California’s gray wolf population rebound accelerates

In the summer of 1924, a government hunter named Frank Koehler set 21 traps near the remote town of Litchfield, in Lassen County about 75 miles north of Lake Tahoe, to catch a coyote that had killed a local farmer’s turkeys.

When he returned a few days later, one of the traps was missing. Koehler tracked large paw prints for 5 miles in the rain, thinking he had a mountain lion. Revolver drawn, he headed into a rocky canyon and heard a growl. There, he saw the last known gray wolf in California, an aging, injured animal cornered between two boulders. He fired two shots, killing it.

A century later, the comeback of the gray wolf is gaining momentum.

“It’s a redemption story. It’s a renewal story. It’s inspiring,” said Amaroq Weiss of the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization. “It has shown that California is wolf country.”

The first wolf returned to the state in 2011, when a young male walked across the border from Oregon. By 2015, the first new wolf pack had re-established, in Siskiyou County. By 2019, there were seven gray wolves in California. Now there are 44 — a sixfold increase over the past five years, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Wolves are now found in nine of California’s 58 counties, in seven packs from the Oregon border to the mountains around Lake Tahoe, and in the Southern Sierra near Bakersfield. State biologists estimate that California north of Interstate 80 could support between 371 and 497 wolves, based on populations around the Rocky Mountains and Great Lakes.

In 2021, one wandered across the state, his radio collar showing a 1,000-mile journey through San Benito, Monterey, San Luis Obispo and other counties before it was killed by a car near Interstate 5 in Kern County. If California follows the patterns of Washington and Oregon, there could be 100 or more wolves in the state in the next few years.

Environmentalists call the recovery a breathtaking success, similar to the comeback of other species once near extinction, like the California condor. They note that wolves once roamed across California and the American West, until ranchers and settlers in the 1800s and early 1900s shot, poisoned and trapped them.

But ranchers and rural political leaders are alarmed. They note that wolves can eat calves, sheep and other livestock, harming their livelihoods.

“One of them killed a calf a quarter-mile from our house,” said Rick Roberti, a fourth-generation cattle rancher in Plumas County. “It’s adding a lot of stress. Wolves chase the cattle. They stress them out. It gets frantic. They will run them for miles. The cattle stampede through fences.”

In other Western states with larger wolf populations, the issue has sparked fierce political battles and lawsuits.

In Wyoming, state laws allow property owners to shoot wolves on sight. They are hunted in Idaho and Montana, with hundreds killed every year. In Oregon and Washington, there are more protections, but wolves can be shot if they are attacking livestock.

California has the most far-reaching laws.

Wolves are protected under the state and federal Endangered Species Act in California. They can only be killed if they are threatening a human. Unlike with mountain lions, black bears or bobcats, property owners cannot get a depredation permit from the state to kill them to protect livestock.

“The wolf is going to spread throughout California,” Roberti said. “There’s nothing to stop it. They are going to move, and I think it’s going to be a crisis. We’re not set up for it.”

“I can understand why people in urban areas think it’s a good thing,” he added. “They think it’s a sign of a healthy habitat. But there’s got to be a balance so it doesn’t get out of control.”

Environmental groups note that far more livestock die from diseases, injuries and other animals, like domestic dogs, than wolves. So far this year statewide, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, 16 calves have been confirmed to be killed by wolves, 2 potentially killed and 1 lamb killed. Last year, 36 livestock animals were killed.

That’s a tiny fraction of the 670,000 beef cattle on 11,000 ranches in the state, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Wolves killing cattle can impact individual livestock producers,” said Pamela Flick of Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental group. “But when you look at it in total, it’s a very, very small fraction of all the cattle out on our landscape in California.”

Ranchers say many wolf kills happen in remote areas and are never reported. They say cattle exposed to wolves don’t reproduce as well, and that wolves are the latest in a series of predators, including mountain lions, bobcats and bears, that California’s environmental laws have helped grow in number against the ranchers’ wishes.

A state management plan published in 2016 doesn’t set a limit for when wolf protections could be relaxed as their numbers increase. It does say that after there are four breeding pairs that produce healthy pups for two years in a row, the rules could change, and after eight breeding pairs, they could be further relaxed.

Steve Arnold, president of the California Cattlemen’s Association, said at a meeting of the state Board of Agriculture on Aug. 6 that as soon as those thresholds are reached, he plans to sue the state to force looser rules.

“We’re going to go after this for all we can,” he said.

Attacks on people by wolves are very rare. In the past 100 years, there have only been two documented cases of a person being killed by wolves in the wild — one a woman jogging in 2010 near Chignik Lake, Alaska, and the other, a male hiker who was killed in 2005 in Saskatchewan, Canada.

In 2021, state lawmakers approved spending $3 million to compensate ranchers for livestock lost to wolves, and to help them pay for strobe lights, fencing, guard dogs and other nonlethal wolf deterrents. That money ran out in March. In June, Gov. Gavin Newsom put $600,000 in the budget to continue the program.

“We’re kind of at that point where we’re seeing the population accelerate,” said Dan Macon, an adviser at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources office in Auburn. “It’s still rare to see one, but they are becoming more common.”