BY Tim E. Hovey
Recently I was talking to a friend who had just purchased property in Mariposa County in central California. During the conversation he simply said he hoped the wolves didn’t find his property. At first I thought he was joking, but then I started looking into the recent history of wolves in California.
Gray wolves are native to California, but from the mid-19th century onwards they were extinct.th In the 19th century, European colonists began hunting wolves to protect livestock. By the 1920s, wolves had been eradicated or completely driven out of the state. In 2011, that all changed.
In 2011, a male wolf, part of a litter from Oregon in 2009 and tagged OR-7, entered California, becoming the first wolf to enter the state since 1924. OR-7 traveled thousands of miles through the Golden State before eventually settling back in Oregon with a mate. Several wolves from this pairing have migrated and settled in California.
You may be aware of the occasional wolf infestation here in the state, but when I recently began researching the wolf presence in California, I was quite shocked to discover how many wolves live here.
As of February 2024, there are a total of six gray wolf packs in California. Wolf packs are defined as two or more wolves traveling together and using the same area within a given period of time. If wolf monitoring finds that wolves are breeding and using the same general location within a six-month period, they are defined as a pack.
There are currently 45 adult wolves, yearlings, and juveniles in Plumas, Lassen, Tulare, and Siskiyou Counties. Additional wolf activity (wolves not yet defined as a pack) occurs in Sierra and Siskiyou Counties.
Shortly after OR-7 arrived in California, the gray wolf was successfully recognized as a fully protected species under the state Endangered Species Act in 2014. Additional protection is provided by the federal Endangered Species Act, meaning that killing a wolf is likely to result in a prison sentence.
In just over ten years, California’s wolf population went from zero to 45 in six counties across the state. As these numbers continue to rise unabated, we will see more human-wolf interactions. One only has to look at Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana to see where this is going. All four states are well above the federal wolf reintroduction threshold, and two of the states (Idaho and Montana) are actively managing their packs with no real control in sight.
Wolves do what they do. We can only speculate what will happen when the wolf population in California exceeds the state’s carrying capacity, and without proper management, it will. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
