Wolves now prowl near Lake Tahoe and across Greece
A European organization aims to "facilitate wolf and human coexistence." In the U.S., the apex predators are spreading through California, but struggling to survive in Colorado.
Wolves are hunting within howling distance of Lake Tahoe, California’s most populated alpine area. Wildlife trackers observed individuals at an “undisclosed location near Lake Tahoe” several months ago. Now, wildlife officials say they received reports of four wolves hovering around a herd of deer in Hope Valley, a five-minute drive from the southern tip of the Tahoe Basin. This is just down the hill from Grass Lake, where I recently wrote that sandhill cranes have returned to Tahoe.
I got married on a mountaintop overlooking Hope Valley, so can I say: Holy smokes!
Wolves were spotted near Tahoe a couple of years ago, but did not establish a pack.
This is only the latest in a string of good news for wolves, which are rebounding across several American states as well as many European countries, including Spain, Italy, Germany and Greece. Unique subspecies, which are more endangered, include the Iberian wolf, Himalayan wolf, Mexican wolf and the red wolf, which previously roamed the entire Southeast U.S. but now only consists of 17 to 19 wild individuals in North Carolina.
Our intimate but troubled history with wolves spans 30,000 years, when they became the first species humans domesticated, nearly 10,000 years before horses. In the past few hundred years, we eliminated them near most of our civilizations. Now, ecologists are promoting their return to regions around the world to help restore ecosystems.
Hope Valley: Flyfishers’ and cross country skiers’ dreamland with plenty of history
The Hope Valley wolves mean that canis lupus are expanding their range in California since returning here in 2011. They established a pack a couple hundred miles north of Tahoe, in Lassen County, in 2017. Last year, a pack was confirmed a couple hundred miles south, in Tulare County, in Sequoia National Forest.
Wolves are native to California but were hunted to extinction in 1920. They made it back to the state on their own after successful reintroductions in Idaho in 1995. Those wolves spread to Oregon, which then travelled south to California. Wolves are protected by state and federal endangered species acts.
In the Tahoe area, wolves join a wildlife cast of large predators that includes coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions (rare) and black bears.
Hope Valley sits at 7,000 feet (2,133 meters) and is infused with history. The original Pony Express travelled through its aspen dense hillsides and meadows, as did Snowshoe Thomson, the “skiing mailman of the Sierra.”
Most of the land is managed by the U.S. Forest Service, which eliminated grazing a couple decades ago. In 1989, the California Department of Fish & Wildlife established a 2,900-acre wildlife area that is home to mule deer, beaver, blue grouse, northern goshawk, Clark's nutcracker, white-headed woodpecker and occasional willow flycatcher.
Flyfishing, back-country skiing and snowmobiling are popular activities.
Hope Valley is nine miles from Christmas Valley, the nearest neighborhood of South Lake Tahoe, a town of 21,000 people.
A keystone species that can help even fish thrive
The story of wolves helping Yellowstone National Park’s ecosystem rebound is well-known, but worth repeating.
From Living with Wolves:
Wolves Improve Riparian Areas: Wolves have redistributed the elk herds, allowing vegetation to recover along rivers and streams. More willows and aspens provide food for beavers. More beaver ponds benefit aquatic plants and animals. Shade from the trees cools the water, making the habitat better for trout.
Hope Valley has plenty of willow, beaver, fish and deer. Elk1 are not currently wide-ranging in California, though they were historically. Wolves also prey on coyotes, which are quite numerous around Tahoe. Ecologists believe controlling coyote numbers helps ground critters like voles rebound, which could benefit birds of prey. It will be interesting to see what, if any, cascade effect wolves bring to Hope Valley.
Wolves spread far south in Greece
Meanwhile, in Greece, four packs, consisting of 30 to 40 wolves, are living on Mount Parnitha, a national park outside of Athens, where 650,000 people live. The nonprofit organization Callisto is working to facilitate coexistence between humans and wolves.
From Ekatherimini.com’s “The Uneasy Return of Wolves to Parnitha”:
Parnitha used to be an inhabited mountain, with a multitude of economic activities taking place. These activities have now been abandoned, so the wolf – and other species of animals – found more room to thrive,” says Giorgos Chatzinakos, a human geographer and a member of Human Dimensions, a group within the environmental organization Callisto. …
“We want to improve people’s relationship with wildlife and their natural surroundings. We work in a collective framework to involve local communities in a process of social learning,” Chatzinakos says.
Callisto is part of a larger European organization called Life Wild Wolf,2 which is working to educate communities on how to live with wolves.
A couple hundred wolves are now scattered across national parks across Greece.
Colorado wolves? Not going so well.
In 2020, voters in Colorado said “yes” to wolves. Colorado Parks and Wildlife released ten wolves in December 2023, just in time to meet the voter mandate. One pair produced four pups, known as the Copper Creek pack, but they were soon blamed for livestock predation. The entire pack was recently recaptured, but the adult male died in captivity soon after. Wolf lovers blame the stress of capture, while wildlife officials claim he had an unnamed ailment and wouldn’t have lived long either way.
This story is chock full of human drama, with government officials being accused of keeping secrets and not consulting neighboring Native American tribes, including the Southern Ute, leading to the withdrawal of support from the Washington tribe that supplied the wolves. Consultation is a foundational legal requirement in U.S treaties with tribes.
Colorado’s wolf reintroduction plan calls for releasing 30 to 50 wolves over three to five years.
Bringing back the dogs
A lot of the human conflict around wolves involves livestock predation. Because I’m a hound for solutions, I love the story from The Guardian last year about Spain’s shepherds bringing back mastiffs to protect livestock. Mastiffs were bred as livestock guardians, are as tall or taller than the tallest wolf, and can weigh twice as much as an average wolf, or over 200 pounds.
One Spanish shepherd interviewed by The Guardian lost 121 sheep to wolves in one season. When he returned the next season with mastiffs, he lost none.
The Iberian wolf has rebounded to 3,000 individuals after its population plummeted to 300 in the 1970s. Policies were implemented to limit the seasons and weapons used for hunting wolves, which resulted in a slow rebound into the 1990s. Spain banned wolf hunting altogether in 2021.
In many regions of the world, we’ve grown accustomed to leaving cattle and sheep out to roam without any protection. Scotland has debated bringing back wolves for decades, but most of their sheep herds are free ranging. Wolf advocates worry about the millions of deer in adjacent wilderness areas that are preventing trees from reestablishing in wide swaths of Scotland.
The same is true for much of the grazed cattle in the American West, which roam free on public lands without much protection. Black bears, grizzly bears and mountain lions may frequent such areas, but these animals aren’t the same type of hunters as wolves, which sometimes kill more than they can eat, known as “surplus killing.”
Dogs that humans bred to stand up to wolves:
Mastiffs
Kangal Shepherds
German Shepherds
Great Pyrenees
Great Danes
In America, could we begin to bring these friends back into our agriculture practices?
Can we rekindle our lost relationship with wolves, so intimate yet tenuous?
On hope and solutions
Bill McKibben said hope “can feel callous” in his latest column promoting “Fear” as a crucial tool in climate activism, especially when massive hurricanes are pummeling the Southeast. I agree, but was thrilled to then find Paul Hormick’s latest column, which discusses a study about solutions as an antidote to climate change burnout:
The researchers found that despair over climate change leads to feelings of exhaustion. ... The bright spot, the researchers found, was that staying focused on solutions for climate change mitigated people’s desire to disengage from the movement.
Bill and Katharine Hayhoe both do a great job of frequently highlighting climate solutions, as does Sam Matey. I can’t begin to cover the topic like they do. But, here’s a reminder that every story on Earth Hope comes down to climate change: conservation is carbon sequestration. I will repeat this theme throughout my reporting.
I’m not peddling false positivity here or just a dose of “feel good.” I could have called this project “Earth Solutions,” but it didn’t have the same ring. I’m trying to change how we write about the environment, to encourage all journalists to write frequently about solutions as well as problems. Read more about this project here.
In summary, here are the solutions I’ve discussed in this story:
Wildlife reintroduction in Idaho almost 30 years ago continues to have ripple effects hundreds of miles away.
Ecologists all agree wolves are great for wetlands, which are powerful carbon sinks.
Building community support and consensus, especially native, tribal or indigenous communities, is key to any environmental success. Education and preparation are key. Let’s boost organizations like Europe’s Life Wild Wolf, International Wolf Center and American Wolf Foundation.
To reduce conflict with predators, we’ve already created incredible “technology” in the form of livestock guardian dogs, whose genes we harvested from wolves millennia ago.
Hopeful headlines
From Mongabay: For ranchers in Costa Rica, jaguars and pumas become unexpected allies
The initiative promotes peaceful coexistence between ranchers and wildcats through the implementation of advanced technologies and policies that have the added benefit of improving production on the ranches. Most importantly, they’ve reduced attacks significantly and transformed ranchers’ perceptions of the big cats.
In spite of the recent incident, Durán says that since 2018 he’s been able to see the benefits of jaguar conservation on his ranch firsthand. He’s now one of the most active cat defenders.
From The Guardian: Herd of tauros to be released into Highlands to recreate aurochs effect
“Introducing the aurochs-like tauros to the Highlands four centuries after their wild ancestors were driven to extinction will refill a vital but empty ecological niche – allowing us to study how these remarkable wild cattle can be a powerful ally for tackling the nature and climate emergencies,” said Steve Micklewright, the chief executive of Trees for Life.
How do we say goodbye to human bodies in the most environmental way? Substack’s Juliet Wilson writes in “Forever Green”:
Cremation reportedly requires as much fuel as a 500-mile car journey. … Toxins in embalming materials can pose a serious risk to water supplies if the deceased is not buried in a suitable site. Many coffins are also far from biodegradable. … Natural burial grounds may be set in meadows or woodland areas and aim to preserve the natural beauty of the site and encourage native wildlife.
From Hakai Magazine: Marine carbon dioxide removal is about to go big. Key words? “Stable for millennia.” Indeed, hopeful news. Perhaps I can sleep tonight.
It begins by pumping seawater into a tank and then using an electrical current to electrolyze the water. That splits the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen gases and extracts an alkaline slurry. This solution is then reacted with the air, which pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and chemically transforms it into two byproducts. One, calcium carbonate, is a white powder used in agricultural lime. The other is a bicarbonate solution that gets released back into the ocean. Previous research suggests carbon stashed away like this should be stable for millennia and would no longer contribute to global warming.
From Maui Now: Five ʻalalā (native Hawaiian crow) begin journey to slopes of Haleakalā before release into the wild
The ʻalalā are revered in Hawaiian culture. Known for their intelligence, they are the only surviving native crow species in Hawaiʻi, according to DLNR. The birds are extinct in the wild.
See my post “How poison is saving millions of seabirds” for more Hawaiian bird-saving joy.
About Earth Hope:
Earth Hope is a solutions-based journalism project that highlights environmental success stories from around the globe, because hope is the foundation of progress. Read more about this project and what inspired it.
About me:
I’m Amanda Royal, a former newspaper reporter who covered wildfires, invasive species, water quality, wildlife and other environmental topics in California and Nevada (while writing under my maiden name and byline Amanda Fehd).
Europeans refer to moose as “elk.” North America has moose as well as elk, a mid-size species of deer between the much larger moose and much smaller mule deer, typically about 700 pounds per adult. Many species of elk inhabit North America, where they range further south than moose, which inhabit a thin stretch from Washington to Colorado, plus Alaska, Maine and most of Canada. California does not have any moose.
Sorry to not provide a link. Google is warning me their website is not secure.
Amazing human-animal dynamic that's complicated by climate change. Thank you for an informative post.
Fascinating news. Thanks for sharing the positive new Amanda. In the Netherlands we saw wolves return a couple of years ago, I believe for the first time in some 150 years. They are now even breeding in “the dutch mountains”, the Veluwe area in the east of the country. One wolf made it two years ago as far as the village on the island where I live in the southwest (like most dutch islands, it’s connected via a dam to other islands and ultimately to the mainland). I remember feeling a bit nervous the next morning during a morning run in the dunes. 😅