Newly confirmed Fish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik is facing a federal judge’s order to reconsider the iconic gray wolf’s Endangered Species Act status.
Detailed findings in the 105-page judicial decision issued Tuesday enumerate the shortcomings in the agency’s rejection of petitions to keep the species listed as endangered. The to-do list from U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy ranges from a need to consider the gray wolf’s historic range to a serious accounting of how loose management by Western states may allow wolf populations to shrink again to dangerously low levels.
The Justice Department, too, has some homework, with 60 days to decide whether to appeal.
“I really don’t know whether the agency will appeal,” Collette Adkins, director of the carnivore conservation program at the Center for Biological Diversity, said Wednesday. “We won on so many alternative bases that it seems highly unlikely that an appeal would alleviate the agency’s need to reconsider the petitions so maybe they’ll decide it is not worth the effort.”
