Howl about this for the history books? A wolf was found in L.A. County for the first time in a century on Saturday morning.
“It's the furthest south the gray wolves have been documented since their reintroduction into Yellowstone and Idaho just over 30 years ago,” said Axel Hunnicutt, the state gray wolf coordinator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The wolf, tagged as BEY03F, was spotted in the town of Neenach, near Lancaster, at 6 a.m.
The three-year-old wolf was born in 2023 in Plumas County, north of Lake Tahoe, as part of the first litter of the Beyem Seyo pack.
“ We don't know what happened to her after that,” said Hunnicutt. “ We documented her through genetics when she was born.”
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Last May, BEY03F was caught in Tulare County and fitted with a GPS tracking collar. The department has been monitoring her movements since. Hunnicut estimated that she has traveled more than 500 miles throughout the state.
The end of January marks the start of the breeding season for gray wolves, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. They will typically break from their pack to find a mate, sometimes traveling thousands of miles to establish a new pack.
There are no records of wolves in the San Gabriel or coastal regions, but the likelihood of her finding a mate is not impossible. Researchers were surprised to discover the pack that BEY03F belonged to in Northern California.
”No one expected a pack to pop up there,” Hunnicutt said. “And that's because two wolves wandered hundreds of miles, so it's possible that some other wolf is doing the same thing.”
The last gray wolf to make it into the Southern California region was in 2021, when the male wolf, OR93 traveled as far down as Ventura County. His journey was cut short later that year, after he was struck and killed by a vehicle along Interstate 5 in Kern County.
Hunnicut said that’s one of the main challenges for BEY03F in her search for a mate.
“ This morning she’s just east of Pyramid Lake,” said Hunnicutt. “Close to I-5, which is honestly just down the road from where [OR93] was killed on the highway.”
