I was reading one of the bigger outdoor magazines last night when I came across a passage that stopped me cold. It said “13 anti-hunting groups” had sued to put the gray wolf back on the federal endangered species list.

That statement is true for the most part. It’s the other part I’m worried about. This whole wolf debate is very heated, and it has become de rigeuer to use half-truths and inflammatory language to forward the cause, particularly by those who want the gray wolf to remain under federal protection.

I believe the science is there to show that the wolves have recovered enough to let the states manage them. It’s unrealistic to think the Western Great Lakes population of gray wolves should colonize outside the big woods up north, and they’re clearly doing just fine there. Thanks to the Endangered Species Act and the end of bounties, the gray wolf population of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan has grown from a couple hundred animals in the mid-1970s to around 4,000 today.

The fact is they’re filling up the available habitat and reaching a balance with their food supply. Conflicts with humans — read that as attacks on pets and livestock — can’t help but increase with the wolf numbers. By giving those controls back to the states, problem wolves can be eliminated and the people who have to live with wolves can be placated. It’s a kind of empowerment that can help build tolerance of wolves in places where that is scarce, and that can only help the wolves in the long run. It’s a practical way to let wolves and humans share the landscape.

Those who oppose letting states manage wolves disagree, and they’re not shy about bending the truth. When a court ruled that wolves should go back on the list because the U.S. Fish and Wlidlife Service didn’t hold a proper public comment period — clearly a technicality – the Humane Society of the United States web site crowed “Feds cry uncle in wolf lawsuit,” as though the USFWS had just given up because it was so incredibly wrong.

Later they describe state management plans as “killing plans” because they include allowing landowners to kill wolves caught in the act of attacking livestock, and they include the possibility of sport-hunting wolves. One HSUS lawyer calls state management “reckless plans to start sport hunting and trapping imperiled wolves.” That’s just silly. The scientists who put together the wolf management plans have spent years listening and learning how to make wolf management work for everybody, most notably the wolves themselves. They’re anything but reckless.

And keep in mind that the Michigan and Wisconsin legislatures would have to pass laws making wolves a game species before any sport hunting can happen. And keep in mind that Michigan couldn’t even get that designation for mourning doves, which already are hunted in dozens of states. Wolves? Yeah, right.

Another group, the Center for Biological Diversity, isn’t against hunting at all, according to Michael Robinson, its wolf expert. It just believes that wolves haven’t recovered enough to be de-listed, and that the USFWS is applying the Endangered Species Act illegally. It claims that the Western Great Lakes wolves are too genetically isolated to be viable and could be susceptible to disease or hybridization. Those sound like compelling arguments, but they ignore the fact that wolves don’t recognize international borders. That western Great Lakes population of wolves is really just the southern arm of a huge Canadian population that includes some 50,000 animals. They come and go between the U.S. and Canada at will, mixing their genes and everything. Isolated? Hardly.

Which brings us back to our outdoor magazine’s claim that “13 anti-hunting groups” filed the suit to keep wolves on the Endangered Species List. Remember the Center for Biological Diversity? They may be anti-wolf-hunting, and they may be in bed with a bunch of anti-hunting lunatics, but they’re not anti-hunting.

A minor distinction? Probably. But in the circles I travel, there isn’t much that can rile folks up like the term “anti-hunting.” Hardly anything is as inflammatory as that. It’s a blanket statement that describes an unbending, systematic attempt to strip us of our rights, extinguish our passion and shut down our lifestyle.

When it’s true, use it. When it’s sort of true, don’t. In the hunter/anti-hunter argument, we have to be right. And saying things that are wrong, even a little bit wrong, makes that a lot harder.

Right?

I’ve been a sucker for a good field guide as long as I can remember, so I was absolutely delighted when The ROM Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of Ontario showed up on my desk.

It makes little difference that I’m in Michigan; with very few exceptions the fishes that live in Ontario can also be found across the northern United States, especially in the Great Lakes region.

This guide is complete and easy to understand. It breaks the fish into families, and each species account describes in detail physical characteristics, habitat and behaviors, and includes several pictures, a map showing the species range in Ontario, and a small chart listing average and record sizes (in metric and standard measures). It includes every species from the teensiest minnow to the mighty muskellunge.

The images used in the species accounts are a useful combination of photographs and illustrations that show the fish from different angles. The guide also includes 43 pages of images showing the fish side-by-side with similar species and pointing out the distinguishing characteristics of each, an extremely handy feature for identifying species that are easily confused.

One extremely minor complaint — and I understand this is an American talking about Canadian fish and that we Yanks are as guilty of this as anyone — is that the maps showing the range of each species stops right at the border, even out in the middle of the Great Lakes. I’ve never liked it when American publishers do that, either. But in the ROM’s defense, the title makes it clear these are the fishes of Ontario. For the most part I know which ones cross that line.  

Compiled by Erling Holm and Marry Burridge, both assistant curators of ichthyology at the Royal Ontario Museum, and Nicholas E. Mandrak, a research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the ROM Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of Ontario (ROM 2009, softcover, $29.95) is an excellent resource.

Last year, when the Inland Consent Decree granted certain hunting and fishing rights to Michigan’s first people — aka the Tribes — there was a good bit of concern over how those rights would affect everyone else. Some people said tribal members would just hunt wherever they wanted and ignore property lines. Others feared that the spring walleye spearing season — for tribes only — would erupt into fights and mayhem like they did in Wisconsin a few years back.

It looks like the pre-emptive complaining made a bigger splash than the actual activities. In fact, nothing much changed.

Now comes word that the Inter-Tribal Fisheries Program has basically donated 70,000 walleye fingerlings to the Michigan DNR to stock into Big Bay de Noc in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The fish were surplus after the tribes reared what they needed.

It was the first such gift in the memory of Jim Dexter, the state’s Lake Michigan basin coordinator, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Thanks to the fish disease VHS, Michigan’s hatcheries are working at a severely reduced capacity. Where a normal Bay de Noc plant would include as many as a half-million fish, this year it would have been closer to 200,000.

Those gift fish put the total of walleye stocked in the bay for 2009 between 250,000 and 300,000.

In other words, they made a difference.