By Alayna Shulman
The lone wolf that’s spent the last half year wandering the north state is now in Butte County, the farthest he’s traveled so far in his journey from Oregon.
The wolf, who left his pack in northeastern Oregon in September and crossed into California in late December, had been in southern Oregon for some time before returning to the north state.
He’s the first gray wolf in California since 1924.
“This animal, he’s in an area that wolves have not been in in quite a long time,” said Karen Kovacs, a wildlife program manager for the northern region of the California Department of Fish and Game.
The tracking device that monitors the journey of OR-7, as biologists have dubbed the wolf, pinned him in northeastern Butte County as of Monday.
Officials with the DFG, which has been monitoring OR-7’s journey, said he entered Butte County on June 28. It’s the farthest OR-7 has traveled in his journey to find a mate or new pack, Kovacs said.
“The unusualness about this particular animal is the distance he’s covered,” Kovacs said. “This animal is on the extreme end, as far as distances that have been documented.”
Indeed, Kovacs said most wolves that leave their packs travel only 50 to 60 miles on average, while OR-7 has likely traversed at least 2,500 miles.
“He clearly has exceeded that by a lot,” she said.
Before that, the farthest south the wolf had traveled was Shasta County.
But Kovacs said it’s hard to tell where he’ll go next.
“I no longer provide any kind of prediction,” she said. “This animal…he’s got a mind of his own, and where it decides to go, it’s all up to him.”
Unfortunately for the wolf, Kovacs said his odds of finding a mate before dying on his journey aren’t the greatest.
“There’s a number of obstacles that a dispersing male who’s gone this distance they have to overcome, not to mention finding another wolf where there are none,” she said.
Among those are starvation, disease, getting hit by a vehicle or being shot or trapped by humans, Kovacs said, though hunting wolves is illegal in California.
Kovacs said there aren’t any wolves in Nevada, so his best bet would be to cross back into eastern Oregon or Idaho, where his parents were born.
It’s hard to predict how long it could take him to cross state lines if he does decide to turn around, Kovacs said.
The wolf’s presence in California after nearly a century without any of his kind has sparked heated debates between animal rights activists and hunters, farmers and ranchers, who have even pushed for an ordinance in Siskiyou County to legalize killing the animals to protect the deer, elk and livestock on which wolves prey.
For more information or to follow OR-7’s trek, go to www.dfg.ca.gov/wildlife/nongame/wolf/.