Idaho Biologists Find First Wolf Pup Litters

Nez Perce tribal biologists tracking several pairs of wolves in Idaho’s backcountry have found the first litters of wolf pups born in the state in 80 years.

“We heard them howl Saturday night and found the den Sunday,” said Curt Mack, a tribal biologist who has overseen wolf tracking efforts.

Mack and another biologist hiked into the headwaters of the Selway River east of Elk City last weekend to try to find the fledgling pack. They returned with the first evidence that wolves released in Idaho by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the past two winters have produced a litter.

He learned on Tuesday that another team of biologists under contract to the tribe had confirmed another litter in the Landmark area east of McCall on the Payette National Forest.

Timm Kaminski, a wildlife biologist who began searching for wolves in Idaho in the early 1980s for the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the last litter of wolf pups documented in Idaho was in 1916. Federal trapper Leo Twitchell reported that litter along the Blackfoot River in southeastern Idaho as part of the campaign to eradicate wolves from the West.

“The only possible exception I am aware of would have been up on the Salmon River along Hat Creek. That was in 1921,” Kaminski said.

Hunting guides reported seeing wolf pups in the Chamberlain Basin in the late 1960s, but there was no official confirmation, he said.

The tribe and federal agency have been closely watching, by air and ground, four or five packs of wolves that may be denning this spring.

They are among the 35 gray wolves released in Idaho by the Fish and Wildlife Service during the past two years as part of an effort to reestablish populations of the predator, which is protected by law across most of its range.

The Selway pair that has produced a litter is near the heart of nearly 4 million acres of wilderness in central Idaho.