NE OR Sheriff Reports Wolf Shot Dead; WDFW Pins May Depredations On Different Pack

It’s been a relatively quiet summer on the Northwest wolf front, but there are a couple newsworthy items out today, one in Eastern Oregon, the other in Northeast Washington.

The Union County Sheriff’s Office reported this morning that a collared female wolf was shot and killed by a landowner within 40 yards of his house while he was protecting livestock northwest of La Grande earlier this month.

The incident occurred near Robbs Hill Road north of I-84 and the Oregon State Police, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Union County Sheriff Cody Bowen responded to the scene, according to sheriff’s deputies.

“The landowner was found to be justified, and he acted within the law of the Oregon Wolf Plan, which allows for a Caught-In-Act Lethal Take of a wolf,” UCSO stated on social media.

ODFW did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the sheriff’s office said that with increasing numbers of wolves that are coming “closer to towns, cabins, and popular outdoor recreation areas … residents and visitors to Union County need to be aware of the wolves’ presence and how to protect themselves and their livestock.”

“Keep pets close by and under a watchful eye. Don’t leave out any attractants that would draw wolves to a home or campsite. Livestock producers should consult their local ODFW office for information on the Oregon Wolf Plan, including means for non-lethal deterrents and permissible Caught-In-Act Lethal Take of a wolf under the current Oregon Wolf Plan,” UCSO advised.

An ODFW map shows that the Five Points Pack roams the area where the female wolf was shot. The territories of 11 Eastern Oregon packs overlap different portions of Union County.

Meanwhile, 230 air miles to the north in Northeast Washington’s Ferry County, WDFW today stated that it had assessed that the Sherman Pack of wolves was not actually responsible for injuring four calves and killing one in mid- and late May, as was initially suspected.

Instead, an unnamed group of wolves to the west of the Sherman Pack is now believed to have been the culprit.

“A newly documented group of wolves utilizing an area west of the Kettle Crest and north of Highway 20 are believed to be the wolves most likely responsible for the May depredations,” WDFW said in an emailed update.

The agency’s new determination was based on “recent radio-collar data, fresh wolf sign west of the Kettle Crest not associated with the Sherman Pack, and information collected through cameras deployed by livestock producers” that all pointed to the Sherman wolves not using the area where the livestock attacks occurred in May.

“Based on this, Sherman pack of wolves are likely not responsible for those four depredations,” WDFW stated.

WDFW Director Kelly Susewind had mulled going lethal on that pack to head off more calf attacks, which affected a single producer, but ultimately declined to do so, based on ambiguities around the final depredation in the series.

In mid-May, the producer also shot and killed an adult male wolf chasing cattle. Like Oregon, Washington has a caught-in-the-act provision that allows ranchers or their hands to shoot a wolf chasing livestock in the federally delisted eastern third of the state. As they do with each incident, WDFW officers investigated this shooting and no charges were filed in this case.

This afternoon, agency wolf spokeswoman Staci Lehman in Spokane indicated that this new group of Ferry County wolves does not have an official name and wouldn’t until next April’s annual wolf report, assuming they’re still around then.

Lehman said that, besides the one shot while chasing livestock, at least two other members have shown up on trail cams and that the wolves were primarily squeezed in between the Nc’icn, Togo and Sherman Packs on the north side of Highway 20 west of Sherman Pass.

“Staff are continuing to monitor this group and will determine at the end of the year whether they qualify as a new pack and/or breeding pair. Range riders are currently deployed in the area of this new group of wolves,” WDFW’s statement reads.

In other Northwest wolf news, a recent Oregon State University Extension Service report looked at wolf impacts to ranchers across the Beaver State and found, “Some ranches face severe financial losses that threaten the sustainability of their businesses, while other ranches, only a few miles away, might see little impact.”

And in Idaho, state managers using a new calculation method that includes pups estimate there were 1,235 wolves as of May 2024, a decline from the previous spring’s estimate of 1,333. Other states in the area use a year-end count that reflects the population at its low ebb.

Meanwhile, Colorado reported a second one of its reintroduced wolves had been killed by a cougar, this latest one a BC wolf that died in Rocky Mountain National Park on April 20, just over a year to the day that an Oregon wolf transplanted to Colorado likely died from a mountain lion attack in 2024. State biologists were alerted to both deaths by mortality signals from the animals’ collars.

Weird, but several radio-collared Washington wolves have also been killed by the big cats. In late 2022, WDFW reported that four had been taken down by cougars in a nine-year span, a rate higher than had been seen in the Northern Rockies over a data set twice as long, and then late in the year another collared Southeast Washington wolf was killed in Northeast Oregon, also by a cougar.

Actually, that is kinda weird …

You would assume that uncollared wolves would be killed by cougars at the same rate as collared ones, but finding the carcasses to prove that would be a lot harder because of the lack of a mortality signal to alert biologists to go check out a dead critter at such and such a location and cougars’ trademark MO of hiding of the carcass.

Who knows.