HAMILTON - As of last Friday afternoon, more than 11,000 hunters had spent a total of $227,794 for a chance to shoot a wolf in Montana.

On Monday, the Ravalli County Fish and Wildlife Association asked the state to use half of what it raises selling wolf licenses this year to study the impacts wolves are having on elk, deer and bighorn sheep populations.

In a letter to the governor and the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks director and commissioners, the association called the funding an "unparalleled opportunity" to fund some essential research into predator-prey relationships.

"We think that wolves have had a huge impact on our elk numbers," said Tony Jones, the association's president. "You couple that with the number of lions that we have here and with the liberal hunting seasons that we had in years past, our elk numbers are taking a beating."

"It's a huge concern, but there's so much we don't know," he said. "No one knows for sure what kind of impact wolves are having on elk and deer. ... You might find a dead elk three-quarters eaten, but there's no way to know for sure what killed it."

The association's letter asked the state to dedicate half of the "windfall" from wolf license sales to study the situation.

FWP wolf coordinator Carolyn Sime said the association isn't the only group in the state eyeing that new pot of funding.

Stockgrowers want the funding to be used to compensate their livestock losses. Others want research projects in their own backyards.

"That money has been spent five times over," Sime said. "Everyone has a different idea of how it could be spent."

The bottom line is the department doesn't have the authority to spend the new wolf license money until the Montana Legislature sets a new budget that begins in June 2011. Until then, the funds will earn interest and benefit all the wildlife programs the state is involved with, Sime said.

The only way the state could earmark money for wolf research is to auction a wolf license to the general public. That didn't happen this year.

That doesn't mean that FWP isn't interested in putting together research projects looking at relationships between wolves and ungulates in different locations around the state, including the Bitterroot, Sime said.

"Wolf license dollars might not be the only way that we could fund research," she said. "There are many different ways to get the funding we would need to make that happen."

Dale Burk, a past president of the Ravalli County Fish and Wildlife Association said that group understands the constraints FWP faces in its budgeting process.

"We can begin to talk about how to use that funding," Burk said. "We felt it was important to put this idea into motion while there is enough money to pay for a research project to develop good baseline data on the interplay between this new predator - the wolf - and the ungulate population."

Burk said the Bitterroot Valley is a good place for that study to occur.

"We have the best population data on elk of anywhere else in the state," he said. "We have 30 some years of it. ... The association has helped fund some of that when the state couldn't afford to do so."

The valley also has 15 documented wolf packs.

And right now no one knows for sure how those two are interacting.

All that's known for sure is elk numbers are dropping in some areas in the valley. This spring, the ratio between cows and calves in some hunting districts was as low as biologists have ever seen.

Overall elk numbers are dropping as well. In the West Fork, elk numbers this spring were half of the five-year average and nearly a third of the population objective set by the state.

"Hunters point to the wolves as the cause. Lion hunters point to wolves. The anti's point to hunters, but no one really knows for sure," Jones said. "It would be good to do a study so people could have a better idea of what's going on out there."