Wildlife crews have stopped the active search for two juvenile gray wolves in California’s Sierra Valley that were part of a pack accused of killing dozens of cows and calves last summer, an official said Tuesday.
The two wolves were members of the Beyem Seyo pack, which in 2025 killed or injured at least 92 calves and cows in a seven-month period, according to a report released last week by two University of California, Davis researchers.
Gray wolves in the state are protected under California law and the federal Endangered Species Act. The story comes as wolf-protection policy has shifted at the federal level, with officials previously planning a first-ever national wolf recovery plan under former President Joe Biden before the Trump administration ended that initiative in November.
In October, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said it had euthanized four gray wolves — three adults and a juvenile — from the Beyem Seyo pack after what CDFW called an “unprecedented level of livestock attacks across the Sierra Valley” by a single wolf pack since wolves returned to the state. CDFW also said it planned to capture and relocate the remaining two wolves to wildlife facilities to prevent the behavior from spreading to other wolves.
CDFW said the pack developed a pattern of preying on cattle. “These wolves had become habituated to preying on cattle, a feeding pattern that persisted and was being taught to their offspring which would leave to form their own packs and could teach them the same cattle-preying behavior,” the department said at the time.
After weeks of searching for the two remaining juveniles, Katie Talbot, the deputy director of public affairs for CDFW, said CDFW had “reduced efforts to capture” them. “Despite best efforts from CDFW’s expert wolf biologists and law enforcement officers, we have not been able to find or get close enough to these young wolves to safely capture them,” Talbot said in a statement, adding that CDFW will continue remote monitoring while hoping for sightings that could lead to safe capture.
Talbot said that CDFW crews would be working this week on capturing wolves and collaring them throughout the state, including in the Sierra Valley.
The AP report also described months-long attempts to deter the pack’s attacks using drones, nonlethal bean bags, and physical deterrents such as flags or rope, along with officers in the field 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the efforts came too late, calling them “tremendous and heroic but it was too late.”
Weiss said ranchers should have taken proactive prevention measures for years, including increased human presence around the cattle and keeping livestock bunched up rather than letting animals roam on large grazing pastures. She also said ranchers were on notice because wolves first returned to California in late December 2011 and because packs had been established since 2015.
The conflict has intensified as California’s wolf reintroduction has expanded. The AP report said gray wolves were eradicated in California early in the last century, with the last known native wolf killed in 1924 in Lassen County. It said wolves later reappeared after reintroductions in Idaho and at Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s.
In an agricultural economics update released Friday, economist Tina Saitone and researcher Tracy Schohr said the Beyem Seyo pack killed more livestock than the entire wolf population of Montana killed in 2024 and more than wolves in Wyoming killed in 2023. The report said Montana’s 1,100 wolves killed 54 domestic animals in 2024, while Wyoming’s 352 wolves killed 49 livestock in 2023. In California, the story said about 70 gray wolves were responsible for 175 livestock kills between January and October last year, with the Beyem Seyo pack accounting for half, citing CDFW data.
Rick Roberti, a cattle rancher in Plumas County and president of the California Cattlemen’s Association, said the experience was emotionally difficult for ranchers. “It was a horrible summer here for everybody and the emotional strain was probably worse than the financial strain for most people. They did the right thing. We couldn’t go on living the way we were living,” Roberti said. He said he would like some areas declared “special zones” where people are allowed to hunt wolves that attack livestock, and he urged that wolves habituated to humans be removed.
Weiss, however, said killing wolves is not a long-term solution. “The scientific literature is pretty conclusory that killing wolves to resolve conflicts with livestock is not a solution. It can actually be counterproductive. It can result in there being more conflicts with livestock,” she said.