certain requirements (and the Forest Service wants a successful project), the project documentation must do what the Ninth Circuit said here: identify where those areas are and show how those requirements will be met in those locations. (And imagine doing that if you don’t know where the locations are.)
This just seemed noteworthy. Maybe it could be replicated for other species …
Kirtland’s warbler tours will be offered daily from May 15 through May 31, 7 days a week at the Mio Ranger District of the Huron National Forest. The Kirtland’s warbler tour costs $10 per adult and is free for children. Funds from the tours help cover costs associated with the tours.
Siskiyou Mountains Salmander, Plethodon stormi, (c) 2005 William Flaxington
The Center for Biological Diversity has notifiedthe U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service of its intent to sue for failure to respond to its petition to list the Siskiyou Mountains salamander as a threatened or endangered species. The species is found primarily on BLM lands, but also on the Rogue River-Siskiyou and Klamath National Forests. Prior listings were avoided largely because of provisions in the Northwest Forest Plan to protect the species:
Conservation groups first petitioned for protection of the salamander under the Endangered Species Act in 2004. To prevent the species’ listing, the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed a conservation agreement in 2007, intended to protect habitat for 110 high-priority salamander sites on federal lands in the Applegate River watershed. In 2008 the Fish and Wildlife Service denied protection for the salamander based on this conservation agreement and old-growth forest protections provided by the Northwest Forest Plan.
The Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR) which replaces the Northwest Forest Plan, has the express purpose of substantially increasing logging on BLM lands with the range of the salamander and elsewhere (USBLM 2016, p. 20). The WOPR was originally proposed in 2008 and abandoned by the BLM in 2012 after years of litigation. In August 2016 the BLM issued a final Environmental Impact Statement implementing the WOPR (USBLM 2016).
The WOPR presents a substantial new threat to Siskiyou Mountains salamanders in Oregon because it will allow increased timber harvest in late-successional areas, decrease optimal salamander habitat, increase habitat fragmentation, eliminate requirements to conduct predisturbance surveys in salamander habitat, and allow logging of previously identified known, occupied salamander sites. The WOPR removes protections for salamander populations formerly included in species protection buffers on BLM lands. Although some of the reserves on BLM lands have been enlarged in the WOPR, timber harvest emphasis areas will often be subject to more intensive logging, and logging of known, occupied Siskiyou Mountains salamander sites is allowed.
This demonstrates again the value of including regulatory mechanisms as protective measures in forest plans: they can keep species from being listed under ESA. There is already a pending lawsuit against the new WOPR (now officially called the Resource Management Plans for Western Oregon), and the Forest Service should keep this in mind when it revises its forest plans that are now governed by the Northwest Forest Plan (especially the “survey and manage” requirement).
The trend seems to be in the other direction, however (see also greater sage grouse). And when a species is listed, regulatory mechanisms are needed in forest plans to contribute to their recovery and delisting. Yet the Forest Service is removing such mechanisms from forest plans for grizzly bears, lynx and bull trout (Flathead National Forest), Indiana bats (Daniel Boone National Forest: to “provide flexibility to implement forest management activities”), and black-footed ferrets (Thunder Basin National Grassland: “greater emphasis on control and active management of prairie dog colonies to address significant concerns related to health, safety, and economic impacts on neighboring landowners”). Since plant and animal diversity was one of the main reasons for NFMA it shouldn’t be a big surprise to see these kinds of retrograde actions ending up in court.
RMEF has helped the BLM and Forest Service implement more than 4,300 wildlife habitat enhancement, land protection, and public access improvement projects. Such projects include aspen restoration, forest restoration thinning, prescribed fire, burned area restoration, planting, seeding, fence removal, and weed control to enhance more than firve million acres of wildlife habitat on federal public lands.
RMEF also facilitated BLM and Forest Service land and easement acquisitions through the nation’s Land and Water Conservation Fund to conserve wildlife habitat and improve public recreational access on federal lands. RMEF has directly contributed more than $36.6 million to both agencies to help fund wildlife and conservation projects. The combined total conservation value of the two agencies’ partnership with RMEF is estimated at more than $411 million.
The NRMG assists the Forest Service, BLM, and the State of Montana in cave inventory, monitoring, and management, with a focus on cave restoration, bat habitat monitoring, and preventing the spread of White Nose Syndrome, a deadly and highly infectious disease affecting bat populations across the U.S. NRMG is actively engaged in helping the agencies educate the public on bat conservation, including installing cave visitor register boxes, which provide information for cave visitors about clean caving practices, decontamination protocols, and reporting bat observations through the NRMG website. The organization also collaborates with Forest Service and BLM personnel and Bigfork High School Cave Club to establish cave climate monitoring, photo monitoring, and Visitor Impact Point monitoring across Montana.
“We are honored to receive this recognition for our conservation work that benefits elk and so many other wildlife species,” said Kyle Weaver, RMEF president and CEO. “We appreciate our federal agency partners with whom we’ve worked shoulder-to-shoulder for years now and look forward to many more joint projects that permanently protect and enhance wildlife habitat, open or improve public access and benefit hunters, anglers and so many others who cherish our wild landscapes.”
“We’ve really enjoyed working with the FS and BLM since 2011. As many agencies are stretched thin with resources, it is imperative that we learn to work more effectively to help manage the outdoor resources we all care so much about,” said Ian Chechet, NRMG Chairman.
Som notes that
It seems as if the RMEF is apolitical. I’ve never heard them seem to endorse one party over another, they also seem to work with whatever administration is in power at the time, and to seemingly get along well with them. I’ve never heard of the RMEF being in disagreement with policies of any federal agency, perhaps if there are disagreements they are voiced quietly and not in public. I think their methods are to get along with federal officials at agencies, and to work with them, not against them.
One Example
The RMEF strategy might be to “catch people doing something right”. For example these quotes from a recent Colorado Public Radio piece on considering recreation when selling public land.
Several hunting and conservation groups voiced support for the action, including the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the Association of State Fish and Wildlife Agencies. But others said it appeared politically calculated to curry favor among lawmakers ahead of the hearing.
The critics pointed to drastic cuts in President Donald Trump’s proposed budget to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which supports conservation and outdoor recreation projects nationwide.
RMEF and State Fish and Wildlife Agencies simply say “this is a good thing”; NPCA “he’s only doing good things because his hearing is next week, and besides he works for the Trump administration and the proposed budget slashes the Congressionally popular LCWF.”
The Center For Western Priorities newsletter went even further..”Western Values Project Executive Director Chris Saeger went a step further, saying the order suggests that “under Bernhardt’s leadership, the sale or transfer of public lands is back on the table and appears to be a real possibility.”
Wolf pups in Neuhaus, Lower Saxony, on Saturday. Photo: DPA
New Scientist covered this story, which relates to the discussions we’ve been having about Wilderness Xtreme and Wilderness Lite. It also causes me to reflect on the distinction between “ideas about things” e.g. Wilderness in the US, and “things” e.g. wolves and their behavior, and the fact that creatures (including humans) don’t always behave as academics predict. It’s all pretty interesting, and I bolded the quotes I thought to be particularly relevant.
In the 1980s, wolves started returning Germany, mostly from Poland. “We were expecting that the large forest areas northeast of Berlin would be the first place settled by the wolves, because it is close to Poland and has dense forest,” says Ilka Reinhardt at Goethe-University Frankfurt.
But she and her colleagues have now analysed data from national surveys of wolf populations, and found that the first wolf colonies established themselves in Saxony, to the south of Berlin, on military training areas. This land isn’t open to the public, though there are no fences stopping people from entering.
With their dense forest cover and low density of roads, these military areas are a similar habitat to protected natural areas. But the team’s analysis suggests that the military land is in fact better for wolves – the animals died less often from human interactions in these places than they did in land specifically set aside for nature.
“Most of the dead wolves that we find have died in traffic accidents,” Reinhardt says. Though road density is similar in military areas, there may not be as much regular traffic there, she says.
The relative safety of these training areas seems to have helped wolves spread across Germany. Analysing data on wolf distribution collected between 2000 and 2015, the team found that wolves seem to be jumping from one area of military land to another, sometimes moving through and beyond other protected areas before establishing a territory.
Over 15 years, they found that wolves went from one established mating pair to 67 pairs across the whole country, with the population growing exponentially. By 2015, wolves had populated 62 per cent of the military training areas larger than 30 square kilometres, and only 14 per cent of similarly sized protected areas.
While it may seem like tanks and wolves make strange bedfellows, similar trends can be seen in other countries. “Something we see in our work in California is that lots of areas that have destructive processes happening, like logging, can be really important core habitats for large carnivores – here, it’s mountain lions,” says Justine Smith at the University of California Berkeley.
Many species are more afraid of humans than they are of our associated machinery like cars or even tanks, she adds. Recreational activities are often promoted on protected lands, while the public has very little access to military land.
“I think what might be going on is that in many parts of the world, protected areas are built in places that have a lot of people already. Or they can attract people to live near them because of the benefits they provide,” she says.
So the relative solitude of a military training ground may be what the wolves prefer. The routine of a military schedule could help as well. “There is some shooting, but it’s always in the same areas and it’s usually during the workday, so the animals can get used to it,” says Reinhardt.
Smith says conservationists could work with federal governments to optimise these lands even more by limiting light or noise pollution at night.
Here’s another news story about wolves in Germany.
