Last year\u2019s changes in wolf hunting and trapping regulations were felt particularly hard in Yellowstone National Park, which weathered its deadliest season<\/a> in living memory. With a new Montana wolf hunting season underway and park researchers studying the unprecedented levels of human-caused mortality, the deadline for the federal government\u2019s review has now passed, and environmental groups have filed suit<\/a>\u00a0demanding that Williams take action.<\/p>\n Two policy decisions from Williams\u2019s Montana years are central to the assessments she is making in her Endangered Species Act review. The first has to do with how wolf populations in the region are estimated. The second is the unique category that wolves occupy under Montana law: Originally designed as a protection during Williams\u2019s years as an FWP attorney, the special category paradoxically made wolves more vulnerable to controversial hunting techniques following her tenure as FWP director.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat Montana has done is they basically turned that regulatory mechanism on its head, and they are now using it effectively as a threat to wolves, not as a protection,\u201d Dan MacNulty, associate professor of wildland\u00a0resources at Utah State University, told me. \u201cThat\u2019s very concerning, and I think it should concern the Fish and Wildlife Service in terms of whether or not Montana is living up to the commitment it made with respect to that delisting rule.”<\/p>\n Fish and Wildlife<\/u> Service announced the review of a petition to relist wolves in the Northern Rockies in September 2021, eight months after Williams had become the agency\u2019s acting leader. The review followed dramatic regional changes in state hunting and trapping regulations. Under pressure<\/a> from environmental organizations to appoint a confirmed leader at FWS, President Joe Biden nominated Williams the following month. The nomination was celebrated<\/a> by both environmental groups and an array of hunting interests<\/a>. Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat, and Sen. Steve Daines, a Montana Republican, both<\/a> urged<\/a> their colleagues to vote for confirmation.<\/p>\n Dave Parsons, a retired wildlife biologist who led the FWS reintroduction of wolves in the Southwest in the 1990s, was one of the few voices of public dissent. For nearly a year, Parsons, along with Bob Aland, a retired attorney and environmental activist, have been waging a two-man campaign to remove Williams from the position. The reason, they argue, is that she is unqualified under the law. Federal statute requires<\/a> that the director of FWS have \u201cscientific education and experience\u201d and be knowledgeable in \u201cthe principles of fisheries and wildlife management.\u201d<\/p>\n While Williams\u2019s experience is undeniable, her educational background is in philosophy and law, not science. \u201cMy primary concern on the surface is not her as an individual,\u201d Parsons told me. \u201cMy interest is saving the agency from this now dark path, where the precedent has been set that you can put in a person without biological credentials in violation of the law.\u201d<\/p>\n The issue has come up before. In 2018, Greg Sheehan stepped down as principal deputy director of FWS under President Donald Trump after then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke sought to have him take full leadership of the agency. Zinke\u2019s effort failed due to<\/a> Sheehan\u2019s lack of a\u00a0science degree. How Williams navigated the requirement is unclear. (FWS declined to make the director available for an interview or to comment on the appointment.)<\/p>\n In December, Parsons wrote an op-ed describing how<\/a> every FWS director going back to the Nixon administration had met the scientific education requirement. \u201cI\u2019m trying to save my old agency, for crying out loud,\u201d he said. \u201cTry to imagine Trump Act II and that law just thrown under the rug.\u201d<\/p>\n In the weeks leading up to Williams\u2019s confirmation hearing, he and Aland informed aides on Capitol Hill that Williams lacked a scientific background. They contacted the White House, the Department of the Interior, and FWS.<\/p>\n When Williams appeared<\/a> before lawmakers in November, the issue never came up. She was confirmed<\/a> in a bipartisan 16-to-4 vote in February. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams speaking at a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, in Washington, D.C., in November 2021.<\/p>\n \nPhoto: Michael Brochstein\/Sipa via AP Images<\/p><\/div> Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho under the law in 1995, after a government extermination campaign led to their near-total extirpation decades before. Williams joined Montana\u2019s game agency three years later and, over the next decade and a half, represented the state in its delisting efforts. The first wolf arrives at Yellowstone National Park in a pen carried by, from left, Mike Phillips, Yellowstone Wolf Project leader; Jim Evanoff, Yellowstone environmental protection specialist; Molly Beattie, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director; Mike Finley, Yellowstone superintendent; and Bruce Babbitt, secretary of the interior, in January 1995.\nPhoto: Jim Peaco\/NPS<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n Under the terms laid out by FWS, wolves in the Northern Rockies \u2014 Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming \u2014 would be considered recovered once there were 30 breeding pairs raising at least two pups each for three consecutive years. In 2002, the agency announced that the criteria had been met. Before the transfer of management authority could happen, however, the states needed to prove that they had a regulatory framework in place to support continued wolf recovery.<\/p>\n In Montana, the solution Williams and her colleagues came up with was to categorize wolves as a \u201cspecies in need of management.\u201d The special designation had surfaced a year before<\/a>, in a bill passed by the Montana Senate, which aimed to carve out a space for wolves once they were removed from the state\u2019s endangered species list.<\/p>\n Categories are key to wildlife governance. Generally, \u201cgame\u201d animals, like elk or deer, can be hunted but not trapped, while \u201cfurbearers,\u201d like otters or bobcats, can be trapped but not hunted. In many states, \u201cpredators,\u201d like coyotes, can be killed anytime, anywhere without a license or a defined season. In a 2003 environmental impact statement<\/a> that Williams consulted on<\/a>, Montana made the case that wolves would stand apart as a \u201cspecies in need of management,\u201d receiving \u201cfull protection\u201d as a non-game animal. Once wolves were recovered, the state\u2019s game commissioners would decide which of Montana\u2019s more conventional categories fit the animals best.<\/p>\n In 2009, the Obama administration announced the delisting of wolves in Montana and Idaho, but not Wyoming, which continually failed to come up with a plan that didn\u2019t involve treating the animals as predators that could be shot on sight. \u201cMontana did an outstanding job of describing, in detail, its regulatory framework and its commitment to wolf management,\u201d FWS noted in its rule<\/a>.<\/p>\n The delisting was immediately challenged and in 2010 struck down by a federal judge.<\/p>\n Williams was recruited<\/a> to her first Interior Department stint the following year. She had once again joined a government agency facing a historic moment for wolves. That same year, Tester, the Democratic senator from Montana, attached a rider<\/a> to a federal budget bill that reversed the court\u2019s decision to reject delisting and prohibited any other judge from undoing the reversal. The move was unprecedented and political: Tester was up for reelection in one of the most important races of 2012, facing an opponent who claimed that he was out of touch with rural voters on the wolf issue. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., walks through the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 6, 2022.<\/p>\n \nPhoto: Ting Shen\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p><\/div> Williams created a review committee in 2018 to study whether the array of hunting and trapping regulations that FWP produced each year were in line with state law. She also presided over the implementation of a new model for estimating wolf populations in the state. Both efforts would play key roles in the wolf review she is now overseeing as director of the nation\u2019s most important wildlife agency.<\/p>\n Aimee Hawkaluk was<\/u> a staff attorney at FWP from 2012 until January of this year. She served on the committee that Williams convened to review regulations. Speaking in a personal capacity and not as a representative of her former or current employer, Hawkaluk said the committee ultimately determined that years of wolf hunting and trapping regulations in Montana misrepresented the law, and that the problem related to the “species in need of management” categorization developed in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n The original idea was that wolves would have a higher degree of protection until they were recovered, at which point they would be reclassified as a furbearer or game animal. \u201cThat\u2019s never happened,\u201d Hawkaluk told me, \u201cso they\u2019re just kind of stuck in limbo as a species in need of management.\u201d<\/p>\n The upshot was significant. Following the 2009 delisting, FWP issued regulations each year explaining to hunters and trappers what they could and could not do in pursuit of wolves. Among the prohibitions were the use of aircraft and radio telemetry equipment \u2014 the kind of gear biologists use to find and monitor wildlife. Those prohibitions, however, were effectively copied from the state\u2019s game animal regulations. As a non-game species in need of management, wolves did not have those protections, Williams\u2019s committee determined. In the department\u2019s view, the warnings amounted to an ongoing, decadelong mistake.<\/p>\n\n The review committee conducted its work over two years,\u00a0reaching some of the critical conclusions on the technology that could be used to hunt wolves after Williams packed up for her return to Washington in 2021. The timing was critical. Despite the many opportunities already offered under the law, Republican lawmakers and a subset of hunters and trappers had long argued that Montana\u2019s regulations did not go far enough. They agitated for wolves to be treated as predators that could be killed with little restriction.<\/p>\n \u201cI had a bill that was going to place wolves on the predator list \u2014 make them a predator, just treat them as predator,\u201d Bob Brown, a Montana state senator, said<\/a> at an FWP\u00a0Committee hearing last year. But after speaking with the governor\u2019s office, FWP, and others, he concluded it was not the right approach \u201cbecause it could lead to relisting.\u201d Instead, the senator introduced legislation to slash Montana\u2019s wolf population by giving hunters and trappers the authority to kill an unlimited number of wolves using bait, snares, and, on private land, authority to hunt at night with bright lights and night-vision goggles.<\/p>\n It was the kind of extreme proposal that normally died on the governor\u2019s desk in Montana, but things had changed the previous fall. Voters elected Greg Gianforte as Montana\u2019s first Republican governor in a decade and half. Gianforte stacked the most important posts in Montana\u2019s wildlife decision-making apparatus \u2014 from Williams\u2019s old job atop FWP to the commissioners who create policy for the department \u2014 with campaign contributors, a former running mate, and representatives of aggressively pro-wolf hunting interests. He then went on to sign Brown\u2019s bill and a half dozen other measures targeting the state\u2019s most iconic predator.<\/p>\n In response, nearly three dozen veteran Montana wildlife managers, many of them Williams\u2019s former FWP colleagues, published an essay<\/a> decrying Montana\u2019s \u201canti-predator hysteria\u201d and the \u201cpartisan political intervention that\u00a0overturned\u00a0decades\u00a0of\u00a0sound wildlife\u00a0policy.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite the pushback, Gianforte\u2019s commissioners approved the most aggressive regulations\u00a0in recent\u00a0Montana history\u00a0for last winter\u2019s wolf hunt. At the same time, the results of Williams\u2019s review committee came to fruition in the form of the state\u2019s 2021 wolf regulations.<\/p>\n Advocacy organizations soon noticed the prohibition on aerial hunting had disappeared and called on<\/a> a Montana judge to issue an injunction to stop the practice. At a court hearing<\/a> in February, Hawkaluk described how Williams\u2019s review committee concluded that wolves were not in fact protected from aerial hunting under state law. (The practice remained illegal under a federal statute, though FWP\u2019s regulations omitted that fact.)<\/p>\n The original idea of a \u201cspecies in need of management\u201d had been twisted beyond recognition. Instead of bestowing protections, the designation made the animals vulnerable to a tactic used for the culling of feral hogs. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t seem to fit what that law was created to do,\u201d Hawkaluk told me, reiterating that she was speaking for herself.<\/p>\n For Hawkaluk, the trajectory of wolves within Montana\u2019s bureaucracy reflects the contentious politics that surrounds the animals. \u201cI think it\u2019s just so convoluted now that it would take an overhaul to crack that, and I think a lot of folks of whatever view on wolves are probably a bit concerned about opening the can of worms,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd so here we stand.\u201d<\/p>\n Aerial hunting<\/u> wasn\u2019t the only tactic to disappear from Montana\u2019s regulations last year. Without public notice, the prohibition against using radio telemetry equipment was also gone. There is at least some evidence that hunters may have attempted to take advantage of the new opportunity.<\/p>\n Early one morning last February, a group of ecotourism guides gathered with their clients north of Yellowstone National Park\u2019s boundary line. They were hoping to spot a mountain lion when a flash of unusual human activity caught their attention instead.<\/p>\n A man had pulled up in a pickup truck. He parked, stepped out of the vehicle, and raised above his head what looked like a radio antenna. He had neither the uniform nor the vehicle of a government official. As the truck pulled away, a third guide recognized the driver as one of the area\u2019s most well-known proponents of aggressive wolf hunting north of Yellowstone.<\/p>\n The guides were concerned. By that point, hunters and trappers had killed an unprecedented 19 of the park\u2019s wolves, many in and around the area where they now stood. The guides sent witness statements to an FWP game warden. When I visited Yellowstone in late May, word of the incident had spread among the park\u2019s research and touring community. I interviewed the guides and reviewed their statements to FWP, then asked the department about the claims and whether hunting wolves with telemetry equipment was now legal.<\/p>\n \u201cFWP game wardens looked into the report and found no functional telemetry equipment or evidence of violation,\u201d Morgan E. Jacobsen, a spokesperson for FWP\u2019s southwest region, said in an email in July. As for using telemetry in wolf hunts, Jacobsen added: \u201cThis would not be lawful while in the act of hunting under Montana\u2019s statute on two-way communication.\u201d<\/p>\n The following week, The Intercept published an investigation<\/a> revealing that the final Yellowstone wolf to die in last winter\u2019s hunt was a radio-collared animal, killed by a veteran backcountry park ranger in the same gulch where the guides had seen the hunter with the antenna. The ranger told me that, following his kill, he became the subject of a National Park Service investigation in which he and other Yellowstone law enforcement officials were accused \u2014 falsely, he said \u2014 of sharing location information on collared wolves with hunters outside the park. NPS declined to comment on the claims, citing an ongoing investigation. FWP, meanwhile, said its Helena-based special investigations unit was conducting a separate investigation into the wolf\u2019s killing.<\/p>\n The day before the story broke, Brian Wakeling, FWP\u2019s game management bureau chief, wrote to the guide who had recognized the hunter and explained that hunting wolves with telemetry gear was legal in Montana \u2014 contradicting the statement his colleague gave to The Intercept just six days earlier. \u201cThe department cannot enforce laws that are not applicable and did not wish to imply that the regulation applied to wolves,\u201d Wakeling wrote.<\/p>\n Ecotourism guides weren\u2019t the only ones concerned about the issue. On July 20, the day The Intercept\u2019s wolf investigation went live, Cam Sholly, the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, sent a letter to Montana\u2019s game commissioners<\/a> arguing that using telemetry to hunt wolves violated the fair chase principle, which holds that human hunters do not take unfair advantage of nonhuman prey, and requested that \u201cthis prohibition be re-inserted into your regulations.\u201d<\/p>\n Montana\u2019s wolf season was over by that point. In the portion of the state that abuts Yellowstone Park \u2014 where longstanding quotas on wolf kills were eliminated entirely \u2014 the death toll of 19 wolves marked a 342 percent increase<\/a> from the previous decade\u2019s annual average of four.<\/p>\n At a Montana<\/u> House hearing last spring, Republican state Rep. Paul Fielder voiced support for Brown\u2019s legislation to slash the state\u2019s wolf population, pointing to a \u201cnew and improved model\u201d for estimating those numbers, which he claimed showed an increase of approximately 300 animals.<\/p>\n Montana had \u201cabout\u201d 1,164 wolves \u2014 a problem, Fielder argued, since the state\u2019s wolf management plan referred to just 15 breeding pairs and 150 individual animals. \u201cBasically, we have four times as many wolves in Montana as the wolf management plan calls for,\u201d he said<\/a>. \u201cSo what this bill does is it gives us some more tools to manage wolves, and we\u2019re not talking about necessarily ethical management of them. We want to reduce wolf numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\nWilliams\u2019s confirmation<\/u> was the culmination of a long career enmeshed in the legal wrangling surrounding wolves and the Endangered Species Act.<\/p>\n
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\nTester won the race, and wolves have been off the Endangered Species List in Montana ever since. Williams returned to her home state as a law professor at Montana State University soon after. In 2017, she was nominated by then-Montana Gov. Steve Bullock to serve as director of Montana’s FWP, the first woman in the position.<\/p>\n“I think a lot of folks of whatever view on wolves are probably a bit concerned about opening the can of worms. And so here we stand.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n
In the portion of\u00a0Montana\u00a0that abuts Yellowstone Park, the death toll of 19 wolves marked a\u00a0342 percent increase\u00a0from the previous decade\u2019s annual average of four.<\/blockquote>\n