Michelle Harris witnessed a large canid with yellow eyes sprint over a fire path bordered with burned snags and enormous sequoias scarred by previous wildfires on July 6 in Giant Sequoia National Monument.
The animal “paused, started to pace, and made clipped barking sounds — like it was very worried about something,” Harris, a scientist working on a restoration project in the region, recounted. “It then cocked its head back and let out a really good howl.”
“All I could think was, ‘It doesn’t look like a coyote, but it has to be, right?’ ”
It was an adult female gray wolf, the leader of a previously undetected pack settling into Giant Sequoia National Monument—a section of the Southern Sierra Nevada that hasn’t felt a wolf’s paw in more than a century, according to animal tracks and DNA analysis of scat and hair samples.
Biologists are cautiously optimistic that California’s southernmost wolf pack, which includes the female’s four cubs—two males and two females — will adjust to their new surroundings 130 miles north of Los Angeles.
Nonetheless, the rapid advent of the so-called Tulare Pack is causing consternation among Central Valley livestock owners and administrators of ambitious fuel reduction programs planned in and surrounding parts of Sequoia National Forest and Giant Sequoia National Monument charred by previous wildfires.
A group of environmentalists has petitioned the US Forest Service to halt post-fire logging operations in the area until it can “determine whether any activities associated with those and other projects could adversely affect the wolves.”