JOSEPH -- Now that wolves have migrated back to Oregon, an argument is simmering about what to call them. Their Latin name is

Canis lupus

, and most people know them simply as "gray wolves."

Oregon ranchers who object to their presence because they prey on cattle call them "Canadian gray wolves."

Sean Stevens, spokesman for environmental group Oregon Wild, says the Canadian reference is a pejorative, "a code for wolves that don't belong here, by people who don't think they should be here. To a scientist, a gray wolf is just a gray wolf."

Biologist Ed Bangs, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's gray wolf recovery coordinator in Helena, Mont., avoids the name game whenever possible. "We just call them '

Canis lupus irregardless

,'" he quips.

La Grande-area rancher Sharon Beck insists the migrating wolves are indeed distinctive.

Evidence suggests the native "timber wolves" that once lived in Oregon were smaller and somewhat more solitary, while the current breed is a bigger northern variety that prefers hunting in packs, Beck says. She wants the welcome mat jerked out from under the newcomers' furry paws.

So who's right? The truth appears up for grabs, at least for now.

Bangs acknowledges that when federal wildlife biologists began their wolf recovery project in the mid-1990s, wolves introduced in Yellowstone National Park and Rocky Mountain states were indeed obtained in Canada.

And he concedes their skulls tend to be bigger, on average, than native skulls collected in southern Montana, southern Idaho and around Yellowstone. It's uncertain, however, whether the native wolves weighed less overall.

"Nobody really weighed them when they were killing all of them," Bangs says. "I'm not sure how much lighter they would be. It wouldn't be much."

Wolves once wandered the continent from the Arctic to central Mexico. By the 1930s, they had been trapped, poisoned and shot to near-extinction almost everywhere but Alaska, northern Canada and parts of Minnesota. They continued to be spotted in eastern Oregon until 1921, and the last Oregon wolf bounty was collected in 1946 in the Umpqua National Forest. The federal government declared wolves an endangered species in 1976.

Now, they're coming back. More than 1,700 roam Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Washington, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In Oregon's remote northeastern corner, 16 gray wolves make up the Imnaha pack near Joseph and five are in the Wenaha pack at the south end of the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness on the Oregon-Washington boundary, says Russ Morgan, a wolf specialist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Unconfirmed reports of wolves in Oregon's Cascade Range and the Pendleton and Jordan Valley areas of eastern Oregon are heard from time to time.

Stevens and Dan Kruse, attorney for Eugene-based Cascadia Wildlands, call Oregon's wolf recovery a conservation triumph.

"The evidence gathered in Yellowstone and elsewhere shows there is this positive cascade of effects by having a top predator back on the landscape," Stevens says.

Environmentalists tend to agree that wolves compel prey species to act in natural ways that were lost when

Canis lupus

vanished from Oregon's landscape. Wolves keep elk and deer on the move, and that re-energizes grasses and foliage such as aspen, halts overgrazing by wildlife and improves stream bank health, they say.

On the other hand, they kill cattle. Rancher Todd Nash figures he's lost 30 calves valued at $750 each in two years from his 550-cow Marr Flat Cattle Co. near Joseph. "I wasn't worried about them until they actually got here," Nash says. "This will absolutely change the livestock industry in the state of Oregon."

Beck blames wolves for Yellowstone's dramatic declines in Rocky Mountain elk, from 19,000 in 1995 to around 7,000 today, and for the free fall of elk in Idaho's Lolo Zone big-game hunting area. There, elk numbers nose-dived from 16,000 in the early 1990s to about 2,000.

Beck is a former Oregon Cattlemen's Association president who wrote the minority report on wolves for the state's Wolf Conservation and Management Plan six years ago. She predicts a similar fate awaits Oregon's elk and deer herds.

Some biologists argue that Yellowstone was overpopulated by elk before the arrival of wolves, and the Lolo Zone's elk population drop was caused by bears and cougars combined with habitat changes following wildfires. Wolves, they say, didn't cause elk numbers to plummet, but are keeping the Lolo Zone's elk herds from coming back.

Beck also says Oregon's native wolves, before they were killed off, were "more the size of large coyotes than these wolves that we've got here now."

The native wolves probably tipped the scales at about 75 pounds, judging from old-timers' accounts, she says. That compares with the 141 pounds that Bangs says Oregon's contemporary gray wolves can achieve.

Native Oregon wolves also tended to be solitary hunters, Beck says, again citing early accounts. Contemporary gray wolves generally hunt in packs of eight to 12, researchers Jim and Holly Akenson found during more than a decade of studying wild wolves in a University of Idaho-sponsored project at the Taylor Ranch Field Station in central Idaho.

Beck also doubts that native wolves entirely disappeared in Oregon, and says they're now at risk of being wiped out by the newcomers.

Bangs says all the native Oregon wolves were killed.

Kruse treats all this skeptically.

"Anybody with an understanding of science has never made a distinction" between wolves on either side of the U.S.-Canada border, he says. "I have never heard of wolves not being pack animals. We want to see wolves in Oregon. They used to be here. They should be here."

Bangs says the size and weight distinctions, if they exist at all, probably matter little.

Wolves act much the same all over the world, he says. "They kill big ungulates," he says, which can include elk, deer and livestock. "That is what wolves make a living on."

Like poet Gertrude Stein's famous line, "a rose is a rose" -- "A wolf is a wolf," he says.

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MORE ON WOLVES



The species:

Longtime wolf biologist and researcher L. David Mech of the University of Minnesota included 24 North American subspecies of wolves in his book, "The Wolf," published in 1970.

Conventional thinking has changed in 40 years, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says there are two species of wolf in North America:

Canis lupus

, the gray wolf, which includes five subspecies and inhabits Canada, Alaska, the Northern Rockies, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and New Mexico; and

Canis rufus

, the red wolf. Red wolves inhabit parts of Florida and the Carolinas and weigh 45 to 80 pounds at maturity.

Ranching:

Last spring, wolves killed up to 11 calves on private property in Wallowa County and perhaps 15 on national forest land. Now, counts of livestock coming off high country summer range in the mountainous northeastern Oregon county suggest 24 calves plus a still- unknown number of mother cows have been killed and eaten by wolves, says rancher Rod Childers.