The Return Of The Wild

In 1924, the last wild wolf in California was shot in Lassen County, a solemn milestone of an era in which wilderness was seen as something to be conquered, not conserved. For nearly a century, the state remained wolfless, its ecological tapestry missing a vital thread. Then…

In 2011, a single wolf—known to researchers as OR-7, to wolf enthusiasts as Journey—crossed into California from Oregon, an emissary of the old order returning to a transformed land. His tracks marked the beginning of an unexpected revival, one that would enrich the state’s ecosystems, but challenge its values, policies, and sense of identity.

Today, that revival is embodied by the California Wolf Project, an ambitious new research initiative housed at the University of California, Berkeley, led by professors Arthur Middleton and Justin Brashares, with Kaggie Orrick as its inaugural Director. Funded by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and National Geographic, the project represents the first comprehensive scientific effort to study wolves in California since their reappearance—a species reestablishing itself in a landscape that has grown more human, more agricultural, and more complicated than ever before.

Orrick, a San Francisco native with a decade of fieldwork in Botswana and Namibia, brings to the project a deep understanding of predator–human conflict and an ethos of place-based conservation. Under her direction, the team is mapping pack movements, analyzing diet and predation patterns, and studying how wolves interact with livestock, wild prey, and other predators like black bears and mountain lions. But they’re also examining the human dimension, the ways in which individuals, local organizations, and state policy can influence coexistence across California’s lands.

It's been a decade since that lone wolf crossed the Oregon border,and ten packs now roam the northern part of the state, with more forming each year. Their resurgence poses urgent questions about how humans and predators can share space in a densely populated state—and what it means, culturally and ecologically, to welcome this iconic keystone species back home.

JMM: You’re originally from San Francisco, but your conservation background is rooted in Africa. How did you find your way from studying lions and leopards to wolves in California?

Kaggie Orrick: My career began in southern Africa, working on predator–human conflict across Botswana and Namibia. I earned my PhD at the Yale School of the Environment, focusing on large carnivore interactions and coexistence. For more than a decade, that was my world. But I’ve always believed in place-based conservation—that you need to be embedded in the landscape you study. Coming home to California felt like closing a loop. Professors Arthur Middleton and Justin Brashares at Berkeley—who’ve done remarkable work on wolves and elk in Yellowstone and predator conflict globally—were launching this new project, and the timing was perfect. Wolves were returning, and California needed research that matched the scale and complexity of that recovery.

JMM: When did the project officially begin?

Orrick: We started fieldwork earnestly in June 2024. It’s a two-year initiative funded by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, with additional support from National Geographic. It’s the first coordinated scientific effort on wolves in this state since their reappearance.

JMM: What are you studying specifically?

Orrick: We have seven core objectives. Some are ecological—tracking movement patterns, home ranges, and resource use through collar data, and by analyzing the images of over 200 motion-triggered cameras deployed across Northern California. We’re also analyzing wolf diet by collecting and DNA-sequencing scat samples, and pairing that with field verification: going to kill sites to distinguish what wolves actually hunt versus what they scavenge. We’re also mapping their interactions with other predators—mountain lions, black bears, coyotes—and prey species like deer, elk, and pronghorn. California’s ecology is unique: we have dense bear populations and comparatively few deer, which adds complexity to the situation.

JMM: California’s wolves are descended from the Yellowstone population, correct?

Orrick: Yes. Every known wolf here traces back to the Yellowstone reintroduction in 1995. They’ve gradually spread west from Idaho into Oregon, and south into California. The first confirmed visitor—OR-7, or Journey—entered in 2011; the first resident pack formed in 2015. A decade later, we have ten established packs, with new ones forming almost yearly. On average, we’ve seen two new packs form each year, for the last three years. Of course, there’s fission and fusion—not all the existing packs persist—but it’s an extraordinary rate of expansion, and a test of how prepared we are to coexist.

JMM: Coexistence of course requires the understanding , cooperation, and even participation of people. Can you discuss the complexities involved with the social dimension of this issue?

Orrick: That’s just as critical, and we’re actively studying human–wolf coexistence through depredation reports and compensation data. We are definitely seeing that there's higher amounts of livestock depredations that are occurring in California than in other states. But there are also a number of innovative policies and funding mechanisms that are trying to address wolf conflicts. California piloted a fascinating three-part compensation program between 2021-2024: payments for verified livestock losses, funding for mitigation tools, and—most radically—“pay for presence,” which is the compensation of ranchers simply for sharing territory with wolves. I believe it’s the first program in the U.S. to cover all three types of compensation. The hidden costs of coexistence, like weight loss caused by cattle stress or increased movement, are often not covered. We evaluated that pilot through producer questionnaires, analyzing what worked and where trust could be strengthened between ranchers, agencies, and researchers.

JMM: What are the main challenges and opportunities presented by the return of the wolves?

Orrick: California is not the landscape it was a century ago. There’s more infrastructure, more livestock, and less wild prey. Wolves are navigating a fragmented, human-dominated environment. Unlike Yellowstone, where wolves live mostly within protected areas, our wolves cross private ranches, state forests, and working lands. As mentioned, that overlap is where both conflict and innovation happens. Our goal is to try and understand these intersections and develop conflict-mitigation and coexistence strategies that benefit all of California’s stakeholders, including the wolves.