Quick, tell wandering wolf boi to return to California because leaving the state means abandoning all endangered species protection! In early October, one Lassen Pack subadult male meandered north to scout out territory in eastern Oregon where wolves were delisted from the state Endangered Species Act in 2015 (western Oregon wolves are still state-listed). When the radio-collared male LAS13M crossed the border from Modoc County in northeast California into Lake County Oregon in early October, he moved beyond California’s ESA protection. Then on Oct. 29, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the gray wolf from the federal ESA throughout the country except for the Mexican wolf in the southwest. I’ll have a separate story about this despicable action later today. For the Bucket, I want to focus on California gray wolf good news.
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Lassen Pack, the second wolf pack to colonize California in 100 years, is doing their best to increase wolves in the state with two litters in 2020. California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced the new births and the dispersing male wolf in a quarterly report. LAS13M was captured and radio-collared last spring, so he was trackable when he began traveling this summer. In early October he entered Oregon, a state with a wolf population of around 160 wolves.
LAS13M began to disperse from the Lassen pack in mid-August. For a few weeks he spent time in the northern part of the pack’s home range approximately 20 miles from the rest of the pack.He then left the pack’s home range and was in Modoc County in late September. In early October he entered Lake County, Oregon.
Because we have regularly detected dispersing wolves in California since December 2011, it is likely that a small number of uncollared dispersers exist in the north state at any moment in time.
The Lassen Pack was confirmed in 2017 when a litter of pups was born. Five more were born in 2018 and four in 2019. In 2020, CDFW discovered that two females had given birth this spring, producing a minimum of nine pups. One mother, the original breeding female of the pack, birthed at least five pups and her two-year-old subadult daughter had at least four pups. A new breeding male, unrelated to the Lassen Pack, sired both litters. CDFW notes, “While multiple litters are somewhat uncommon, they most frequently occur when genetically unrelated adult wolves join a pack.” This year, biologists confirmed three adults, three yearlings, and nine pups in the pack.
june 2020 pups
june 2019 pups
Petition to state governors to protect wolves the federal government has abandoned.
PETITiON: Tell Governors: Now's the Time to Protect Wolves
Please take a moment to tell governors with wolves in their states to do everything in their power to ensure the species' survival and recovery.
The decision to end federal wolf protection means that states will soon manage wolves — so governors play a critical role in the future of wolf families in places like California, Colorado, Utah, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington and the Dakotas.
The last thing these wolves need is a rush of state-sanctioned hunting and trapping seasons. That'll take us right back to the time when wolves were relentlessly killed and harassed — a time when pups weren't safe in their dens and packs were torn apart.
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some of my previous stories about wolves in california
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