Recent wolf sightings in Ely rekindle debate over the Endangered Species Act

Some Ely residents aren’t too thrilled about their newest neighbors.

The rural city in northern Minnesota — located just outside the Superior National Forest and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness — has become a regular hangout for several gray wolves that have appeared in town at least three times this month alone.

“This wolf has been seen daily in Ely for nearly a month and a half now,” one resident said in a post Monday on Wolf.Report, a social media site dedicated to sharing close encounters with the iconic Minnesota predator.

The day before, Ely police posted a video of two wolves running down a city street and passing through people’s yards. Another post from The Ely Echo shows a wolf walking just outside the local public school.

Residents first reported seeing the wolves in April.

It’s not unheard of for wolves to come so close to humans, but it is rare, even in smaller rural cities like Ely, which has a population of roughly 3,200 people and sits on the edge of the state’s only federally protected wilderness area. That has some Ely residents worried the wolves are becoming too comfortable around humans, potentially leading to dangerous conflicts with pets or children.

The encounters follow renewed debate over the status of the U.S. gray wolf population and whether it should continue to be listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

“I am a deer hunter; you’ll see packs of wolves walking right underneath your deer stand,” Stauber said. “And if you have game cameras, you’ll see the wolves almost on a daily or a nightly basis coming across your camera.”

Minnesota officials estimate about 2,700 gray wolves live in the state today, far above the goal of 1,400 set under Endangered Species Act. Stauber believes the population is likely higher.

But conservation advocates have pushed back against the idea of delisting the gray wolf, saying the wolves haven’t recovered fully in other states, even if they have in Minnesota. Some advocates also worry a delisting risks the kind of trophy hunting that made the wolf endangered in the first place.

Earlier this year, several congressional Republicans introduced legislation that would delist the wolf. The Trump administration is also proposing rule changes to the Endangered Species Act that environmentalists say would dramatically weaken the law.

“Removing protection for wolves would reverse the recovery of one of our most beloved species and take us back to a time when wolves were shot, trapped, and poisoned until they disappeared from the landscape,” Susan Holmes, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition, said in a statement responding to those proposals.

“People think they can feed other animals and not attract wolves and coyotes,” wrote Ely resident Kim Breimeier in a recent Facebook post. “We sometimes would have so many deer on the road from people feeding them that it was hard to drive in our neighborhood.”

While wolves pose a threat to livestock and pets, attacks on humans are exceedingly rare.

“Wolves represent little threat to humans, unless people habituate them by providing them with food,” according to Colorado State University.