Wildlife advocates to sue feds over wolf recovery plan

Laura Lundquist

(Missoula Current) On Tuesday, the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity sent a 60-day notice to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declaring its intent to sue if the agency doesn’t develop a national recovery plan for the gray wolf as required by the Endangered Species Act. The law requires groups to provide a 60-day notification to give the agency a chance to respond and possibly avert the lawsuit.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has never developed a national wolf recovery plan, even though the grey wolf has been listed as endangered across most of the lower-48 states since 1978. The Endangered Species Act requires the agency to write recovery plans to help listed species survive and to set the criteria that must be met before a species can be delisted. The only time a recovery plan isn’t required is when “such a plan will not promote the conservation of the species,” according to the Act.

Among the several court cases over the past five years dealing with the protected status of the wolf, two were decided in 2022 that are pivotal to this challenge. The first was a ruling from the federal district court of Northern California that threw out the Fish and Wildlife’s decision to delist wolves throughout the lower-48 states. That returned protections to all wolves except those in the Northern Rocky Mountains, which were Congressionally delisted.

Several decades ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service developed regional recovery plans for wolf populations in the Great Lakes, Northern Rocky Mountains and the Southwest U.S. Only the first plan is still active, and no regional plan was created for wolves that have expanded to the southern Rocky Mountains, the West Coast and the Northeast.

The Center for Biological Diversity argues that the Great Lakes recovery plan, written for the “eastern timber wolf” and last updated in 1992, could not be applied to wolves in the West. According to the 60-day notice, “Reliance on such an outdated and geographically restricted plan prevents (the Fish and Wildlife Service) from facilitating nationwide wolf recovery.”

So the second court case resulted in a ruling from the District of Columbia federal district court that ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to create a national recovery plan for the wolf. The Center for Biological Diversity had requested in 2010 that the Fish and Wildlife Service write a recovery plan but the agency had denied the petition in 2018 during the first Trump administration. So the Center for Biological Diversity sued and won in 2022.

In February 2024, under the Biden administration, the Service announced it would start working on a national recovery plan, even though it also denied two petitions to relist wolves because it found that wolves in the Western United States “are not at risk of extinction now or in the foreseeable future.”

Wolf advocates challenged the denial of the petitions, and this past August, Missoula federal district judge Donald Molloy ruled that the Fish and Wildlife Service hadn’t justified the denials and told the agency to reconsider.

Then, just a month ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service said it wouldn’t produce a wolf recovery plan. In a 10-page finding, the agency concluded “neither listed
entity (44-State or Minnesota entities) meet the definitions of a threatened species or endangered species,” based upon the agency’s species status review conducted in 2020. So, the agency is using the exception that a recovery plan would “not promote the conservation of the species” and that “recovery plans are no longer statutorily required under the Act.”

The Center for Biological Diversity called the agency’s finding “a policy reversal by the Trump administration.”

“We’re challenging the Trump administration’s unlawful decision to once again abandon wolf recovery, and we’ll win,” said Collette Adkins, Center for Biological Diversity senior attorney. “The Fish and Wildlife Service must live up to the reality of what science and the law demand. That means a comprehensive plan that addresses gray wolf recovery across the country.”

Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.