A federal judge on Friday said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could not evade its obligation to develop a nationwide recovery plan for the gray wolf/USFWS, Gary Kramer

A federal judge on Friday chastised the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to produce a nationwide gray wolf recovery plan, saying individual plans for the Eastern timber wolf, Northern Rocky Mountain wolf, and Mexican wolf don't meet the requirements under the Endangered Species Act to develop national plan for the gray wolf.

Furthermore, Judge Dabney L. Friedrich said the agency could not pick and choose which recovery plans it works on. Shortly after the judge's ruling was issued, Defenders of Wildlife announced that a gray wolf pack had been documented in the Sequoia National Forest in California.

In his 17-page ruling (attached below), Friedrich noted that while the Fish and Wildlife Service has created plans for the three wolf subspecies, those plans are in three distinct regions of the United States and left 44 states where the gray wolf is listed as endangered without a wolf recovery plan.

"For one thing, the Mexican wolf and Northern Rocky Moujntain wolf are each either wholly or substantially excluded from the 44-State Listing altogether: The Mexican wolf is listed separately, and gray wolves located in the Northern Rocky Mountains are excluded from the 44-state Listing," the judge wrote. "For another, none of the plans, including the one for the Eastern timber wolf, addresses, or even purports to address, conservation and survival of the 44-State Listing of gray wolves, criteria for that listing's removal from the Endangered Species List, or estimates of the time and expenses necessary to achieve theplan's goals."

The judge's ruling stems from a November lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity that argued Fish and Wildlife had failed to develop a recovery plan for portions of the gray wolf's range in 44 states where the predators are listed as endangered. That lawsuit followed by ten months a federal judge's ruling that restored ESA protections for the gray wolf across much of the country, finding that the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2020 removed the protections based on two core populations of the canid, not on the species' status in a significant portion of its historic range, and did not consider whether that range was needed to achieve full recovery.

When the Center brought last fall's lawsuit, it said recovery plans needed to describe actions necessary to achieve the full recovery of species listed under the ESA. However, the gray wolf’s outdated recovery plan was developed in 1992 and mostly focuses on Minnesota, the organization maintained. As such, that plan neglects other places where wolves have lived and could recover, like the West Coast, southern Rocky Mountains, and northeastern United States, it added.

“This straight-forward ruling signals safer trails ahead for the exceedingly vulnerable wolves in western Oregon and Washington, Colorado and the Northeast,” said Sophia Ressler, a staff attorney at the Center. “I hope this finally ends the Service’s decades-long gerrymandering of wolf ranges in its attempt to prematurely remove wolves from the endangered species list. The agency must live up to the reality of what science and the law demand. That means a comprehensive plan that addresses gray wolf recovery across the country.”

Friedrich said his ruling wasn't dictating how Fish and Wildlife should develop a recovery plan, only that the agency had failed to come up with any plan. Section 4(f) of the Endangered Species Act "imposes an obligation on FWS to create a recovery plan for the 44-State Listing, an obligation it has never met," he wrote.

The judge also rejected the agency's contention that under Section 4(f) it has discretion to "give priority (in creating recovery plans) to those endangered species or threatened species ... that are most likely to benefit from such plans."

"Even if the Court were to consider this argument —which it need not— it would prove too much," Friedrich wrote. "The defendants concede that the ESA imposes a mandatory duty to create a recovery plan for each listed species. Given that concession, there is nothing in the statutory language to suggest that a different rule applies based on whether a newly listed species replaced a previously listed, distinct, antecedent species. And 4(f) in its current form imposes a continuing, present obligation to FWS to create compliant recovery plans, even if other recovery plans were previously developed under a different legal regime or for different previously listed species."

The ruling does not directly impact wolves in Alaska, or the northern Rocky Mountain states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, as well as wolves in certain portions of Oregon, Washington and Utah, noted CBD in a release.

Meanwhile, Defenders of Wildlife announced that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife on Friday confirmed that the state’s newest wolf pack includes at least five individuals not previously detected in California plus four pups — two females and two males. CDFW has not yet provided a name for the pack, but did note that the one female in the group is a direct descendant of California’s first documented wolf in the state in nearly 90 years, a female spotted in 2011, Defenders said.

The father of the pups was  a descendant of the Lassen Pack, the organization added. Tulare County is the farthest south a wolf family has taken up residency in the state in recent times, said Defenders.

“California has reached another exciting milestone in gray wolf recovery with the discovery of a new pack in the southern Sierra Nevada,” said Pamela Flick, California program director for Defenders of Wildlife. "This recently detected group of wolves is at least 200 straight-line miles from the nearest known California pack and demonstrates the species’ amazing ability to disperse long distances and take advantage of the state’s plentiful suitable habitat.”