How Kaggie Orrick maps the complex relationship between wolves and people

“Is that one there?” Kaggie Orrick, a National Geographic Explorer and conservation scientist, asks from the passenger’s seat of the truck. She and her colleague and collaborator Malia Byrtus — a seasoned wildlife camera trapper and conservationist — are shepherding me around their research grounds, gray wolf territory. A doglike shape emerges through the tree line. A silhouette moves toward us on the trail, at least, it seems to. Its ambiguously neutral color is entirely consistent with a gray wolf. We stare, frozen, a few seconds longer. The mass is motionless. Nobody moves. Then, someone cackles. It’s a rock. It couldn’t have been more obvious once the thing was viewed from its side that this was an unmistakable, inanimate slab. But for one, suspended second, it was a gray wolf.

Orrick leads research for the California Wolf Project, based at the University of California, Berkeley in partnership with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Her work, supported by the National Geographic Society, centers on trying to understand how gray wolves and people might share Northern California land. In practice, this means long days in the alpine wilderness at the base of California’s Mount Shasta, checking camera traps, analyzing tracks pressed into soft ground and sitting across tables from the cattle ranchers whose relationship with wolves has grown complicated. For nearly a century, not a single wolf was documented in California. In the last 15 years, they’ve made an epic return.

The cycle repeats for hours. Logs mock us. Tree branches, shadows, our fatigued eyes play tricks on us. Chipmunks rustling add to the ruse. We sigh again in slight disappointment, and move on. On a full day scouting the forests and ranchlands of California’s Siskiyou County, would we finally see a gray wolf? If we don’t see them, we might have to settle for signs of them. But Byrtus and Orrick have seen them before, and have been trailing them regularly. They know the wolves: their predatory and scavenging behavior, their navigation patterns, their contribution to the land and the complex challenges humans face as a result of their return.

On a private ranch, the local communities’ struggle becomes immediately plain: There, across a wide, open field, a family of calves graze in the afternoon sun, unbothered and unaware they were being watched. And where we stand, wolf scat — practically camouflaged as dense clusters of cattle hair — litters the path. Gray wolves are here, and they’re preying on ranchers’ livestock.

Cattle raisers in the area haven’t had to worry about wolves in their lifetime. By the 1920s, gray wolves were likely extirpated from California via bounty hunting, livestock predation concerns and habitat loss. Similar pressures wiped them out across much of the western United States. 

Then, in 2011, an adolescent male wolf wandered south from Oregon across the state border on his own, traveling more than 1,000 miles. Designated OR-7, he was the first wild wolf confirmed in the state since 1924. He eventually found a mate. Wolves, Orrick says, demonstrate this pattern of desiring to go their own way. “Not to anthropomorphize them too much, but it is quite funny. During their ‘teenage years’, they stray from the pack and settle into a new area.” They repopulated the region, with successful pup litters born year after year. Today, California has roughly 12 known packs, around 70 individuals at minimum, concentrated across the northern third of the state. The local pack, the Whaleback Pack, is the main pack in Siskiyou County, and the primary focus of Orrick’s research. 

Since she joined the California Wolf Project in 2024, the wolves have continued to thrive. “We’ve found only a few elk skeletons. It’s a sign the packs are capable of hunting wild prey,” says Orrick. The wolves are hunting wild game. But they prefer an easy target.

Calves are abundant, and vulnerable in this area. They’ve become one of the Whaleback Pack’s primary sources of food. Meanwhile, ranchers’ frustrations, and economic losses, are mounting. 

It’s a complex relationship between human and animal, but Orrick refuses to treat this as a problem with a winning side. Her work sits deliberately in the middle, trying to help a returning keystone species and humans share the land they both depend on. 

The key to durable conservation

Orrick grew up in San Francisco. She wanted to be a marine biologist. She ended up in sub-Saharan Africa, “I didn’t know what I was going to do after I graduated college, so I went and was an intern on this game reserve for six months and it was the most incredible experience I’d yet had. And, at the end, I was hired to help them with their small species research.”

She started on lizards, butterflies and rodents. “Everyone else was chasing big game research,” she recalls. She eventually took a permanent position at the game reserve, then spent years absorbing ecology and social sciences. She earned her master’s degree from studying elephants on a private reserve in South Africa, and a doctorate from the Yale School of the Environment, this time based in Botswana, where she spent years investigating cattle ranching and large carnivores. Lions, in particular. The work was rewarding, if occasionally harrowing, Orrick recalls. She’s been charged by elephants. Once, with a herd of buffalo approaching faster than she could escape, she had no choice but to hunker down in her tent and wait it out. There were also a memorable number of vehicle issues in the field. “And at least now, I’m not constantly changing tires,” she laughs. 

It was in Africa she learned lessons about the human-wildlife interactions that are foundational to her work with wolves.

“It became clear that durable conservation has to also work for the people living alongside these animals,” Orrick stresses, “or it doesn’t work at all.” 

In unforgiving heat, Orrick and Byrtus scan the open grassland through binoculars. Our eyes are practically permanently strained, conjuring shapes from shadows. A stump looks like it’s breathing, but it’s not. The meadow is still. The truck stops. Orrick spots tracks pressed into the soft ground and a mangled chew toy that was once a plastic milk bottle. “I’ve found shoes, garbage, scraps … Wolves play with things the way dogs do,” Orrick explains, adding quickly that they are, without a doubt, not dogs. 

“Wolves are keystone species,” Orrick highlights. Her work is part of the American Keystones Initiative — a yearlong conservation effort by the Society to protect America’s iconic species and landscape. “They have such a large impact on their ecosystem; they regulate prey populations, they influence other species.” In other areas in the West, this endangered animal helps keep prey herds healthy, which has ripple effects across the food web. 

Back in the truck, miles roll by, and Orrick breaks down how she’s tracking packs, including their recent litter of pups. Using GPS collar data from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, her team maps where wolves are actually moving. The data shows favored terrains and paths they avoid. Despite a vast landscape to roam, they are practical: They avoid arduous routes and have clustered in a relatively small area of the landscape, congregating along the periphery of the cattle ranches. This tracking data is corroborated with ranchers’ testimonies: When did they see depredations, what deterrents were used, or not, and which non-lethal methods actually work? Electric fencing, flagging, sound devices, even rival pack scat have all been tested in other areas of the west as ways of harmlessly shooing the wolves away. Some help, others don’t. Completing the survey will take Orrick another two years.

Gray wolves are protected under California and federal endangered species law. It is illegal to kill one, even if it has just killed livestock, except in circumstances involving a direct threat to human safety. Ranchers who suffer losses can file depredation claims and are eligible for state compensation, but this still doesn’t get to the root of the problem, and local communities can be skeptical about collaborating with conservationists.

“I’m not going to say it’s been incredibly easy,” Orrick says. However, “we’ve been relatively well received from the beginning.” Her work hinges on building trust with local communities, which she’s navigated with patience and developed over time. “We just keep showing up.” Winding through the wriggly foothills, squinting for signs of the pack reminds Orrick and Byrtus of their highly skilled collaborators. One partner in particular has such a well-trained eye for tracks, he can spot them from his truck. He’s recognized the subtle spoor of wolves just by their claw marks, baked into dirt grooves as small as jelly beans. “He knows the den sites. When they’ve moved,” Orrick touts. He’s also experienced in cattle ranching. “People trust him a lot. He cares for both the ranchers and the wolves and truly wants what’s best for both.” Successfully walking the line between these groups is instrumental to the success of their work. 

We arrive at a pond. A ranching couple is passing through. They know Orrick well. They share that another family’s two cattle have been harassed by wolves in the last couple of days. Their own herd hasn’t, thankfully, recently been troubled. But they did spot a couple curious wolves sniffing, and perhaps licking, their salt blocks. Orrick empathizes. Wolves are incredible creatures, they are also a menace to these people. Orrick and the couple trade field reports. They bond over their mutual admiration for and frustration with the animal’s boldness and opportunism. 

Byrtus had strapped cameras to the trees dotting the pond a few days prior. She and Orrick are eager to review the footage. Orrick pops the memory card from the camera into her laptop. Three shadows play hide and seek in the very place we’re sitting, between a pine grove and still water. “There!” One appears in the left corner of the frame, looking directly into the lens. Two others rustle in the distance behind it, running across the screen, one with a slight limp. And in a flash, they’re gone. They had, predictably, marched through here in the night, and they’ll no doubt return. Their patterns are becoming more predictable as Orrick continues to study them. She stays fascinated. “Wolves’ removal and subsequent recovery in the United States has been one of the most remarkable we’ve seen in conservation practice.” 

Since they naturally recolonized in the western U.S. from their origins at Yellowstone National Park, they’ve demonstrated an ability to survive and thrive in a number of different environments, including, at times, human-dominated ones. 

Orrick’s research will ultimately coalesce into a map that shows the complex mosaic of land the wolves inhabit — a mix of private property, public forests and timberlands. Her work facilitates a collaborative path forward, by being on the ground often. Success in her eyes will be measured by how well California can create conditions for people and wolves to cohabitate in shared landscapes. “If we’re going to think about wolf recovery in California,” she says, “we need to think of voluntary incentives and benefits that will help everybody in all of these different land types to support that.”

ABOUT THE WRITER For the National Geographic Society: Natalie Hutchison is a Manager of Digital Content for the Society. She believes authentic storytelling wields power to connect people over the shared human experience. In her free time she turns to her paintbrush to create visual snapshots she hopes will inspire hope and empathy.