California's Wolves Have Returned After a Century. But at What Cost?

Susan Hart first noticed the wolves one summer about six years back. They’d pop up in the evenings on the ridges of the ranch she runs with her husband, Blair, whose family has raised cattle near Montague, California, since 1852. The Harts are one of the oldest ranching families in Siskiyou County, an enormous, sparsely populated region of rugged mountains and pristine valleys near the Oregon border. The most frequent visitor Susan saw was a wolf with a distinctive light coat and an injured foreleg that spent a lot of time watching the herd. It was clearly too slow to catch a mule deer, the most common prey animal in the nearby mountains, and Susan was worried that it was just a matter of time before it became bold enough to attack one of her animals.

That day came in the fall of 2021, when she and Blair awoke to find a bloodied calf with a huge portion of its hide torn away. The calf somehow survived, but the wolves, known as the Whaleback pack, struck again roughly a year later, taking three calves in one night. At 2022 prices, it was a more than $7,000 loss.

Thus began a seemingly endless series of all-nighters watching pastures, patrolling fence lines, blasting music, and flashing lights—even spreading human urine as a deterrent. Still, the wolves lingered. Out of ideas, Susan called a wolf expert at the University of California, Berkeley named Arthur Middleton to plead for advice.

To her surprise, Middleton, a National Geographic Explorer, and another ecologist from the university named Justin Brashares, an Explorer in Residence, offered to drive five hours north for a visit. Like most ranching areas, Siskiyou County is a very conservative place. “It was all hush-hush because we didn’t want the neighbors to know that we had Berkeley professors up here,” Susan told me. It was the start of not only a lasting friendship but also a groundbreaking research project with results few could have anticipated.

The Whalebacks are the descendants of wolves that began drifting down from Oregon 15 years ago, starting with a single intrepid male known as OR7. His appearance in 2011 signaled the return of an animal that had been missing from the Golden State for close to a hundred years.

Canis lupus, commonly referred to as the gray wolf, can be black, gray, or white, and ranges in size from 60 to 145 pounds. It was once the world’s most widely distributed land mammal, and was found across most of the contiguous United States. In the 19th century, fur trapping devastated the wolf population in the West, as it had done across the country. The arrival of ranching to the Rockies, which brought widespread poisoning of wolves, finished off the few remaining holdouts by the 1920s.

But in the absence of an apex predator, elk populations exploded, damaging the landscape. In an unprecedented effort, officials reintroduced 66 wolves to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in the mid-1990s. There are now some 2,500 of the animals across the northern Rockies, along with about 300 in Oregon and California. Wolves’ impact on the greater Yellowstone ecosystem has gone far beyond restoring balance to the elk population. Competition from wolves, for example, has reduced coyote numbers, which has resulted in more rodents left for raptors to eat and better pronghorn fawn survival rates. Carrion from wolf kills, meanwhile, has become an important source of food for bears. The wolf’s return and rapid spread is widely considered one of the greatest wildlife conservation success stories in American history.

Ranchers in Northern California don’t see it that way, though. The wolves that made their way here encountered a different landscape—more people, fewer game animals, and a lot more cattle. Not long after they arrived, wolves began killing livestock, mostly calves, which are far more vulnerable than adult cattle.

Middleton and Brashares, the two ecologists, spent the night in the Harts’ bunkhouse, where they talked late into the evening. They knew that California lacked the enormous expanses of public land that had made the northern Rockies an ideal choice for wolf reintroduction. That meant private ranchlands would bear the brunt of the wolf’s expansion, and it also meant that anyone who wanted to study the wolves would need access to those same ranches. Gaining the trust of the traditionally insular ranching community would be critical, and that meant that what mattered to ranchers was suddenly very important to biologists too.

In the bunkhouse, they hatched the plan for the California Wolf Project. The idea was to map out where wolves were likely to spread next, and to help communities deal with the issues that would arise.

At the time, Middleton imagined that the Whaleback pack might soon move on from the area around the Hart ranch, since so few deer were there for them to eat. But that wasn’t what happened, and before long, the Harts’ neighbors were losing calves at an alarming rate.

To wrap their head around the problem, the Wolf Project team started setting up game cameras on public land to see how wolves were using the habitat and began collecting wolf scat to see what they were eating. Like most ranchers in the mountain West, Siskiyou County producers tend to summer their cattle at higher elevations, usually on public land leased from the U.S. Forest Service. The grass in the mountains is a cheap way to fatten calves, but roaming cattle are difficult to monitor and much more susceptible to predation.

At a community meeting last January, conservation scientist and National Geographic Explorer Kaggie Orrick, who now serves as the Wolf Project director, shared the findings of a recent two-year-long study with a room full of Siskiyou County ranchers. For a Tuesday evening in tiny Lake Shastina, population 3,000, the turnout was considerable—filling the conference room at the Lake Shastina Golf Resort.

Nobody was surprised when Orrick announced that the Whalebacks were the most prolific livestock hunters in the state. The pack, which had 10 pups the previous summer and numbered perhaps as many as 16 wolves, had been responsible for at least 114 confirmed or probable losses since 2021, though the actual number is no doubt higher, since the remains of many missing animals are never found. But the study results Orrick unveiled next sent shock waves through the room: Scat analysis revealed that the Whalebacks’ summer diet was 92 percent livestock. Even Orrick, who had spent months compiling the data, seemed at a loss for words.

“All I’ll say is this is extremely—,” she began.

“Not OK,” yelled a woman from the audience.

“Not OK,” Orrick agreed.

“It’s learned behavior,” another rancher said. “The young wolf is learning to kill livestock from the older animals.”

Even though such a dynamic has seldom been seen in the 30 years researchers have studied wolves in the northern Rockies, the possibility that it might be happening now in some of California’s packs is forcing wildlife officials to make difficult choices.

Recently, 250 miles to the south, in Sierra Valley, the Beyem Seyo pack had killed dozens of cattle in just a few months. In response, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife decided to kill the pack’s breeding pair and a mature female. It was an extraordinary decision that made national headlines. But Siskiyou County’s ranchers seemed ready for similarly drastic intervention. “Maybe we should wipe out the Whaleback pack,” the frustrated rancher suggested, “and start over again.”

The issue goes far beyond Sierra Valley or Siskiyou County. The Wolf Project collected data from five packs scattered mostly across the North State, as California’s 10 northern counties are known. Every one of the packs had a summer diet consisting predominantly of livestock, and the data showed that predation on livestock went up as availability of native prey went down.

Nobody seems to know for sure why there are fewer deer in the woods here than there were a generation ago, but biologists cite drought and habitat lost to forest fires, which have devastated the North State in recent years. Ranchers add to that list the state’s decision to protect the deer’s natural predators like mountain lions and black bears.

For now, the mystery of the missing deer remains a puzzle. What is certain is that California’s wolf problems are just beginning.

Not all ranchers were immediately eager to work with Middleton. The Truaxes are a seventh-generation ranching family in Siskiyou County, and they’d never let him visit their property. But a graduate student on his team had recently met the youngest daughter in the family, Kylee, who at just 20 years old was gradually buying her grandparents out so that she could run the ranch with her father. This is always a dicey proposition, because it requires the next generation to take on debt, which is generally guaranteed by calf sales. Kylee’s future now hinged in part on finding a solution to the wolf problem. After an attack, also called a depredation, last winter, she persuaded her father to let Middleton and his team visit.

Middleton, 47, has an easy smile and a salt-and-pepper beard. Boarding school took away his native South Carolina accent but not his southern manner; he has a slow, thoughtful way of speaking and seemingly boundless reserves of patience.

As is often the case when he meets a new ranching family, Middleton found himself listening to a considerable amount of venting about the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which many ranchers believe is incompetent, overly secretive, and uncooperative. The department has a wolf collaring program, but currently only six of the state’s 11 packs have a wolf with a working collar. Ranchers can access a website with a map showing location information collected from the GPS-enabled collars. But the data are uploaded only once a day, to preserve the collars’ battery life. And the department shares only general location data, which makes it even more difficult for ranchers to know exactly where a pack might strike next. Sensitive information, like the location of dens with pups, is a closely guarded secret, as are the frequencies of the radio transmitters on the collars, which allow regular tracking.

Even if they find wolves, there is little California ranchers can do about them. In Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, wolves were gradually removed from the endangered species list as they became more numerous, and can now be hunted and trapped in all three states. Wolves that prey on livestock, meanwhile, are routinely shot. But California wolves are another matter. Here the state’s handful of wolves—estimates range from 60 to 90, spread mostly across the North State—enjoy the full protection of the federal Endangered Species Act, as well as state regulations that have historically prevented ranchers from using more than flashing lights or loud noises to drive them off. CDFW has encouraged ranchers to adopt management strategies that have had some success in limiting conflict elsewhere: installing specialized fencing that moves in the breeze (known as fladry) and automated noisemakers; limiting calving to one season of the year; promptly removing carcasses that might draw predators; and consolidating operations as much as possible so that cattle can be more carefully monitored. A few cattle ranchers have begun experimenting with livestock guardian dogs like Maremmas and mastiffs, which have long been used in the area to protect sheep from coyotes and mountain lions.

Eventually, Kylee and her father showed Middleton where the calf had been killed, in a pasture remarkably close to a house on the property. The night after Middleton’s visit, the wolves came back and took a second calf. In the nights that followed, Kylee, her father, and her 80-year-old grandfather took turns patrolling the ranch until sunrise, hoping their presence would be enough to scare the pack off. But they couldn’t stop the wolves from taking a third calf, which Kylee discovered at 3:30 in the morning. “I look, and there’s a calf on the ground and it’s all eaten up,” she said. “And I’m nervous to get out because I don’t know if these wolves are 10 feet from me or a hundred feet from me. You just don’t know where the wolves are.”

In relative terms, North State ranchers have not lost a lot of livestock—Siskiyou County alone produces some 25,000 calves a year—but the depredations tend to be clustered, disproportionately affecting individual ranchers. Over the summer and fall of 2025, a single rancher in Sierra Valley lost nearly $90,000 worth of calves. And the habitat is not yet saturated with wolves, suggesting the problem could get much worse. According to the Wolf Project’s study of available habitat, in the coming years wolves are likely to spread to the North State counties west of Interstate 5, as well as hundreds of miles south along the Sierra Nevada range.

For years, CDFW has compensated ranchers for livestock lost to wolves, but there is no way to account for the stress and uncertainty their presence has brought to ranching in the North State.

As one of Kylee’s neighbors told me, “We are living in a never-ending nightmare.”

The officials on the front lines of the governmental struggle to track and manage the wolves are contending with their own problems. Last winter, CDFW invited me to come along on their biannual collaring operation. Early one frigid morning I met up with Axel Hunnicutt, the state’s chief wolf biologist, and his crew outside the hamlet of Fall River Mills, in Shasta County. Wolves from the Harvey pack had been spotted a few miles away, and a helicopter team was working to flush them into the open and dart one or more with a tranquilizer.

Hunnicutt, who cut his teeth studying hyenas and lions in Africa, was excited about the possibilities for how wolves might change the Golden State. Other parts of the country have seen the apex predators provide some surprising ecological benefits, from a greater diversity of plant species to a higher germination rate for blueberry seeds. “Exactly what those effects will look like in California is something we’re still learning, and we shouldn’t assume they will mirror places like Yellowstone,” he said. “But the return of wolves adds another piece back into a complex ecological system.” For now, though, he was worried that his base camp was too visible from the road. He knew that curious passersby would eventually stop and ask questions he preferred not to answer, such as where captured wolves would be released—inevitably close to somebody’s ranch or grazing lease.

Presently we heard the helicopter coming over the ridge behind us. We could see a wolf’s tail hanging out an open door as the pilot made a tight circle down into the clearing. The pilot, a private contractor with decades of wolf experience, had insisted that he and his crew not be photographed. He hoisted the enormous semiconscious wolf over his shoulder, looking like nothing so much as a 19th-century trapper returning to his forest cabin, if not for the bright red jumpsuit. The wolf was a young female with a thick black winter coat. Moving efficiently, Hunnicutt’s team laid her out on a padded tarp on the tailgate of a pickup and began taking her vital signs and preparing her collar.

Almost everyone in the camp had gone to Sierra Valley the previous summer, when the department brought in dozens of personnel to drive the Beyem Seyo wolves out of the area. When that failed, CDFW had tried to kill the wolves with its own staff. But that effort went tragically wrong: They accidentally shot a juvenile male, one of the animals they had planned to capture and relocate. It was the first legally killed wolf in the state of California in almost a century, and CDFW had gotten the wrong one. Eventually, the department called in the helicopter crew to dart the breeding pair so they could be euthanized.

I joined Hunnicutt’s crew on the second day of the collaring operation, and he let me know they’d captured three wolves on the first day. Though we spent many hours together in the days that followed, he made no mention of a troubling fact I learned later: One of those wolves had died shortly after being captured. Anytime an animal is tranquilized, there is a chance it won’t recover, sometimes due to a preexisting condition that is not immediately evident. It is also possible to run a perfectly healthy wolf to death with a helicopter, if a chase goes on for too long. (The department later issued a press release, reporting that the cause of the animal’s death had yet to be determined.)

Many of the complaints about CDFW are attributable to the department’s lack of resources. Even as wolves have now spread all the way into Southern California—one was spotted in Los Angeles County last spring—Hunnicutt has just three full-time staff to monitor them all. He told me that he had rolls of fladry sitting unused in his office. Even if he had the money to fund an education campaign about its use, he wouldn’t have the personnel to put it up, at least not at anywhere near the scale needed. Meanwhile, funding for the livestock compensation program has often been on the chopping block.

There is a cold logic to the state’s frugality: The North State is home to less than 2 percent of California’s residents. Wolf attacks on people are extremely rare. And while agriculture has a powerful voice in Sacramento, wolves are not a threat to the state’s livestock industry in general, which is concentrated in the Central Valley, where, because the ecosystem has been so altered, wolves are unlikely to ever become established. A majority of state legislators are from population centers like Los Angeles, and most have never been anywhere near the remote stretches of the North State. “I feel like 90 percent of my job is teaching people how we live,” Sierra Valley representative Heather Hadwick has said.

Yet many feel that the department could do more with what it has. Hunnicutt told me he tries to call ranchers if he notices that wolves are clustering on their property. With existing technology, however, he could have them automatically notified by text when a collared wolf is detected on their ranch or grazing lease. Ranchers could then haze the wolves off before they got close to cattle. It wouldn’t be real-time data, because of battery limitations. But even switching from one morning upload to, say, three uploads of data a night—when wolves are most active—would help tremendously.

So would giving ranchers the ability to haze wolves with something more than bright lights and loud noises. Last summer, CDFW entered into agreements with sheriff’s departments in several counties that will allow deputies to use rubber bullets. The state has tentatively suggested allowing ranchers to use paintballs and lengthier pursuit of wolves—on an ATV, for example—provided they first take a training course. CDFW has also signaled a willingness to begin sharing more timely and more precise location information with ranchers, though the details of such a plan are yet to be worked out.

Fifteen years into California’s wolf era, ranchers could be forgiven for asking, What took so long? The problem is one of trust, and it originated with the Shasta pack, the Siskiyou County wolves that produced the state’s first modern-day litter of pups, in 2015. Much to the dismay of many locals, the pack was thriving. Then one day, they were simply gone. Nobody knows for certain what happened to the wolves, but some biologists suspected they were poisoned. According to Pamela Flick at the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, caution is warranted: “Circumstances and population numbers are very different between the northern Rockies and California, just as wolf management should be—at least while wolves remain critically endangered here in the Golden State.”

Even if the state finally loosens its rules on hazing, one needn’t look further than a single mountainside in Siskiyou County to see that ranching in the North State will likely look different moving forward. No producer in California has lost more calves to wolves than the Martin ranch, which is one of the oldest in the county. Of the $3.7 million paid in compensation statewide through the spring of 2026, $683,000 went to this one ranch.

Yet the Martins’ neighbors, the Chase ranch, haven’t lost a single calf. The two operations share a fence line, and their summer range is on the same mountain. The difference is that the Chases have turned their operation upside down since wolves first appeared, as owners Dan and Becky Chase explained to me on a visit last January. These days they don’t send calves up into the summer range, where the timber is heavy and their safety is difficult to monitor. They now calve earlier in the year and then wean and sell their calves before sending the adult cows—which have proved much less susceptible to predation—up onto the mountain. It means they must pay for more feed, to replace the grass their calves would have been eating in the summer range. And they have to sell them at a younger age and a lower weight, which makes them less valuable. But the change, along with others the couple have made, has meant far less conflict with wolves. (Scott Gliatto, who runs the Martin ranch with his wife, Janna Martin Gliatto, told me they now employ a man to patrol at night, and that depredations have since declined.)

One afternoon, Dan and Becky Chase drove me around their ranch, a sprawling high-country spread with views of Mount Shasta to the south. It is an exceptional operation: organic feed, carefully monitored soil, meticulously vaccinated calves. It looks like a paradise for cattle and cattlemen alike, which makes it hard to remember that ranching here is hanging on by a thread. One bad year could be a disaster, Dan told me. “We couldn’t buy a four-wheeler without a finance package.”

Both the Chases and the Harts, who have also done almost everything state wildlife officials and environmental nonprofits have suggested, are an example of how to ranch in a future where wolves will be a fixture. But neither family is comfortable with being called a model. Blair Hart, who is in his seventies, gets up at three every morning to patrol his ranch for signs of wolves, and often helps his neighbors do the same. The stress has taken its toll. “It’s not sustainable,” Susan Hart said.

Both families look forward to the day when the state feels like a partner and not an adversary. The Wolf Project’s Brashares pointed out that pilot programs in Africa alert villagers in real time when problem lions are nearby. “If impoverished countries in Africa can pull this off, then the fourth largest economy in the world has no excuse,” he said. As for trusting ranchers with sensitive location information, Dan Chase said that he had passed up dozens of opportunities to shoot a wolf in the past few years. “If we haven’t proven trust at this point,” he said, “what are you waiting for?”

The success of the Chase ranch has also resulted in something of a conundrum. In the beginning, the Chases were reimbursed for the cost of changing their operation to avoid conflict with wolves. But that funding didn’t last, and the state began paying instead for direct losses only. It is too simple to say that this decision punished good management practices and rewarded poor ones, because not everyone can stop sending calves to their summer range, as the Chases have, and not every lost calf is a result of bad management. But with beef prices near an all-time high, it is not hard to find ranchers muttering about neighbors getting paid top dollar for calves—even scrawny animals that might have been hard to sell at all—left in harm’s way and killed by a wolf.

I asked Dan and Becky to consider a thought experiment: If everyone changed operations the way they did when the first wolf arrived, what would things look like today? Becky wasn’t sure she knew the answer or even if she liked the question. The management habits of neighbors is not a polite topic of conversation in ranching country, where you rely on them at branding time and in a thousand other ways. But Dan said he thought the wolves would have moved on by now. “All predators will move with the food,” he said. “If there’s no food source, they’re moving to someplace where they can feed themselves. I mean, that’s kind of common sense.”

Moved on to where, though? The difficult truth may be that until the deer come back, these counties will never be a good place for a wolf to make an honest living. “I wish I could just pick up the wolves here and bring them to the other side of I-5,” Hunnicutt said. When wolves finally do spread west of the interstate, they will find a much wilder landscape stretching across the Mendocino and Klamath National Forests and all the way to the coast—woods filled with deer and elk, and, crucially, fewer livestock. Hunnicutt said he could imagine a day when wolves are so well established there that packs in other parts of the state can be managed more aggressively without fear of damaging the wolf’s long-term viability in California.

From Susan Hart’s perspective, that is too long to wait. “My biggest fear is that the success of the species … is going to overrun the ability of our nonlethal techniques to be effective,” she said. Even the state’s removal of the Beyem Seyo wolves in Sierra Valley might be only a temporary solution, Susan said, since whatever pack replaces them will likely already be accustomed to eating cattle. Ranchers will continue to learn from the successes and failures of their neighbors, but it’s the big picture that worries Susan the most. “We don’t have a plan,” she said. “That’s the toughest thing.”