MONTPELIER, Vt. – In what environmentalists hailed as a major victory, a federal judge on Friday ordered the Bush administration to step up efforts to restore the gray wolf to Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York.

“The wolves are howlin'” in celebration, Patrick Parenteau, director of the environmental law clinic at Vermont Law School, said with a laugh. Parenteau, lead attorney in the case, said his students “did all the hard labor in the case. It’s a nice victory for our students.”

Judge J. Garvan Murtha, sitting in the U.S. District Court for Vermont, found that the Department of the Interior violated federal law in 2003 when it issued a rule saying no further efforts to restore the wolf were needed.

Efforts to restore wolves had been successful in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The government wanted to lump those states in with the Northeast in a new 21-state eastern region and declare that enough had been done to restore wolf populations throughout the eastern United States.

But Murtha wrote that the Fish and Wildlife Service “simply cannot downlist or delist an area that it previously determined warrants an endangered listing because it ‘lumps together’ a core population with a low to nonexistent population outside the core area.”

If the government had prevailed, Parenteau said, “the only wolves that would exist in the Eastern United States would be those wolf populations in the upper Great Lakes. That’s what the final rule [put out by the Fish and Wildlife Service] said, and that’s what we challenged.”

The gray wolf has been under federal protection since 1974, but in April 2003, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service revisited the animal’s status, declaring that healthy wolf populations in the Great Lakes constituted a “recovery” of the species in an area spanning 22 states, including Maine. That decision resulted in wolves in the East being classified as “threatened” rather than “endangered.”

Some Mainers joined a fight against a subsequent proposal to remove wolves from the list entirely, saying that without continued federal protection, the wolves would not have the chance to reproduce and re-establish themselves.

On Friday, Ken Elowe, the head of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s Bureau of Resource Management, defended the state’s restoration efforts thus far.

“I guess, in my view, the question that comes to mind is what does ‘step up reintroduction efforts’ mean,” Elowe said. “In my view, we are doing everything that is biologically responsible right now.”

Elowe said there are some groups in Maine that would like to see the DIF&W “put [wolves] on the ground,” but he cautioned that doing so would be irresponsible.

Elowe pointed out differences between wolves in other parts of the country and those thought to exist in Maine and said there is no biological consensus on which wolves to reintroduce to Maine. Without knowing the solution to that complicated genetic puzzle, any efforts would be premature, he said.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to put a wolf on the ground that’s never been here before,” he said. “It would be an introduction and not a reintroduction.”

Maine’s current wolf population remains a subject of debate, but Elowe said the department recognizes and charts reported wolf sightings and advises hunters how to recognize the difference between coyotes and wolves.

There are other barriers to reintroduction efforts in Maine, Elowe said.

“Without the public behind it, it would be doomed to failure,” Elowe said. “Certainly, there are social and political considerations that would make it successful or unsuccessful that could not be ignored.”

Elowe said another consideration is the legality of any introduction efforts, pointing out that in New Hampshire, the Legislature passed a bill prohibiting the introduction of wolves, and that in Maine, any introduction of a species must first be approved by the state Legislature.

“I would hate to have the court define [what constitutes a stepped-up effort to restore wolves] because I think there’s enough biological questions that need to be answered instead of a court deciding that,” he said.

Anthony Tur, a Fish and Wildlife Service field officer in Concord, N.H., said the agency’s headquarters in Washington would decide whether to appeal the ruling.

He questioned the push to build gray wolf populations in the Northeast on two fronts, saying it wasn’t clear that the public would support such a move and there was dispute in the scientific community about whether gray wolves ever populated the region.

Environmental groups, including the National Wildlife Federation, Vermont Natural Resources Council, Maine Wolf Coalition, Environmental Advocates of New York and Maine Audubon Society, joined in the lawsuit. They argued that good wolf habitats exist in northern Maine and in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, and that northern Vermont and New Hampshire likely would become an important corridor for wolves migrating between those two habitats.

John Kostyack, attorney for the National Wildlife Federation, called the ruling a “major victory for wolves and for all the people who care so much about preserving America’s natural heritage.”

BDN writer and outdoor columnist John Holyoke contributed to this report.