SAGOLA, Mich. — When Brian Roell got word from an aerial surveillance crew that the gray wolf’s radio collar was indicating no movement, he knew what it probably meant.
A few hours later, the wolf program coordinator for Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources was trudging through a swampy backwoods near this township in the Upper Peninsula with another wildlife biologist and a DNR conservation officer. Guided by a hand-held antenna that picked up the radio collar’s rapid beeps, the searchers made their way into a thick black-cedar stand.
There, in a slight depression, lay the dead wolf. The wound on the 6-year-old male’s chest left no doubt about the cause of death: a bullet from a small-caliber rifle.
The wolf was among more than three dozen thought to have been deliberately and illegally killed in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula within the past five years, according to DNR data obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act.
Officials in other north-central and Rocky Mountain states report scores of wolf shootings despite legal protection for the animal driven to near extinction in many areas.
Some residents of the sprawling, rural Upper Peninsula deeply resent the wolf’s presence. Among them are hunters who think the wily predators are decimating the whitetail deer herd and farmers who have lost livestock.
“They’re born killers,” said Al Clemens, a hunter from Ironwood who has lobbied state legislators to establish wolf hunting and trapping seasons. “. . . People are just fed up.”
Yes, wolves eat deer, but not enough to put a serious dent in the total, Roell said.
“Wolves are an easy scapegoat,” he said.
Tough cases to crack
Most wolf-killing cases go unsolved, and many illegal kills never come to official attention. But now and then investigators catch a break.
As Roell and biologist Dean Beyer examined the Sagola Township wolf’s carcass, officer Chris Holmes spotted footprints nearby. Not far away, he found fresh tire tracks from a sport utility vehicle. The men set off, following the tracks.
Soon they spotted a camouflage-style glove on the ground and took it along as possible evidence.
Before long, the tire tracks entered a privately owned parcel where there were two hunting blinds on stilts. Farther on, they found a small cabin and a Chevrolet Blazer with tires matching the tracks on the road.
After determining who owned the backwoods camp, Holmes confronted the owner’s son, 28-year-old William Jason Morgan of Iron Mountain.
Faced with evidence — including the glove, which matched another the investigators saw on the kitchen table — Morgan admitted shooting the wolf from a deer blind. He’d thought it was a coyote, he explained. But after seeing the radio collar, he realized he had killed a wolf and hid the animal in the swamp.
Morgan pleaded guilty in April 2007 and was fined $2,385. He lost his hunting privileges through 2010 and was placed on probation for six months.
Officers are investigating seven wolf shootings this year.
But wolves are survivors. Their mortality rate is high, but so is their birth rate.
