In 1924, a hunter shot the last known wild wolf in California, in Lassen County. For the next eighty-seven years, the state had none. This week, California wildlife officials confirmed that gray wolves are not only back, but have hit their highest modern population on record.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife released its annual wolf report on Thursday, confirming 55 wolves alive and nine wolf packs roaming the state by the end of 2025. That is up from 50 wolves and seven packs the previous year — and from zero just over a decade ago. Most of the wolves are clustered in the northeastern part of the state, though new pack territories continue to spread.
"More wolf packs and more new territories are exactly what we'd want for a wolf population that's beginning to recover," Amaroq Weiss, a senior wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement responding to the report.
The comeback is one of the most improbable wildlife stories in the American West. After being trapped and shot out of California by the early 20th century, gray wolves vanished from the state for generations. Federal protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1974 began the slow recovery of wolf populations elsewhere in the country. By the early 2010s, wolves had recolonized Idaho, Montana, and Oregon — but the species had not crossed back into California.
Then, in 2011, a single wolf changed everything. A young male known as OR-7, born in northeast Oregon, dispersed south in search of unclaimed territory and walked into California. He stayed for a while, did not find a mate, and eventually returned north. But his story rewrote the conversation about what was possible. By 2015, descendants of OR-7 had formed California's first modern wolf pack — the Shasta Pack — and the population has been climbing, slowly and steadily, ever since.
This year's report adds two more packs and five more wolves to the running total. Each new pack represents a breeding unit with the potential to send dispersers into still-uncolonized parts of the state. Wolves typically need around 50 to 70 individuals in a region to be considered demographically secure, and California has now crossed into that range for the first time in a hundred years.
The ecological case for wolves rests on what biologists call trophic cascades. As apex predators, wolves change the behavior of deer and elk, which lets streamside vegetation recover, which stabilizes riverbanks, which improves habitat for fish, songbirds, and beavers. The most famous example is Yellowstone, where the return of wolves in 1995 is credited with helping restore aspen groves and willow stands along watercourses. California's wolves are still too few to drive ecosystem-scale changes, but their continued growth puts those benefits on the table.
The return has not been without friction. The state has invested approximately $5.6 million since 2021 in compensation programs for ranchers who lose livestock to wolves and in nonlethal deterrence methods such as range riders, fencing, and noise devices. California regulators consider that spending a price worth paying for the ecological return of a native species.
For now, the headline is simple: a century after California pronounced itself wolf-free, the state has more wolves than at any point in living memory. Nine packs are raising pups in territory their ancestors once walked. And the gray wolf — written off, hunted out, and presumed gone — is quietly building back across the northern half of the Golden State.
