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Defenders Magazine

Summer 2004

Defenders News Briefs Summer 2004

Deadly Season in Alaska

The aerial wolf-gunning season has ended in Alaska, leaving 147 wolves dead. The state-sponsored predator-control program ran as planned until April 30, despite the objections of more than 100,000 Defenders members and other conservationists across the country. An attempt to get the federal government to halt the killing also failed when U.S. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton in February rejected a petition by Defenders to clarify if the Federal Airborne Hunting Act applies to the program. As many as 500 wolves are slated to be killed when the program resumes in late fall.

Jets in North Carolina Grounded



Conservationists are cheering a federal judge’s recent decision to halt the Navy’s efforts to build a jet landing field in a part of North Carolina vital to migratory birds and endangered red wolves. The Navy wants to build the landing field for fighter planes near the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, a habitat in the northeastern part of the state that shelters both wolves and more than 100,000 migratory waterfowl annually. Defenders and other conservationists sued to halt the project, and proposed alternative locations for the field that would be less damaging to the area’s wildlife. A federal judge on April 20 agreed with these objections and ordered work on the airfield temporarily halted. The Navy may appeal the decision. Subsequently, federal biologists announced that a record 55 red wolf pups were born in northeastern North Carolina this spring. A total of more than 100 red wolves, a critically imperiled wolf subspecies, now live in North Carolina.

Bison Fall in Yellowstone

Nearly 280 wild bison from Yellowstone National Park were killed this past winter under a government-sanctioned program, according to the Buffalo Field Campaign, a local conservation group. Wild Yellowstone bison are shot or shipped to slaughter each winter because Montana livestock officials fear the spread of brucellosis, a bacterial disease, to cows that graze on lands near the park. Defenders and other conservationists have long opposed this program, pointing out that there are no documented cases of wild bison passing brucellosis to cattle. Reps. Maurice Hinchey (D-New York) and Charles Bass (R-New Hampshire) have proposed Congressional legislation that would protect Yellowstone bison.