Sheltered for many years by federal species protection law, the gray wolves of the West are about to step out onto the high wire of life in the real world, when their status as endangered animals formally comes to an end early this year.
The so-called delisting is scheduled to begin in late March, almost five years later than federal wildlife managers first proposed, mainly because of human tussles here in Wyoming over the politics of managing the wolves.
Now changes during that time are likely to make the transition even more complicated. As the federal government and the state of Wyoming sparred in court over whether Wyoming's hard-edged management plan was really a recipe for wolf eradication, as some critics said, the wolf population soared. (The reworked plan was approved by the federal government in November.)
During that period, many parts of the human West were changing, too. Where unsentimental rancher attitudes -- that wolves were unwelcome predators, threatening the cattle economy -- once prevailed, thousands of newcomers have moved in, buying up homesteads as rural retreats, especially near around Yellowstone National Park where the wolves began their recovery in 1995 and from which they have spread far and wide.
The result is that there are far more wolves to manage today than there once would have been five years ago -- which could mean, biologists say, more killing of wolves just to keep the population in check. And that bloodletting might not be quite as popular as it once was.
"If they'd delisted when the numbers were smaller, the states would have been seen as heroes and good managers," said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery coordinator at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. "Now people will say they're murderers."
Wolves are intelligent, adaptable, highly mobile in staking out new territory, and capable of rapid reproduction rates if food sources are good and humans with rifles or poison are kept in check by government gridlock -- and that is precisely what happened.
From the 41 animals that were released inside Yellowstone from 1995 to 1997, mostly from Canada, the population grew to 650 wolves in 2002 and more than 1,500 today in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. The wolves have spread across an area twice the size of New York state and are growing at a rate of about 24 percent a year, according to federal wolf-counts.
Human head counts have also climbed in the same turf. From 1995 to 2005, a 25-county area, in three states, that centers on Yellowstone grew by 12 percent, to about 691,000 people, a report released earlier this year by the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana showed. That compares to a 6 percent growth rate for Wyoming as a whole in that period, 7.5 percent for all of Montana and 19 percent for Idaho. The wolf population has grown faster in Idaho than any place else in the region, doubling to about 800 in the past four years.
The director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Terry Cleveland, said changes in economics and attitude were creating a profound wrinkle in the outlook for human-wolf relations. Cleveland, a 39-year-veteran with the department, said that many newcomers, who are more interested in breathtaking vistas than the price of feed-grain and calves, do not see wolves the way older residents do.
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