Gray wolves disappeared from California a century ago — now they’re making a comeback. State wildlife officials say more than 70 gray wolves could be in California – up from 44 last year — and new packs exist. But this progress is fragile. Some livestock owners want the wolves to stay out of the state. Hunters want to shoot them. And both Republican and Democratic leaders have tried to remove wolf protections.
“You love big dogs, you gotta love wolves. You love how coyotes look and how foxes look, you gotta love wolves,” says Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity.
She explains that wolves are ancestors of dogs — they’re bigger and have paw prints that look like dogs wearing snowshoes. “A wolf track is maybe five inches long and maybe up to five inches wide. … That's to help them get through the snow, which we have in California.”
Gray wolves are typically found in Northern California’s skiing regions, such as Modoc and Shasta Counties. One wolf pack, however, has made its way farther south in Tulare County, near Sequoia National Monument, she notes.
Finding the big canines down south isn’t altogether a surprise, however. In 2021, a gray wolf was spotted in Ventura County: “Wolves travel long distances, it's what they do as part of their biology. And this wolf was out looking for a mate … and he actually made it all the way down to Yosemite, and then cut across the Central Valley, across our three busiest roadways in the state, and made his way out to Ventura County before trying to turn back. Unfortunately, he was killed by a car, which helps us understand how important those wildlife overpasses are going to be.”
After their pup years, gray wolves leave their packs and begin to establish their own territory, typically between 1.5-3 years old. Weiss says the pack seen now comes from the Lassen pack, which arrived in the area in 2017.
“They're still around, and they've been pumping out puppies every spring since then. The Whaleback pack was confirmed in late 2020, they've also been having puppies since that time. That has allowed their pups to grow up, become a few years old, and wander off and look for other wolves to mate with, unrelated wolves. … This is [an] all-natural pattern.”
Today, humans continue to be wolves’ main predator, Weiss says. In other states, cougars prove to be an adversary as well. People, however, are allowed to hunt wolves in three states: Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. In the rest of the U.S., wolves have full federal Endangered Species Act protections, and hunting is banned.
Weiss says the future of federal protection for gray wolves is unclear. They were removed from the federal endangered species list during the first Trump Administration: “Even though a federal district court did overturn the delisting back in 2022 and restored protections, just recently, at the end of September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, under the Biden administration, did file an appeal to that decision. So we don't know where things are going to go next.”