In 2015, the state briefly became home to its first modern wolf pack when a pair of wolves from Oregon arrived in the Shasta County area. While scientists believe other uncollared wolves have been roaming wide swaths of the state largely undetected, wolves did not stay put in California until recently.
In November, he was hit by a car 50 miles north of Los Angeles after traveling over 1,000 miles through the state. The wolf, named OR-93, wandered from the Mount Hood area of Oregon to San Luis Obispo County, Calif. Last year, a 2-year-old lone wolf broke records when he traveled through the Central Coast of California, the first known to do so in over a century. One of his daughters, OR-54, traveled over 8,700 miles, including a trip to the Lake Tahoe Basin. His radio collar recorded around 4,000 miles in his quest for a partner, whom he eventually found in Oregon, his home state. A wolf named OR-7 roamed California for 15 months starting in December 2011. When wolves go in search of mates and their own territory, they disperse from their packs on remarkable journeys. California’s wolves were no exception.īut experts agree it was only a matter of time before wolves returned. When settlers arrived, they quickly decimated the wolves’ native prey of bison, elk and deer, and then replaced them with livestock. That number may fluctuate once spring begins and new pups emerge from their dens, but California can probably expect to have wolves calling the state home for years to come.Ĭenturies ago, North America had anywhere from 250,000 to two million gray wolves. Now it seems that in the state’s far-north counties, families of wolves are there to stay, with a relatively stable population of about 20 wolves. Since 2011, a series of roving canids have come and gone. The last of the state’s original wild wolves was killed by a hunter in Lassen County in Northern California in 1924. Wolves don’t need to be dropped off in California because they are returning on their own. “And for the record: No, we’re not importing wolves. “Wolves make people crazy,” he said of these persistent rumors. This wasn’t the first post of its kind, and it wouldn’t be the last. He was asking about a post with wildly specific details spreading across Facebook that urged people to find a red truck that was transporting breeding wolves along Route 97 into Siskiyou County, Calif. Kent Laudon, a wolf biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, woke up one morning last year to a flurry of text messages from a rancher in the state’s northernmost county.