A New Wolf Pack, Irate Ranchers, and the Astonishing Comeback of California’s Most Celebrated Predator

"As discussed below, "living with wolves is not easy..."

NOTE: this article was originally published to San Francisco Chronicle's Apple News Channel on October 13, 2024. It was written by Kurtis Alexander.

QUINCY, Plumas County — Everyone cheered. Except the cowboys.

On a balmy night in this rural northern Sierra town, a California wildlife official announced at a conservation forum that the state’s new population of wolves was growing “exponentially.” After years of uncertainty, he said, the animals were thriving.

The crowd of locals, which included college students and outdoorsy types, largely welcomed the report. But not those in the wide-brimmed hats and dusty ball caps. The few dozen or so unexpected guests at the recent Audubon Society speaker series in Quincy waited for the presentation to finish, then lobbed grievances toward the stage.

“These wolves are eating more farm animals than they are wild animals,” called out one rancher.

“We’re losing cattle daily,” protested another.

“It’s like having some burglar come into your yard every night,” shouted another. “And we’re getting no support.”

Gray wolves, wiped out in California by hunters and trappers a century ago, have been trickling back in over the past decade: a lone wolf here and a pack there, mostly near the Oregon border. In the past year, however, the population has soared, with at least eight packs — the latest documented just last week — now established as far south as Tulare County and untold numbers looking to start new packs.

The recently discovered pack was confirmed on trail-camera footage in Lassen National Forest. It consists of at least two adults and two pups, according to state officials, providing yet more evidence that wolves appear to be in California to stay.

While ecologically remarkable, the comeback of the storied predator remains fraught with questions about how a creature that’s emblematic of the state’s iconic wildness can be accommodated in a landscape now dominated by humans. It’s a tension that goes beyond wolves: In the face of development and the pressures of climate change, California and the West have struggled to find a place for many species, from salmon and smelt to eagles and condors to beavers and bighorn sheep.

The challenge is only compounded with an apex carnivore, and few conjure the angst evoked by an animal sometimes vilified as the big bad wolf.

“I’m beyond frustrated. I’m pissed off,” said Dan Greenwood, one of the ranchers who showed up at the Audubon Society event. Last year, Greenwood began seeing concerning numbers of wolves near his cattle east of Quincy, and already he counts more than 25 dead cows and calves due to the new predator, two lost within days of the forum. “The rest of the state doesn’t see this. They hear about the wolves, and it sounds great, but they’re not the ones that have to live with them.”

The state has made wolf recovery a priority, granting protections to the canine under the California Endangered Species Act. The law prohibits harassing or killing wolves even when they regularly eat livestock — not the case for mountain lions and bears. While at least one wolf has been shot, a crime that can carry prison time, many cattle owners say they feel powerless to protect their animals. A pilot program to compensate ranchers for livestock losses ran out of money.

State officials at the forum, while expressing sympathy for the ranchers, acknowledged there is only so much that can be done to protect livestock, which only heightened frustrations.

“They didn’t come via trailer?” shouted one person in the room, invoking an unsubstantiated theory that the wolves did not naturally migrate to California but were brought in by the state or shady environmentalists.

Amid the clamor, a few people at the event who had come to marvel at the achievements of wolves and other wildlife headed for the exits. The moderator stepped in to try to nudge the discussion in a different direction.

“It sounds,” she said, “like there’s kind of a misunderstanding here.”

Looking for pups

A few days after the event, in wooded hills about an hour north of Quincy, Kent Laudon steered his muddied pickup down a gravel road. Snow-topped Lassen Peak loomed in the distance. An open bag of Fritos sat on the center console, next to an electronic wolf collar.

Working as the wolf biologist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Laudon’s job is to keep tabs on the animals. By doing so, he occupies a unique place at the center of the wolf’s controversial return.

His work, which involves catching and collaring the canines so they can be monitored, not only allows the state to better understand the spread of wolves and support their conservation, but also serves ranchers by alerting them when the carnivores are near. The importance of collaring is a rare point of agreement at this factious moment in the recovery.

“The wolves are going to do what the wolves do,” said Laudon, who was two weeks into his latest effort to collar a wolf, while driving slowly through thick timberlands. “You need to worry about the people. Do right by the people.”

Laudon was looking for the Lassen Pack, the second pack to form in California since the wolves reappeared. Trapping one of the adults and fitting it with a GPS collar would allow surveillance of the group to resume after a previous collar had failed. Since January, the pack had been unmonitored across its sprawling home range in Plumas and Lassen counties, at the rugged crossroads of the Sierra Nevada and Cascades.

The state has been behind in getting collars on the animals. The recent surge in wolves has been overwhelming. At minimum, state wildlife officials aim to have one wolf collared in each pack, but only four of the eight confirmed packs have members with collars. The state’s wish list also includes monitoring other pairs and possible additional packs. About 20 new collars sit at the ready.

Laudon, who was hired as the first scientist to study California wolves seven years ago and now wields 27 years of wolf management experience across five states, has perfected his methods for pursuing a wolf for collaring. He was tracking the Lassen Pack by homing in on the newborns. Since wolves generally give birth in spring, their young still had limited mobility, meaning a den of pups or a rendezvous site for raising the family might be found. There, adults would be hovering.

“It’s possible that they’re up here,” Laudon said at one point, turning his truck up a heavily forested slope on what barely passed as an old logging road. His gaze wavered between straight ahead and out the driver-side window. He was on constant watch for tracks, tufts of hair and scat.

If and when Laudon found the pack, he intended to set a trap.  Then, he would wait. Once a wolf was caught, he would anesthetize it, check its vitals and take blood and stool samples to learn more about it and collar it before releasing it back into the wild. Catching a wolf for collaring can take days, weeks or even months.

The GPS collars that the state uses transmit reports once a day via satellite, documenting where a wolf has been at various times. The data helps trackers understand not only the wolf’s advance but what it’s doing: For example, a pause in movement might indicate that a pack had stopped to feed, possibly scavenging or having made a kill.

As Laudon proceeded up the steep and bumpy road, wolf tracks he had spotted earlier could no longer be seen, and he quickly realized the animals weren’t there. Still, he knew he was close.

Laudon had located the pups several days earlier in a short tunnel dug on a nearby mountainside. (State officials asked that the area where Laudon was closing in on the pack not be disclosed, to protect the wolves.) Before Laudon could return to set a trap, however, he learned that the pack had been spooked by people passing through and had moved on. He suspected the wolves hadn’t gone far.

“Everyone wants more collars on wolves, from the wolf advocacy side to the ranching side,” he said. “I’m pulling my hair out at times.”

He continued driving, passing a large reservoir with a rare pocket of cell service. His phone lit up with a message from a local rancher named Wally. Wally wanted an update on the Lassen Pack.

An unthinkable comeback

It all started with OR-7.

In 2011, after a 2-year-old wolf fled his pack in the remote wilderness of northeastern Oregon, he made history by crossing that state’s southern border, becoming the first of the great carnivores to run wild in California since 1924, so far as is known.

The wolf, identified as OR-7 by Oregon wildlife officials who collared it, was looking for a mate, and in doing so, was continuing the extraordinary proliferation of his predecessors. His parents are believed to have come from Idaho following the reintroduction of gray wolves in the northern Rockies in the 1990s, an ambitious effort to save the wolf in the Lower 48.

Wolves, which once numbered as many as 2 million across the continent, were close to vanishing from the contiguous United States last century. Until recently, the prospect of the canine returning to California was unthinkable.

With their built-in drive to roam and unrivaled endurance, as well as hard-won protection under the federal Endangered Species Act, the reintroduced wolves and their progeny spread vigorously. The animals, which can grow to 150 pounds and stand 3 feet at the shoulder, may tussle with a bear or mountain lion on occasion but their only real impediment is people.

Today, the successfully spreading wolves, along with incoming Canadian wolves and an enduring population in northwest Montana, number a little more than 3,000 across seven western states. Gray wolves also live in the Great Lakes region, and a subspecies of gray wolves, known as Mexican wolves, lives in Arizona and New Mexico.

The wolf’s arrival in California was widely celebrated. As OR-7s movement was reported via GPS collar, with many in the public following his every zig-zag across the north state, he gained instant fame. There were congratulatory vigils, bumper stickers calling for OR-7 to be president and Twitter accounts musing about the wolf’s quest for love.

The furry superstar eventually returned to Oregon, unable to make a connection, but not before unveiling a whole new frontier for the gray wolf: the vast, sparsely populated forests of California.

State wildlife officials have since estimated that 23,000 square miles of habitat is suitable for wolves in Northern California — an area nearly the size of West Virginia — extending from the inland Sierra and Cascades to swaths of the mountainous coast.

“California didn’t lose wolves because it didn’t have habitat,” said Amaroq Weiss, a biologist and senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We lost wolves because we killed them all.”

OR-7 is also credited with prompting protections for wolves under California’s endangered species act. The state provisions came in addition to federal protections, ensuring that safeguards for wolves remain if policymakers in Washington weaken the federal law. In parts of the West, though not California, the law has already been rolled back.

Today, about 65 wolves are documented in California, the majority split between the eight known packs. State officials say there are potentially at least three more packs, and possibly many more, as well as numerous individual wolves, but they’re yet to be confirmed.

“We’ve seen a big jump,” said Weiss, who called the uptick inspiring. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a doubling of the packs over the next two years.”

State officials say that Northern California alone could support between 371 and 497 wolves. That estimate was made before the surprise discovery of a pack last year in Sequoia National Forest, more than 200 miles south of the nearest known pack, which means there’s potential for additional numbers in the southern half of the state.

“In the not too distant future, it could be a more common thing to see a wolf trying to get to Monterey or Santa Barbara,” said Axel Hunnicutt, the state’s gray wolf coordinator, who works with Laudon on the recovery.

The wolf’s return, Hunnicutt and others point out, can have value beyond the wolves themselves. Studies show numerous trickle-down benefits. For example, by helping control deer populations, the top predator limits the overbrowsing of streambanks. This protects the vegetation that feeds songbirds, as well as anchoring soil for beaver dams and filtering contaminants from waterways.

OR-7’s legacy continues with the Lassen Pack. One of his offspring, like his dad, ventured to California and started the pack after pairing with a female of unknown origin. The Lassen Pack, now with a new breeding pair, marked its eighth litter with this year’s pups.

‘A real pain’

Amid the old barns, meadows and creeks of Indian Valley, not far from Quincy, ranchers Brian Kingdon and his son, Travis, were making the rounds in their pick-ups one morning, checking on cows. It was calving season, and wolves were among the many things on their minds.

The emergence of the Lassen Pack in 2016, the Kingdons say, changed everything for the ranching community. While accustomed to dealing with mountain lions and bears, the wolves added a new layer of risk for livestock that’s been tough to manage. Things got worse, they say, when another group of wolves named the Beyem Seyo Pack started coming around last fall.

“They’re a real pain to us. That’s what they are,” said Brian, who lives outside the pioneer town of Taylorsville, an area that was roaring with gold prospectors when his ancestors arrived in the 1850s but is now quiet cattle country.

Over the past year, the state has officially pinned about 45 livestock kills on wolves. While that number has increased, it’s still substantially less than the toll from non-predator issues, which include poor health, bad weather and injury. Ranchers, though, suspect the actual number of kills is significantly higher because only a fraction are investigated. Many cattle owners don’t report fatalities, and when they do, the evidence is often gone long before it can be examined.

Preliminary research shared with the Chronicle shows that cows are indeed a dietary staple for many California wolves. An analysis led by Ken Tate, a professor of plant sciences at UC Davis, found that 72% of wolf scat collected in the area around the Lassen Pack in 2022 and 2023, from 18 different wolves, contained traces of cattle. About 45% contained deer. None had elk.

Part of the reason for the preponderance of cows in the diet of wolves is believed to be a lack of preferred prey. California’s elk numbers are low, while deer have been in decline for decades.

An even bigger and broader issue than the wolf attacks, many ranchers say, is the mere presence of wolves causing stress on cattle. This can hamper weight gain and fertility of cows, undermining production and ultimately profits. Tate’s research team is currently working to better quantify these less direct impacts.

Until this past year, the concerns about wolves had been limited mostly to parts of Lassen, Plumas and Siskiyou counties. However, as wolves spread, so have the problems, which are now top of the agenda for the California Cattlemen’s Association and state Farm Bureau. Members of these organizations have pushed to delist or down-list wolves from California’s Endangered Species Act in hope of giving ranchers more flexibility to deal with the carnivore — namely, to shoot problem wolves.

Illegal wolf kills have been suspected only periodically. A code of silence governs the crime, which ranchers call SSS, short for “shoot, shovel and shut-up.” Speculation of SSS ran high after the Shasta Pack, the state’s first contemporary wolf pack, mysteriously vanished in 2016. Investigators never found any wrongdoing in the disappearance, and to this day there have been no convictions for killing wolves in the state.

California wildlife officials attribute the apparent rarity of wolf kills, in part, to the state’s outreach to ranchers, notably alerts about the location of the predators from the tracking information provided by the collars. Officials also credit the patience and diligence of cattlemen.

The Kingdons, probably more than most, have prepared themselves for wolves.

At their small operation, where Brian and Travis are the only ones working the cows, they’ve ringed pastures with fladry, strips of colorful fabric that blow in the wind and reputedly deter the canines. They’ve installed electric fences, and they coordinate with neighbors to keep watch for the animals.

“There’s a network of people here. We check the cows at midnight or 1 in the morning,” Brian said, as he stood next to the hot wires of a fence surrounding days-old calves. “It’s hard.”

To ward off wolves, one of his neighbors towed a trailer into her field to sit sentinel. Another got guard dogs. Some hire watchmen.

Since taking precautionary measures, the Kingdons haven’t lost any cattle, which can be a $3,000 hit or more. Achieving such success is not feasible for everyone.

In the nearby Plumas National Forest, Richard Egan runs cattle on a grazing allotment that’s just too big to secure. He’s had five wolf kills confirmed by the state but suspects the real number is closer to 30. Most, if not all, are due to the Lassen Pack.

“In this open-range environment, there really aren’t any identified deterrents,” Egan said as he was coordinating the annual delivery of his herds from their wintering grounds in the foothills to the higher, fertile federal land.

To reduce his losses, Egan received a share of the $3 million that the state has given ranchers for wolf-related expenses. Set up in 2021, the livestock compensation program not only covered losses due to dead cattle but reimbursed for prevention measures such as fencing. It also offered “pay for presence” funds for the stress-induced problems associated with cows being around wolves.

Ranchers were initially reluctant to take state money. They believed accepting payments showed tacit approval for wolves feeding on livestock. But as damages mounted, the compensation fund became more popular, enough that in March of this year, it dried up. Ranchers have pressed for more funding.

Most cattlemen also want more information on the whereabouts of wolves. Many believe there are just too few collars on the animals. A good start, Egan says, would be collaring members of the Lassen Pack, and as quickly as possible.

“It’s hard for us to figure out what’s going on out there right now,” he said. “I’m a rancher. I’ve got a lot to lose.”

A fraught future

Back on the search for the Lassen Pack, Laudon drove through a stretch of badly burned forest. A thick carpet of green grasses and shrubs had emerged, marking the slow return of life after the catastrophic Dixie Fire in 2021. There was no sign of wolves.

Laudon pointed to an area, hemmed by charred conifers, where he had recently tracked down members of the pack before they were spooked. It was the same place that seven years ago, the pack’s founding pair gave birth to their first pups. Laudon, at the time, trapped and collared the breeding female, initiating a record of surveillance that continued with other members of the pack, contributing invaluable insights into the wolves and the broader recolonization of the species — until the GPS collar failed.

“When I started the job, the question was: Are wolves even running around here anymore?” he recalled. While Laudon anticipated a bump in wolf numbers, he said the extent and pace of it is “surprising, even for a guy like me.”

Finding a wolf is not easy. In California, the home range of a pack is about 400 square miles of sometimes steep and overgrown wilderness. Led by a breeding male and female, often with pups, several yearlings and sometimes unrelated tagalongs, the smart, unusually perceptive and highly social packs can be elusive. Some wolves even wise up to the fact that they’re being tracked and become more careful to not get caught, Laudon says, what he calls “trap avoidance.”

To help with trapping, the Department of Fish and Wildlife has brought on new staff over the past year to share the collaring responsibilities that Laudon had shouldered alone. It’s part of a modest expansion of the state’s wolf program following the spike in the wolf population. Long operating on less than $1 million a year with Laudon the only full-time employee, the program now includes four full-time positions and a $1.5 million research contract with UC Berkeley.

The state also has stepped up accommodations for those affected by wolves. “Conflict biologists” are working with ranchers to try to deter the predators from livestock. Wildlife officials have made a long-term commitment to helping sustain populations of deer and elk to ensure wolves have more to eat than cattle. Financing for the livestock compensation fund was even partially restored by the Legislature during recent budget negotiations, despite a ballooning state deficit.

Laudon, who is 60, has developed a demanding tracking routine, if you can call it that. In much of the spring, summer and fall, he goes at least 10 straight days in pursuit of a wolf, often well into the night, retiring to a small camp trailer, with a bed, his laptop and a fridge filled with lunch and dinner fixings and maybe a bottle of Pinot Grigio. In his younger days, he stayed in a tent. His Ahab-like devotion to the search, though, hasn’t waned.

“The wolves are around here somewhere,” Laudon said, deliberating whether he should come back out after dark and continue looking. “I don’t know where they are. But this isn’t where this is going to end.”

Before Laudon headed back to his trailer, he rechecked a couple of traps that he had set to make sure there was no activity. The traps were empty.

The search would have to pick up again later.

The setback seemed to drive home a larger point: While getting the Lassen Pack, and other wolves, under surveillance is vital to the recovery effort, the success of the wolf is not really about the collars, nor the information the collars provide.

The real issue may be whether people care enough about the fate of the animals to accept their growing presence.

“As a society that wants conservation,” said Tate, the UC Davis scientist, “there are real-world consequences.”

California’s track record with wildlife isn’t good. The sprawl of our cities has crowded out places where animals roam. Our demand for water has strangled rivers and the aquatic life that lives there. Economic progress has heaped pollution into the food web across countless flora and fauna. The climate crisis, meanwhile, is driving landscape-level change that will test the limits of all living things.

If there’s a case for the animals, say wildlife advocates, it rests not only in the balance they bring to the natural world, but also in the wonder they invoke and the sense of wildness they sow into the spirit of California. Living with wolves may not be easy. Living without them may be just as hard.