By Kale Williams | The Oregonian/OregonLive
One of the pups fathered by famed Oregon wolf OR-7 has been spotted in California, state wildlife officials said.
Pictures of the male wolf, which does not yet have a name, were captured on trail cameras in Lassen County last fall and again earlier this year, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said in a statement.
Over the summer, officials deployed additional trail cameras and began searching for tracks and scat left. They found evidence that not one, but two, wolves were frequenting the area.
A number of fecal samples were sent off to the University of Idaho’s Laboratory for Ecological, Evolutionary and Conservation Genetics and testing revealed that one of the wolves was indeed the offspring of OR-7 and the other his female companion.
OR-7 gained widespread fame when he broke off from the Inmaha Pack in northeast Oregon to forge his own way in 2011. His travels drew much attention when he crossed the Cascades and became the first wolf to take up residence in western Oregon in more than 70 years. Wolf enthusiasts across the country and around the world followed OR-7’s progress through information relayed by a tracking collar.
He wasn’t finished trekking, though. He eventually made his way to California, becoming the first wolf recorded in the state in more than 90 years, before he came back to Oregon, fathered a litter of pups and established the Rogue Pack in 2015.
OR-7 and his family are the first established pack in Western Oregon since wolves became extinct here in the late 1940s as the state’s eight other packs are all located in Eastern Oregon.
OR-7, mate and pups become ‘Rogue Pack,’ first pack in Western Oregon
Achieving packhood adds another historic distinction to OR-7’s long list of triumphs, which include becoming the first gray wolf to travel west of the Cascades in more than six decades and the first found in California in 90 years.
Now it seems that one of those pups is following in his father’s footsteps. Though officials said there was no evidence that OR-7’s offspring spotted in the Golden State was expected to father any pups this year, if the male wolf and his female companion were to establish a pack, it would mark only the second one in California since wolves returned to the state.
After OR-7 was first spotted in California, trail cameras captured images of two separate adult black wolves and five pups in Siskiyou County in 2015. Those wolves were designated the Shasta Pack and, until OR-7’s offspring was spotted recently, they were the only members of the species known to exist in the state.
Gray wolves have made a resounding comeback in Oregon since they were effectively wiped out in the mid-1900s. In 2009, there were around a dozen wolves in the state, but the last count, in 2015, saw more than 110 wolves in the state. The species was delisted as a threatened species in eastern Oregon, but still remain under protection by the federal Endangered Species Act west of highways 78, 95 and 395.
In California, the species is federally protected throughout the state and officials said that, if the pair remains in California, they will attempt to fit at least one of the wolves with a tracking collar in the spring.
The collar or collars would help officials keep an eye on the pair’s movements, but Karen Kovacs, a wildlife program manager with the state, said knowing where the wolves are could potentially head off conflicts between wolves and livestock.
“The purpose of collaring gray wolves is to understand some key biological parameters such as habitat use, prey preferences and reproduction, as well as to potentially minimize wolf-livestock conflicts,” she said in a statement.
— Kale Williams