In the Cascade Mountains, our sites are broken into 4 categories:
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North Cascades – North of US 2 and west of US 97
Central Cascades – Between I-90 and US 2
I-90 corridor – Hyak to Easton
Southern Cascades – South of I-90
We only have one category to discuss our sites in northeast Washington, which is defined as the area
north of US 2 and east of US 97.
Wolf Monitoring
Wolf recovery and management has been a major focus for Conservation Northwest's broader wildlife
recovery and connectivity goals since 2008, when our volunteer led remote camera teams in the
Methow Valley documented the first pack in Washington in over 70 years.
Washington has eight confirmed packs of wolves: two in the Cascades and six in northeastern
Washington. Four additional packs are suspected by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
(WDFW), but were unconfirmed as of October 2012. Conservation Northwest works with WDFW and
other partner organizations to implement the state's wolf conservation and management plan that was
adopted in December 20114. Understanding the presence and range of our state's wolf population helps
to inform management actions including measures to reduce conflicts between this recovering species
and other land uses (i.e. ranching, recreation, vegetation management).
Our project goals for monitoring wolves this season were both to: 1) Monitor this species presence in
known locations where agencies seek greater information on the visual characteristics, pack size, and
range; and 2) Monitor high quality habitat where wolves have been documented to capture evidence of
dispersing wolves into new and previously undocumented areas of Washington.
Fourteen of our twenty-four total remote camera sites were dedicated to wolf monitoring and their
distribution reflected the three recovery zones delineated by the state: Eastern Washington, North
Cascades, and the Southern Cascades. The Southern Cascades recovery zone includes the Olympic
Peninsula and southern Washington coast, which were two areas we did not include in this year's
monitoring efforts as there is no indication of current wolf presence or likelihood of wolf presence in the
near future due to the lack of a nearby source population and other significant barriers such as road
infrastructure and high concentrations of human development in the southern Puget region.
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Washington Wolf Conservation and Management Plan, http://wdfw.wa.gov/publications/00001/
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