Gray wolves now call Tulare County home as species pushes south in California – Visalia Times-Delta

Gray wolves are alive and well in Tulare County.
The population of gray wolves has increased in the county, state, and country in recent years because of the legal protections of the Endangered Species Act, which reversed a decline that began centuries ago.
Until recently, gray wolves weren’t seen in California for about 100 years.
“Across this country, our entire history ­­­– post-European contact – has been a history of eradicating wolves, to the point where we no longer had any wolves in the lower 48 United States,” said Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization that works to protect endangered species.
“By the time the Endangered Species Act was finally passed in 1973, except for a small population of maybe 600 wolves in far northeastern Minnesota, and a tiny population of wolves on (Michigan’s) Isle Royale, we had wiped out wolves across the country,” she said. “Keep in mind that at one time, it is estimated that there were nearly 2 million wolves across all of North America.”
The gray wolf was added to the endangered species list in 1974.
That meant that the small population of wolves in Minnesota could now safely expand in number and territory, Weiss said.
“Wolves from Minnesota grew in number and also moved into neighboring Michigan and Wisconsin,” she said. “Today, there are about 4,000 to 4,500 wolves across that three-state region.”
However, in the northern Rockies, having protections wasn’t enough to allow wolves to repopulate.
“Wolves would try to come across the border from Canada into Montana,” Weiss said. “They kept getting shot, so eventually the federal government – the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – decided to do a reintroduction of wolves.”
Captured wolves in Canada would be transported and released into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Those wolves would then established packs.
What people call a wolf pack is really a family. Some of the younger wolves stay with their family for the rest of their lives, but many, if not most, leave their packs to look for mates.
By 1999, wolves in Idaho were starting to make their way west into Washington and Oregon.
“[Oregon’s] first known wolf come in from Idaho in 1999, but it had its first pack finally established in 2008,” Weiss said. “Their offspring have continued to leave their pack and go out and look for mates and territory of their own. That is how we have started to get wolves coming into California.”
The first gray wolf came into California from Oregon in 2011, according to Weiss.
“He had come from over in northeastern Oregon, traveled diagonally all the way across the state of Oregon, and then dropped down into Siskiyou County in California,” she said. 
“He was here for about 15 months. He went back to Oregon, made a few brief trips back into California over the next six months, and then he settled down in southwest Oregon with a mate he finally found there in spring of 2014,” Weiss said. “They had puppies and about two years later, one of their puppies came as a young adult into California.”
In the meantime, other wolves from northeastern Oregon had also made the long trip to California.
“Although we had our first wolf show up here in 2011, it wasn’t until 2015 that we had our first pack established,” Weiss said. “That was the Shasta Pack.”
“A few months later, after they were implicated in some livestock conflicts, they totally disappeared,” she said. “They were never seen again, except for one of their offspring who was discovered about a year later in the same area. And then about six months after that, he was seen in Nevada.
“We know who he is because people went out and collected scat, or wolf poop,” she continued. “They collected the scat, they DNA tested it, and determined that he was from that family.” 
After the Shasta Pack disappeared, the next pack in California, the Lassen Pack, was confirmed in 2017.
The founding male wolf for that pack was one of the pups that had been born to the first wolf that had come into California, Weiss said.
“The Lassen male, was actually born in Oregon, but when he was about 2 years old, he left his family and came looking for a mate in California,” she said. “He met up with a female wolf here who had wandered all the way over from the Northern Rockies because her genetics show that she is related to that population.” 
The Lassen Pack continued to have pups each year since then, according to Weiss.
In late 2020, the Whaleback Pack was discovered, she said. They had puppies in 2021, and they have had puppies every spring since then.
The Beckworth Pack was discovered in spring 2021.
“This is the first time we begin to see wolves that were born in California start to form a pack because the Beckworth Pack included one or two wolves that had been born into the Lassen Pack’s litters,” Weiss said. “Since that time, we have had more packs form – the Harvey Pack, the Beyem Seyo Pack, the Antelope Pack, the Diamond Pack, of course, the Yowlumni Pack down in Tulare County, which was confirmed in summer of 2023.”
The Yowlumni Pack is California’s southernmost pack, according to Weiss.
“The interesting thing about that pack is the female wolf, the adult mother wolf in that pack, is a direct descendant of that very first wolf that came to California back in 2011,” she added.
Weiss said that wolves were first discovered in Tulare County by researchers in Sequoia National Forest. 
Since Dec. 5, 2023, the Yowlumni Pack has been continuously monitored by the CDFW by a tracking collar on an adult female. The CDFW reported that the pack includes at least 15 wolves, including six 1-2 years old, and seven pups.
The CDFW also reported that the Yowlumni Pack probably killed a calf on the Tule River Tribe Reservation in September.
In 2021, the California State Legislature appropriated $3 million to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to create a Wolf-Livestock Compensation Pilot Program to protect livestock producers from the financial impact of wolves. The pilot program was launched in June 2023 and continued until funds were exhausted in March 2024.
A total of 109 grants were awarded to producers with livestock in four counties with known wolf activity: Tulare, Siskiyou, Lassen, and Plumas.
When there are reports of a wolf sighting, CDFW works to confirm them.
“They ask people to send them photographs because a lot of times people mistake wolves for coyotes, or coyotes for wolves,” Weiss said. “If they get enough credible reported sightings that really sound like this is a wolf, the agency will go to that locale and they will set out trail cameras all over the place until they can actually get video footage of an animal in the area so they can determine themselves whether they think it is a wolf.
CDFW will then set leg-hold traps, to capture those animals. Wildlife experts check the traps regularly, Weiss said.
“They do a full examination of the animal, take blood samples, take a tissue sample – a tiny little pinch from their ear – and they put a radio collar on them,” she said.
“Much more modernly, there are GPS collars that instead send up signals to a satellite every day,” Weiss continued. “You can set the collars so that they give off signals maybe once every six hours. You’ll get four readings a day and they go up to the satellite, and 24 hours later, the satellite downloads that information to the biologist’s computer.”
Many collars these days have both kinds of technology on them, according to Weiss.
Apparently, the detailed information about local wolf packs is provided by a combination of modern technology and poop.
People are “absolutely not” at risk from wolves, according to Weiss.
“In the last 120 years, in all of North America – including Alaska, which has 6,000 to 11,000 wolves, and including Canada, which has 40,000 to 60,000 wolves – there have only been two instances of people being attacked and killed by wolves, one in Alaska, one in Canada,” she said. “The one in Canada, at the inquest, the experts disagreed on whether it was a wolf that killed the person, or whether it was a bear that killed the person, and then wolves came and fed on him.
“Wolf attacks on people are exceedingly rare,” Weiss said. “You are so much more likely to be hit by a car when you back out of your driveway. You are more likely to be hit by lightning. You are more likely to put your money in a candy machine and have the candy machine not work, and you yank on the handle and the candy machine falls over on you. 
“Yes, they are big, large carnivores, and yes, they have big teeth, but they are not looking at humans as prey,” she said. “They evolved to look at four-legged, wild ungulates as prey: moose, deer, bison, elk, caribou, musk oxen. If you are anywhere where there is a wolf in the wild, if they see, hear, or smell you before you see them, most likely you won’t see them. Most likely they’ll be gone.”

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