It’s with sorrow and also great pride that I bid farewell to a wild wolf who captured the hearts of wildlife watchers everywhere with his strength and determination, and inspired me to write A WOLF CALLED WANDER. When OR 7 was a pup in the Imnaha Pack in northeastern Oregon, wolves were only recently returned to my home state, and we had much to learn about wild wolves and many questions about how they would survive. When OR 7 dispersed from his pack in search of a mate he fired the imagination of the world with his persistence–eventually finding a wolf in southwestern Oregon where none had been seen in more than 80 years.

He and his mate founded the Rogue pack. (Sorry to disappoint Star Wars fans, it was named for the Rogue River watershed where they live.) The pair went on to have pups year after year. Those pups are founding members of California’s first wild wolves in more than a century, the Lassen and Shasta packs. OR 7 has not worn a collar in several years and was last seen on a trail camera in the fall of 2019. His mate has been seen on trail cameras this spring but not OR 7 so he is missing and presumed dead at this point. He was 11 years old, more than twice the average life span for a wild wolf. His Rogue pack continues to thrive and his pups and grand-pups will raise their voices in Oregon’s forests for generations to come.

There is plenty to celebrate about the progress wolves have made in OR 7’s lifetime. Wolves have slowly but steadily increased over the last decade. There are now 22 known packs in Oregon and the known population of wolves has increased 15% in the last year. In response the Department of Fish and Wildlife has hired more wolf biologists and concentrated grant money and public education toward the goal of managing livestock to co-exist with wolves. Those efforts are paying off as there are 43% fewer losses of livestock in 2019. Here is a link to a wolf encounter with an ODFW intern in the summer of 2019. It has good information about meeting wolves in the wild. I hope our future contains many more beautiful and peaceful wolf encounters like this one.

Sources: https://dfw.state.or.us/wolves/docs/oregon_wolf_program/2019_Annual_Wolf_Report_FINAL.pdf, and https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-wolf-population-up-but-famous-or-7-may-have-died/