Something Wild

The recent news that wolf OR-93 (the 93rd Oregonian wolf to be tranquilized and fitted with a GPS-tracking collar) met an all-too-early demise on a busy interstate shocked and saddened those who had been following his record-setting journey deep into Southern California. In some ways, though, despite all the coverage it’s garnered, and despite OR-93’s inspiring expedition, the death was as routine as it was abrupt. 

We can’t help wishing he had more epic ending to his story, but his death is a stark reminder that wildlife is killed on our roads all the time and that wolves, elusive as they may be, are not immune. This past summer, a red wolf that was bred in captivity and then released into the wilds of North Carolina was struck and killed by a vehicle. These red wolves are the world’s most endangered wolf species, yet this was the second red wolf fatality this year, reducing their numbers in the wild to around 20.

Gray wolves, such as OR-93, are not in such a precarious position 26 years after their mid-90s reintroduction to the West. But roads and highways look like a good bet for wolves on the move, and that’s what wolves, reaching speeds of 45 MPH and covering 30 miles a day just hunting and marking territory, like to do: move. Trucks hurtling through the dark pose a threat that wolves don’t yet have the evolutionary biology to assess properly as they push into their historical habitats on the edges of human civilization. That’s what happened when, on November 10, on a busy interstate freeway near the town of Lebec in Kern County, a vehicle struck and killed the young, male gray wolf after he had wandered about 1,000 miles from his birthplace.

In more significant ways, though, OR-93’s death is remarkable. It put a final pin in the map at the furthest point south a wild wolf has ventured since wolves were pushed out as Americans moved west. Along his tour through California, OR-93 skirted Yosemite, the first time a wolf has done that in 100 years. He slipped into Monterrey County, made tracks near San Luis Obispo, cruised into Ventura County—going places no wild wolf has gone in centuries.

Even more remarkable, the pin in the map where OR-93 was hit on Interstate 5 marks much more than the banal end to a record-setting trek. It marks the point at which promises foretold a decade ago have started to bear the fruit of our wildest imaginations. In this way, as sad as it was to learn of his death, the good tidings that OR-93 brought along his journey did not die on the highway with him. 

To explain, let’s go back to whence he came.

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As Americans pushed west, federal and local jurisdictions programmatically and brutally killed off gray wolves from most of the continental United States. By the 1920s, gray wolves had been eradicated from a land over which they once held sway, leaving just a handful of holdout packs in the Northern Great Lakes. Their decline paralleled the rise of industrial farming, mining, ranching, logging, western settlement and the building of modern infrastructure. It mirrored the genocide of Native Americans and was carried out for the same reasons—pithily summed up and simultaneously sterilized by the term Manifest Destiny. 

In 1975, the Environmental Protection Agency listed gray wolves as an endangered species, a classification that is meant to set restoration efforts in progress. Gray wolves captured in the outback of Alberta, Canada were reintroduced to the Rocky Mountain West in 1995—the culmination of a dramatic, two-decades-long struggle to carry out the Endangered Species Act the way it was intended. 

Given the challenges, mostly overblown, that wolves presented to the entrenched political and cultural relics of Manifest Destiny, the reintroduction program squeaked by with significant concessions to those lobbies. In short, because the wolves were considered so controversial, they were not afforded the same level of protections other species that were reintroduced under the ESA had been. 

Those concessions dictated that gray wolves be taken off the federal Endangered Species list last year despite having only reclaimed 15 percent of their historical habitat in the Lower 48. Their population numbers are still just a tiny fraction of what they were before extirpation. Losing federal protection means that wolf management has returned to local jurisdictions. As a result, most states with wolves have resumed hunting and trapping, including immoral trophy hunting, the licenses for which, ironically (or not) help fund state wildlife agencies.

Wolves are resilient, though, and do pretty well with half a chance. They prospered following reintroduction to the Yellowstone National Park and the rugged mountains of Central Idaho. Many ecologists argue the land beneath them did, too. Wolves, they believe, brought back with them a long-missing “landscape of fear” critical to restoring the natural balance in places such as Yellowstone, where overgrazing elk were taking a toll. 

As their numbers increased, dispersing wolves continued moving West seeking to establish new packs in new territories. It’s a stretch to say recovering wolves could read the political tea leafs, but their westward movements almost always came one step ahead of a relentless anti-wolf lobby.

“To a wolf, a land with no wolves is a vacuum. It’s not unusual for a wolf to go into a vacuum and keep going.”

For example, wolves made the leap across the Snake River from Idaho and into Northeast Oregon when Idaho green lit the first wolf hunts in almost a century. This was the modern equivalent of the Northwest Passage for wolves, a critical juncture that opened up abundant, sustainable habitats in a region still covered by state and federal protections as the same were being rolled back in Northern Rocky Mountain states such as Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.

Wolves, though, don’t read the newspapers. They are driven by their own imperatives. As noted Oregon wolf advocate Wally Sykes once told me, “To a wolf, a land with no wolves is a vacuum. It’s not unusual for a wolf to go into a vacuum and keep going.”

On the Oregon side of the Snake River awaited the Zumwalt Prarie, the largest intact grassland in the U.S., girded by rugged mountains and nourished by abundant streams. To wolves, it offered hundreds of thousands of elk with few competitors, a vacuum too good to pass up. 

The first several wolves to venture across the river didn’t fare so well. Some met the same fate as OR-93 and others were killed by humans who didn’t want wolves around. But the wolves, like nature abhorring a vacuum, kept coming.

Somewhere around 2008, a male who came to be known as 0R-4 and female who earned the moniker “Sophie” through an Oregon Wild-sponsored naming contest, made it across the river and up into the mountains on the other side. The pack they started was designated the Imnaha pack for the territory they established around the Imnaha River, a tributary of the Snake high up in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest in Northeast Oregon. 

The Imnaha pack is foundational to the story of the gray wolf’s comeback. Their impact extends to both geography and policy that benefited wolves following in their tracks. Ranchers, whose cattle the pack sporadically predated were less enthusiastic. OR-4 and Sophie also spawned arguably the most consequential wolf since the reintroduction program, OR-7. 

OR-93, whose epic walkabout brought him within 75 miles of downtown Los Angeles before he was fatally struck by a vehicle near Lebec, is his legacy. OR-93’s short life signifies that we are on the cusp of fulfilling possibilities first hinted at when OR-7 crossed the border into California exactly a decade ago. 

***

In late December 2011, OR-7 became the first extant wild wolf in California in nearly 90 years when he entered Siskiyou County, some 600 miles from his pack’s territory in Northeast Oregon. For more than a year, the wandering wolf, whose adventures earned him the nickname Journey, traversed Northern California, spending the summer 2012 looping around Plumas Country. 

His arrival in California set off the usual howls of ruination from the usual voices that still yield outsize political, cultural and financial influence throughout the West. For many, particularly ranchers, it was as if the devil himself had sauntered into town. Others, like me, saw something redeeming in his daring foray into the Golden State. The path he’d followed was a patchwork of greenbelts and open spaces skirting dangerous roads and more dangerous humans that was largely pieced together through years of painstaking effort by a variety of conservationists and governmental agencies. OR-7’s journey effectively proved the efficacy of those efforts. 

At the risk of anthropomorphizing a wolf’s wayward biological imperatives, I chose to see his adventure as a necessary act of defiance. Here, into the endgame of Manifest Destiny came something to disrupt our delusions, something wild and untamed to show up our human folly and point toward a better way: a wolf. OR-7 ignited the hope that something wild could return to our own backyards, where it needs to be if we ourselves are to make it. OR-7 threw down a challenge—could we live with wolves, and in so doing, choose a more sustainable path? 

California responded well. 

In the wake of OR-7s extended tour, the state granted him (and those who might follow) something like permanent resident status by voting to protect gray wolves under the state’s Endangered Species Act. California became, legally at least, a safe haven for wolves. Wolves don’t know this, of course, and yet they seemed to as they defied expectations and followed OR-7 all the way to California. Years after OR-7 had been declared a genetic dead end, a female from his neck of the woods in Northeast Oregon caught up with him in the Cascade Mountains near Crater Lake.

Could we live with wolves, and in so doing, choose a more sustainable path?

The two started the Rogue Pack in the spring of 2014, making a home of the massive Klamath-Siskiyou eco region, a 19,000-plus square-mile, globally significant biodiversity center spanning from Northern California into Southern Oregon. The couple bred successfully for years, establishing the region as wolf country and again proving the efforts of organizations such as the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center that have been working for years to preserve the area’s environmental integrity.

A member of the Imnaha pack went on to start the Shasta Pack, California’s first gray wolf pack in nearly 100 years. The Whaleback pack, whose current territory is in Eastern Siskiyou County, is genetically descended from OR-7’s Rogue Pack. Some wry satisfaction can be taken in the fact that Siskiyou County is where the last gray wolf known to live in California until recently was killed for a bounty back in 1924. Though there are currently three known wolf packs and at least 20 wild, gray wolves spread across the northern counties of California, the Shasta Pack mysteriously disappeared in 2016. Foul play is suspected.

The epic journeys of California’s seminal wolves. Graphic by Tori O’Campo

OR-93 picked up where OR-7 left off, pushing even further into the vacuum, marking trails wolves reclaiming their historic domains will surely follow, given half a chance. But half-a-chance is hard to come by. The future of gray wolves here, and across the U.S., is far from certain. They prospered under endangered species protection, but their populations and habitats are at politically palatable numbers, not biologically secure ones. With the rollback of endangered species’ protections, wolves are being hunted en masse again. These hunts rob young wolves of adult mentorship. Then, the young wolves do what they need to do to survive, including predate on livestock. This creates self-fulfilling prophesy, providing political cover for persecuting the big, bad wolf even though wolves are responsible for a tiny fraction of livestock losses and those loses are mostly reimbursed by taxpayers.  

The biggest question for wolves remains what it has always been—whether or not we are capable of surrendering our perceived entitlements for the opportunity to live with something wild. This still manages to flummox us, even as it becomes increasingly clear our own survival depends on doing so.

It’s exciting, though, to think about the trail that OR-93 blazed into Southern California. Before he met his demise on the stretch of I-5 known as the Grapevine, he had roamed around the Los Padres National Forest in the mountains north of Ojai and Filmore in Ventura County. Thanks to wise human interventions such as the recent Rim of the Valley Corridor expansion of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, he came this close to fulfilling a decade-old dream of a wolf in my backyard. One will someday. They are coming, and I hope we are here to see it.