One of three Mexican gray wolves stalks her new one-third-acre pen after being released from a holding cage outside of Hannagan Meadow. She was part of a wolf recovery program in Northeastern Arizona.

Jeff Robbins / The Associated Press 1998

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BOZEMAN, Mont. — Compensation paid to ranchers who lost livestock to wolves set a record in 2006, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Defenders of Wildlife, a national environmental group that pays ranchers for confirmed or probable kills of livestock by wolves, wrote checks for $154,000 last year, the highest amount the group has paid, according to a report in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

Most of the deaths — with compensation totaling $148,000 — took place in the Northern Rockies states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. The rest were in New Mexico and Arizona, where a fledgling group of Mexican gray wolves has been reintroduced.

Across the West last year, Defenders paid for the losses of 158 cattle, 204 sheep and eight other animals, mostly guard dogs but also a couple of horses.

In 2005, the group paid $101,000 for depredations. It paid $137,000 in 2004.

The Defenders' Bailey Wildlife Foundation Compensation Trust is in its 20th year.

During the trust's first year in 1987, it paid $3,000 for the loss of five cattle and nine sheep killed in northwestern Montana by naturally recolonizing wolves, according to the Defenders' Web site.

Annual payments never rose above $7,500 until 1997, the year after the second batch of wolves was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho. Payments have risen steadily since then.

"We've seen more wolves out there, and we've expected more depredations," Suzanne Stone of Defenders told the Chronicle.

She said that less than 1 percent of all livestock deaths in the Northern Rockies are because of wolves, adding that disease, birthing problems, injuries, rustling and other predators all take more livestock than wolves do.

"Wolf losses are a drop in the bucket compared to a lot of other losses," Stone said.

The impact of wolves on the overall ranching industry "is pretty minor," agreed Jay Bodner, a natural resources specialist for the Montana Stockgrowers Association.

But the impacts on individual ranchers can be significant, he said.

An example came last year near McCall, Idaho, where one sheep rancher lost 90 animals in a series of attacks by several different packs.

The trust's goal is to reduce the impact of depredations on individual ranchers, Stone said.

As of early December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated there were 1,264 wolves in three states: Montana has 300, in 59 packs; Wyoming has 314, in 34 packs; while Idaho has 650 in about 70 packs.

Wolf numbers are quadruple what federal officials said was necessary for biological recovery, but removal of federal protections has been delayed by political and legal squabbles.

As livestock deaths climb, so does the number of wolves killed for killing stock. In 2005, government officials killed 152 wolves, according to Ed Bangs, who runs the wolf recovery program for Fish and Wildlife.

That's about 12 percent of the wolf population, he said. Officials traditionally remove about 7 percent of the population for preying on livestock, but the ratio has grown as the wolf population has expanded.