FWP AT WORK Liz Bradley, Wolf Specialist, Missoula

PROBLEM SOLVER

LIZ BRADLEY

“A BIG PART OF OUR JOB is to reduce conflicts between wolves and people living on the landscape with wolves. What I’m doing here is putting up fladry [fence flagging] around a 20-acre calving area near Alberton where wolves had killed a calf a few days earlier and another was missing. [The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s] Wildlife Services investigated but was unable to set traps due to freeze-thaw conditions, so the rancher was open to using fladry, which works best on relatively smaller pasture like this or on hobby ranches. There’s something about the fluttering of the flags that scares wolves off, so we string fladry up around the pastures and then the rancher checks each day to make sure it hasn’t fallen down. Because there was no fresh snow, we couldn’t tell if wolves later came up to the fladry and were scared off—as happened on a similar project I was working on at the time north of Missoula—or if they just never returned. But there were no further problems with these cattle.”