GROS VENTRE RIVER DRAINAGE— “There’s one,” Ken Mills said softly.
“White dot to the left of the tree.”
Wolf 1259M padded into a grassy meadow visible from nearly a half-mile away.
Mills, a wolf biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, had been scanning with binoculars and a spotting scope for over two hours before the animal, the Togwotee Pack’s breeding male, entered the view. The fortysomething bearded biologist had departed his Pinedale home at dawn bound for the slow, rickety drive onto Union Pass. Then, after riding miles into the backcountry on horseback, he finally reached a timbered perch strategically selected because it overlooked a den site where the pack was raising pups.
Mills has overseen Wyoming wolves ever since the state gained control of the large canines a dozen years ago, and he keeps as close an eye on the state’s packs as he possibly can. He wanted to get a count on the pups, but there was a broader purpose of being there on that Thursday in July 2023.
“A lot of it is just staying in touch with the pack so that I can talk about them and know them,” Mills explained from his wolf-watching aerie. “I think that element’s really important to the job. These aren’t just numbers.”
Plus, keeping an eye on Wyoming’s wolves isn’t exactly a bore. “It never gets old,” Mills said.
Without looking at notes, Mills spouted off information about the animal now walking through the meadow a few hundred vertical feet down a sagebrush-strewn hillside from the biologist. Wolf 1259M, a white male, had replaced 1173M, and the two animals looked so similar it took a genetic test to ascertain they were actually different animals, he said.
He knew a good deal about the den site, too. The Lava Mountain Pack — once the largest wolf pack in the entire American West — started using this area to raise pups as long ago as 2015, before strife in the wolf world drew them toward the Green River. After being vacated, the Togwotee Pack took a liking to the same little nook, which has water, security, ample prey, and is isolated enough that wolves don’t get disturbed. “When they den here, they have everything they need,” Mills said. “They’ll stay most of the summer.”
Wolf biologist Ken Mills uses a very-high-frequency receiver to attempt to pinpoint the locations of GPS-collared members of the Togwotee Pack. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
This little corner of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem isn’t the only place where Mills is investing great energy into keeping up with a Wyoming wolf pack. He’s in charge of a hands-on monitoring and management program that, out of necessity, relies on counting every wolf known to exist in Wyoming — every year. Last year the statewide tally was 352, and just over half of them (192) lived in a “trophy game area” where Game and Fish has jurisdiction and wolf hunting is tightly regulated with system that caps how many can be killed. Despite bar-room banter claiming way more wolves roam Wyoming than biologists say exist, Mills says his margin of error is low — probably countable on one hand.
“The most we’ve ever found after we’ve released our annual report has been five,” Mills said.
The wealth of scientific data and careful population management made possible by that level of precision are unique to Wyoming, and have earned the state’s wildlife managers the respect of colleagues and even one-time adversaries. As biologist turned Greater Yellowstone Coalition wildlife advocate Matt Cuzzocreo put it: “It’s really a credit to the department. It’s one of the reasons why we need to let professional wildlife managers manage wildlife.”
“It’s really a credit to the department. It’s one of the reasons why we need to let professional wildlife managers manage wildlife.”
Matt Cuzzocreo
Among Northern Rockies states, Wyoming stands alone in its census-style approach. In Montana and Idaho, which are home to significantly more wolves, managers long ago switched to less-precise modeling using genetic samples and other techniques to estimate numbers of animals and packs. In other areas of the West with relatively recent wolf arrivals, like Oregon and Washington, state managers still use hard counts, though the feasibility of doing so is questionable long-term as populations grow. “Once you exceed 400 [wolves] it gets a lot messier,” Mills said. “There’s just so much effort that it takes and so much collaring that it takes to keep up with a population that large.”
1 wolf, 2 wolf, 3 wolf, 4 wolf
But Game and Fish and its federal wolf management forebears have counted and managed Wyoming wolves with precision for nearly three decades, ever since animals reintroduced into Yellowstone began leaving the park and reclaiming old haunts left vacant since the 1930s when the species was exterminated.
Over the course of 2023, some 83 Wyoming wolves in 25 trophy-game-area packs wore tracking collars — the backbone of the monitoring effort that cost north of $350,000. Why have Equality State wildlife managers kept on with a resource-intensive program that requires constant monitoring and many miles in the truck and hours in the air to surveil wolves roaming thousands of square miles?
The large majority of wolf packs in Wyoming include animals that’ve been fitted with GPS tracking collars. The close monitoring enables the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to generate a precise map depicting where packs roam in the Equality State. (Wyoming Game and Fish Department)
Partly, Mills and his colleagues keep on with the precision approach out of necessity — because Wyoming’s wolf population hovers near enough to the minimums necessary to prevent a relapse to federal management, they need to know the exact number. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service granted Wyoming jurisdiction over its wolves in 2012, lawmakers passed statute and state officials adopted a management plan that classified wolves as a “predator” in about 85% of the state — everywhere except for a portion of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in northwest Wyoming where wolves are classified and managed, instead, as trophy game animals. In the predator zone they can be hunted at any time of year without a license by virtually any means.
Eradication of wolves in the predator zone is not the explicit goal of the plan, but that’s the effect. Last year, for example, a record-high 51 wolves were killed by hunters in the predator zone — almost double the 27 killed in the regulated hunt. Packs were eliminated or cut down significantly, including the Dog Creek Pack just south of Jackson and the Owl Creek Pack outside the Wind River Indian Reservation near Thermopolis.
Wolves have failed to permanently establish in places like the southern Wyoming Range, the Bighorns or any other chunk of mountainous country with cover outside of Yellowstone region. In effect, Wyoming’s consistently retained relatively few wolves: Game and Fish aims to maintain a population of 160 in the regulated trophy game area, and it hits the mark year after year.
“We’ve got a lot of stability in all aspects of wolf management right now,” Mills said during a lull in the wolf-watching outing. From 2019 to 2023, he said, the population was within 10% of the 160-wolf goal. It’s a very strategic number designed to ensure with 95% confidence that there are at least 11 breeding pairs — one more than the 10 pairs Wyoming must maintain to stay true to its Endangered Species Act delisting agreement commitments.
Wyoming manages its wolves with a population objective of 160 animals inside the region where the species is classified as “trophy game.” The target number is designed to ensure that the number of breeding pairs (in red in this graph) never falls below 10 — the minimum agreed to when Wyoming gained jurisdiction over its wolves. (Wyoming Game and Fish Department)
Of course, hemming wolves into Wyoming’s northwest corner through unregulated hunting is controversial. It was a factor in a court decision that caused Wyoming to lose authority over its wolves from 2014 to 2017. The lack of restrictions on how wolves can be killed can produce ugly outcomes, and the policies are being reviewed after a Sublette County wolf was tortured last winter — an incident that renewed calls to take the state’s authority away.
Yet, biologists and wildlife managers respected in the wolf world say Wyoming’s is a system that, on balance, works. Doug Smith, who recently retired from leading Yellowstone National Park’s wolf program, is not a fan of the predator zone. But the veteran wolf biologist understands why Wyoming took that approach. In the absence of aggressive hunting, he said, wolves will exceed the “social carrying capacity” — essentially the public’s threshold of tolerance.
“And so to have wolves, you need to be tough on wolves,” Smith said. “Hence the predator zone. Some wolf biologists, without mentioning names, say it makes sense.”
‘As good as you’re going to get’
Smith put Wyoming’s modern wolf population into historical context. Canis lupus was functionally absent from the region for much of the 20th century, and when the federal government brought the animals back there was resistance until the end. Former Gov. Jim Geringer fought the reintroduction even after wolves were on the ground. “Amidst the joy and bitterness, I remain seriously concerned with the uncertainty that continues to surround Yellowstone wolf reintroduction as it moves forward,” Geringer wrote to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt in 1995.
This graph depicts numbers of confirmed wolf-livestock conflicts, and wolves killed in response, within Wyoming’s trophy game area by calendar year. The spike in conflict (marked by filled circles) in the middle of the graph is a period when wolves were protected by the Endangered Species Act and numbers grew. (Wyoming Game and Fish Department)
Until it actually happened, no one believed that Wyoming would again be the domain of the wolf. The public tolerance just wasn’t there, Smith said.
“And now you have them in some places,” he said.
“It’s as good as you’re going to get” is an argument he’s heard colleagues make.
Doug Smith is a retired senior biologist who led the Yellowstone Wolf Project for nearly three decades. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Wolves thrived, saturating Yellowstone and then the complex of mostly federal lands surrounding the park. Mark Bruscino was the man supervising large carnivores for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department some 17 years after reintroduction, when the state gained jurisdiction. The dual predator zone/trophy game concept for wolf management came from “levels above the field people,” he recalled, though did include some consultation with biologists. Bruscino, who’s now 11 years into retirement, knows that the two-tiered approach “sits poorly” with some groups.
“But from a population management standpoint, it works just fine,” he told WyoFile. “There’s room for wolves in northwest Wyoming, but in a modern world there isn’t room for wolves everywhere. And I’m a wildlife person — I like all wildlife. I want as much of it as we can have.”
As the years have passed with Wyoming in control of its wolves, resistance to the state’s management has waned. A decade ago, dozens of people would show up at Game and Fish meetings to squabble over wolf hunting seasons, arguing for big changes in both directions. Nowadays, it’s relatively quiet. Most years, meetings are sparsely attended. The summer Mills headed into the mountains to the Togwotee Pack den site, the state had received only 12 public comments in response to its hunting season proposal. Some called for higher quotas, some praised the proposal for slightly reducing hunting seasons. Requests, generally, were tempered and reasoned.
Resistance waned, then flared
“The wolf issue isn’t as much of a controversy,” Mills said from the hillside that summer. “Part of the goal of the wolf program is to … demonstrate that wolves can be on the landscape in northwest Wyoming, and it’s not that big of a deal.”
Notably, dynamics shifted in the aftermath of the Sublette County wolf abuse incident. There was a huge showing of interest in Wyoming’s 2024 wolf hunting regulations, with some 328 people writing in from 45 states and five countries. Comments included a petition signed by 19,000 people, while other individuals who wrote in called for no wolf hunting at all or were focused on issues that Game and Fish doesn’t have the authority to alter, like policies allowing predator zone wolves (and other species) to be run over by snowmobiles.
A lone wolf stands out on the horizon near Bondurant in 2017. (Mark Gocke/Wyoming Game and Fish Department)
Most years, however, there’s not a fervent push for wholesale changes to Wyoming wolf management. Montana and Idaho have made headlines over aggressive wolf hunting seasons and techniques, some of which emanate from state legislatures instating policies to lower populations. The Wyoming Legislature has not gone down the same path of directing Game and Fish to kill more wolves. And on the flip side, until the Sublette County incident, advocacy groups had quieted down about policies they see as unsavory, like the predator zone’s unregulated killing.
“There’s no litigation over it, because we don’t have any good claims or hooks to litigate,” said Andrea Zaccardi, a Victor, Idaho-based attorney for the Center of Biological Diversity. “There’s no advocacy over it, because Wyoming’s not going to change it.”
“I guess we’ve given up, in a way,” she added. “We’re not going to just beat our head up against the wall making the same arguments year after year.”
Zaccardi’s not the person to praise Wyoming’s careful management of wolves and wolf hunting in the trophy game zone. The Center of Biological Diversity, she said, doesn’t support any trophy hunting as an organization — and wolf hunting falls into that category.
But others who also stay apprised of western wolf issues have accolades for Wyoming management.
“Wyoming’s got quotas,” Smith said. “Montana and Idaho don’t — it’s a free-for-all. They have a predator zone, too, they just call it something else.”
Over Smith’s decades at Yellowstone, he had to negotiate with the three border states over wolf-hunting policies that, some years, have a great impact on wolf ecology and research in the park. Wyoming’s hunt has generally had a negligible effect, especially relative to Montana’s. It was also the “easiest” state to work with, he said.
“The reason why is because it’s the smallest state, bureaucratically,” Smith said. “I would call Ken and he would talk to me directly.”
Science-driven management
Wyoming Game and Fish’s census-style approach to monitoring, combined with the mortality limit system, have also enabled data-driven wolf management. In 2023, the population of wolves in the trophy game area grew significantly: 192 were tallied at the end of the calendar year (one more died in the new year), which meant the population was about 20% higher than the 160-wolf objective.
Rather than hiking the quotas, however, Mills proposed going in the opposite direction: reducing the total number of trophy game-area wolves that can be hunted from 40 to 38.
“We’re reducing the mortality limit by two, and the population is 31 wolves above objective. Why is that?” Mills said over lunch earlier this summer.
Through years of data collection, he explained, his team knows that “recruitment” — the production and survival of pups born — is likely to decline on its own due to the higher number of wolves at the end of 2023. The anticipated number of wolves that would die from causes other than hunting and recruitment “almost offset each other.”
“Our population would be estimated to grow by seven this year if we did not hunt,” Mills said. “That’s it. It’s because the data says that 190, 200 wolves — right around there — that’s carrying capacity.”
A graying female wolf from the former Dell Creek Pack recovers from being sedated during a 2018 collaring operation. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Later in the summer, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission OK’d Mills’ 38-quota hunting season proposal without making any changes. The season started Sept. 15, and one hunt area near Dubois with a two-wolf quota is already closed.
Game and Fish’s approach to establishing wolf hunting seasons has drawn plaudits from perhaps unlikely parties. A group that once sued over state management of wolves, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, now doesn’t even bother to advocate changes to the regulated hunt — because it likes what it sees, including the voluntary buffer that’s baked into the 160-wolf objective.
“The math that Game and Fish is using — given the fact that they’re working off a census and a minimum count, rather than a model — it’s unimpeachable for that portion of the population,” said Cuzzocreo, the coalition’s Wyoming wildlife program manager.
Keeping up on Wyo’s wolves
In the months that followed Mills’ sighting of Wolf 1259M, he kept amassing data and documenting what became of the Togwotee Pack — like he does with all the others.
Although Mills never eyed the pups on that day in July 2023, a contracted Game and Fish pilot counted five youngsters during an overflight that summer. There were 10 wolves in the pack the winter prior, and the litter would have made it among the larger Wyoming packs for a time.
Life can trend toward the eventful, though, for wolves in the modern West. During the 2023 hunting season, the pack’s breeding female was shot and killed. The pack fractured sometime thereafter.
Ken Mills, the wolf biologist for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, rides into a remote corner of the Gros Ventre River drainage to tally puppies in a wolf pack in July 2023. No pups were seen that day, though Mills did lay eyes on an adult male from the family, known as the Togwotee Pack. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Wolf 1259M, who was the dominant male, was related to all the other females, and so he took off with a few of his packmates in tow and established a new pack west toward Jackson Hole.
Other female wolves remained in Gros Ventre drainage territory off to the east, picking up new males.
“Does human-caused mortality disrupt pack structure? Yeah, here’s a case in point,” Mills said. “Does it always? No.”
The details of what became of all of Wyoming’s packs are laid out in Game and Fish’s annual wolf monitoring report, which the Pinedale biologist and his colleagues stuff with a dizzying volume of data.
Over lunch, Mills, unprompted, dove into an intricate genealogical tale inspired by a photograph of the animal on the annual report’s cover: Wolf 1152F, a white female that has a scar running down her snout.
“I actually have her skull, and she’s got damage to her bone under there,” Mills said. “Pretty brutal.”
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department publishes a detailed accounting of wolves and wolf issues in the state every spring. (WGFD)
Born into the Lava Mountain Pack, 1152F dispersed, lived a year on her own and then picked up a gray male from the Lower Gros Ventre Pack — which has faced its own tribulations from long-past cattle conflicts. The scar-faced female went on to form the Klondike Hill Pack. She met her demise at age 9, likely from lightning, in August 2023.
“There were some cattle that were killed by lightning in there,” Mills said. “She was standing on one of those spongy, mossy mats out in the open.”
Mills knows the finite details because he went to retrieve her tracking collar from the rugged terrain these elusive animals traverse. He didn’t stop there.
Then Mills, with excitement in his voice, launched into an account of what became of her packmates. The breeding male, 1345M, was killed by the Water Dog Lakes pack a couple months later. That left only an uncollared subadult and pups remaining in Klondike Hill Pack’s territory. Around that time, the Water Dog Lakes Pack suddenly grew from three to seven animals. The two packs included some cousins, and the theory is that they adopted the remaining pups and the yearling wolf.
“Pretty fascinating,” Mills said.
The post Wyoming’s mostly wolf-free policy produces precise management of a controversial canine appeared first on WyoFile .