Move over, Song Dog, there’s a new Sheriff in town, named Canis lupus.
The gray wolf has returned to California after a century of rancher’s wrath virtually erased the species from its native range.
Here’s a sound that hasn’t been heard in California for a long, long time. What you’re hearing is more than yowling. It’s the call of the Yowlumni Pack, which could not be more perfectly named. This is a group of gray wolves discovered in Tulare County during the summer of 2023. The pack was identified in the Sequoia National Forest on the ancestral lands of Tule River Tribe.
Gray wolves, like coyotes, are indigenous to our state, according to California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which states “Wolves are habitat ‘generalists,’ meaning that they can adapt to living in many kinds of habitat. They basically need two things to thrive: abundant prey and human tolerance.”
Abundant prey? No problem. Human tolerance? Not so much.
Anyone who ventures into Nextdoor or many other local bulletin boards and Facebook pages has been exposed to endless bickering about coyotes and their relative merit as nuisance animals. Talk about generalists! They can get by on roadkill, stale Tootsie Rolls and French Fries snarfed up from restaurant parking lots, along with occasional unlucky house pet. Thanks to this ability to improvise, the long-legged singing canine has now extended its range from the West coast to New England. Every one of the lower 48 now reports coyote sightings.
All sorts of hanky-panky goes on that makes coyotes disappear. Every day. There are rules, often broken. But as with rats and pigeons, no one except animal advocates seems to take much notice.
But buckle up, bucko. Dealing with gray wolves, also called Timber wolves and Tundra wolves, will be a whole new ballgame. Let’s start with the fact that wolves, unlike coyotes, are protected by law. As in, really protected. Since 2014, gray wolves have been listed as endangered under the California Endangered Species act and federal Endangered Species Act. The “take” of a gray wolf is prohibited anywhere in our state—“take” being defined as to hunt, pursue, harass, catch, capture or kill.
There is no hunting season for wolves in California. If you feel like arguing the point, email State Gray Wolf Coordinator Axel Hunnicutt. Or, better yet, if you’ve got an itchy trigger-finger, move to Idaho, where $1,000,000 has been set aside by that state to pay out in bounties on wolves. In Idaho, the bureau is still called Fish & Game (as opposed to “Wildlife”), and the expressed goal is to reduce the wolf population to 500 or fewer.
Conservationists caution that this size population cannot guarantee sufficient genetic diversity to keep the species strong, but perhaps that’s the implicit point. Idaho law allows hunters and trappers to kill an unlimited number of wolves year-round on private land, and allows the use of hunting dogs and ATVs to do it.
Montana and Wyoming also offer plenty of opportunities to shoot-‘em-up. Montana’s recently extended wolf-trapping season now offers a bounty program. And in Brokeback Mountain country, gray wolves can be killed without a license “…in nearly any manner and at any time,” according to The Humane Society of the United States.
The motivation of these states of course boil down to two things: T-bones and lamb chops. Conservationists maintain that the impact of wolves on livestock is minimal, but the red meat lobby ain’t havin’ none of it.
Didn’t we learn anything from Yellowstone?
What makes this debate especially poignant is that wolf hunting in the northern Rockies threatens to undo the ecosystemic miracle of sorts—it’s called a trophic cascade– that has unfolded in Yellowstone National Park over the past three decades. Wolves are a keystone species, meaning that all other species rest upon their role in the food chain. When hunting and trapping erased wolves from Yellowstone decades ago, wily coyote got a promotion from second banana to top pup in terms of predation.
Coyotes are smaller and lighter than wolves. Their graceful, agile bodies require less protein than those of wolves, and by virtue of their smaller size, they cannot easily take down elk, a diet staple of the gray wolf. To isolate one factor in the drama, the exploding elk population wreaked havoc on the local soil and vegetation. Many plant and insect species vanished as a result of degraded topsoil, and, ironically, elk and deer often went hungry in the absence of a true apex, Alpha predator.
When 41 wild wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone in 1995, things changed fast. Coyote was sent whimpering back to second place, and the wolves took their rightful share of elk. The landscape began to morph. Tree, shrub and grass species which had been overgrazed down to nothing returned, and flowering plants, birds, insects and aquatic life followed. Even the direction of streams and rivers shifted as balance was restored to the land. This documented case resonates with centuries of First Nations wolf-lore, including Inuit stories that credit Amarok, a giant wolf spirit, with keeping the caribou herds culled.
Wolves rule. They occasionally take on bears, and often win. They can beat the fancy-pants off a mountain lion, true in both cases because of their pack psychology and masterful, 5-part hunting strategy: wander, formation, stalk, attack, chow down. Can wolves harm humans? Damn skippy. But as with every wild thing, simply avoid them and you’re unlikely to end up on the lunch menu.
Wolves, unlike coyotes, truly have no interest in humans, probably because they are not as adaptable as opportunistic scavengers.
The newest pack of gray wolves to enter California is in Tulare, some 200 miles from Pasadena. How close to the Rose Bowl will the wolves venture? Difficult to predict, and for everyone’s sake we hope that they stay far, far away. But here’s the thing: decisions made by human beings will continue to affect wolves.
It’s been said that nothing unites people like a common enemy. Perhaps. But on a more cheerful note, the arrival of a new gray wolf pack in California —incidentally, they moseyed down here all on their own, presumably from Oregon – may give us an opportunity to cooperate and work collectively to appreciate wolves from a safe distance, and to protect their place in a the world we share.
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