The big question now for wolves in Montana is where do we go from here?

The state’s first fair-chase wolf hunt ended Monday with 72 wolves out of a statewide quota of 75 being taken. That was close enough for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks to pull the plug on the season, lest the hunt go over quota.

Up front, FWP said the season would be a learning experience. As much as it was a hunt to manage wolves, it was also an experiment to see how a wolf season would work and how a hunt should be run. It was a season to build on for the future.

“We feel pretty good about how the season went. We need to make some adjustments and perhaps create some sub-quotas in some areas,” said Shane Colton, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission chairman from Billings.

“But overall, this season was a clear indicator that the state of Montana and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks can manage wolves responsibly and we should be able to continue to do so,” he said.

The statewide population was about 500 wolves at the end of 2008 in 84 verified packs with 34 breeding pairs. The Rocky Mountain region has about 1,650 wolves.

“We stayed conservative because we wanted to get a hunt on the ground. All along we said this was going to be a year to see how it goes and make adjustments from there,” Colton said.

That 72 wolves were actually taken by hunters came as something of a surprise, considering the fact that wolves are generally very secretive and are considered difficult to hunt.

“Wolf numbers are clearly robust. The fact we reached a quota shows that the numbers are robust. There wasn’t anyone that thought we were going to get more than about 45,” he said. “Maybe the numbers are more robust than we think. Maybe we caught them by surprise. No one knows.”

The early-season hit on the Cottonwood Pack in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness near Yellowstone National Park, including the taking of the alpha female which had been tracked by radio for five years by researchers, caused a stir in the scientific community.

But Colton said that aside from pointing out the need for sub-quotas, it wasn’t really a problem in terms of wildlife management or damage to the wolf population. Yellowstone is closed to hunting. Montana was not. Wolves do move back and forth across the political boundary in between.

“We have to set a season that recognizes the realities of a hunting landscape. There are not horrible long-term consequences from that,” he said. “That pack maintained some mortality, but it’s still a viable pack and we still have a strong population of wolves across Montana. We’d look at sub-quotas in areas like that.

“We do need to work to focus our harvest in areas where we’re getting depredation problems,” he added. “That will be one of our challenges.”

Wolf hunter numbers came as a bit of a surprise with 16,500 individuals purchasing licenses. With a quota of 75, that meant just one out of every 208 hunters would fill a tag, a hunting success rate of less than half of 1 percent.

But another reality is that the $325,859 generated by those license sales isn’t going to come anywhere close to paying the bills for wolf management in the state.

According to Carolyn Sime, who heads FWP’s wolf program, an analysis from Montana’s 2003 wolf management plan puts the state’s annual cost for wolves in the $907,000 to $948,000 range.

That includes about $456,000 for wildlife biologists, operations and monitoring, $157,000 for an enforcement staff and operations, $54,000 for conservation education, $50,000 for fiscal, legal and administration costs, $50,000 for proactive, preventative efforts and $100,000 for depredation and predator control. Another $40,000 to $81,000 is estimated to be needed to pay for livestock compensation.

And all plans may change depending on what happens in the courtroom.

A lawsuit to end wolf hunting and put wolves back on the endangered species list filed by 13 environmental groups will be heard in federal court in Missoula sometime early next year.  Among the issues in the suit is that you can’t delist wolves in Montana and Idaho while keeping the contiguous wolf population of Wyoming on the list.

In the meantime, Colton and FWP feels the state’s first fair-chase wolf hunt did achieve its goals.

“We’re going to digest the information from this year’s hunt,” he said. “We’re going to look at what we want to do for overall wolf numbers. This is a species that will need continuous management and observation.

“The wolf season wasn’t perfect,” Colton said. “But overall, it was a strong success.”