Hiking near Gardiner, Montana, on a recent balmy February day, I hit slushy snow and came across the tracks of one other human, and then some deer and elk. Soon, I encountered something more surprising: canine tracks that dwarfed my dog’s paws, and lots of them. Wolves.
It was clear in these low-snow conditions that all the wildlife was staying up high. As I kept climbing, a hunter came traipsing down the hill, skinny and tired, rifle in hand.
“Looking for wolves?” I asked. That species was the only one in season.
The wolf-hunting season had been good to him so far, he told me, but he hadn’t lucked out that day. “What else am I gonna do?” he said, gesturing to the snow-free hills in the distance. Like this hunter, I was finding a way to occupy my time in a winter that had been anything but normal.
The encounter made me curious: What did the season’s warm, dry weather mean for wolf hunting — both here in Greater Yellowstone, and across the state?
The Montana wolf hunt
My answer came just before spring. Montana’s six-month wolf season closed on March 15. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks reported hunters and trappers harvested, or “took,” 247 wolves across the state. The number is slightly below the 10-year average of 278 and the lowest since the 2016-17 season.
In addition, nine wolves were killed illegally since September— information not otherwise included in the state’s official tally. Still, state officials say the season’s outcome wasn’t out of the ordinary. “The total number of take is within the highs and lows that we’ve seen before,” Quentin Kujala, chief of conservation policy with FWP, told me.
Wolves have been hunted here for over a decade and a half. Montana saw its first legal wolf season in 2009 and after court battles and legislation, federal protections were removed in Montana for good in 2011. Ever since, hunting has been a tool to manage a species that some see as a savior of ecosystems and others as a menace to livestock and elk.
The tension over wolves heightened in 2021 when lawmakers mandated that the state reduce its wolf population. But the directive lacked a clear target number for how many wolves there should be. Ever since, Montana has experimented with a slew of regulations to make it easier for hunters and trappers to kill wolves including the legalization of night hunting, baiting, neck snaring and, most recently, eliminating quotas in most of the state while increasing the total number of wolves individual hunters and trappers can take.
Despite all these new laws designed to help them harvest and slash the population, hunters and trappers in Montana are killing fewer wolves, not more.
One reason might be a lack of dedicated wolf hunters and trappers. The hunter on the trail — I didn’t catch his name before we parted ways — told me he’d taken five wolves this year. That’s well within the bounds set by law in Montana. However, he’s an outlier. Kujala said rather than dedicated and targeted sportsmen, the vast majority of wolf hunters are opportunistic, meaning they’re folks who buy a license in case they come across a wolf while out chasing deer or elk.
License sales have also stayed relatively static over the years. The numbers aren’t in for this season yet, but last year, of more than 18,000 permit holders, 118 hunters and trappers killed one wolf, and 31 killed two wolves. Only 12 hunters and 14 trappers killed three or more.
Another reason could be season length, said wolf trapper Joe McGillivray, who also runs an excavating business and partners in a small cattle operation in Lolo, Montana. In late 2023, a federal judge in Missoula limited wolf-trapping season in nearly all of western Montana to January 1 to February 15. The order, meant to safeguard federally protected grizzlies from getting trapped by mistake pre- and post-hibernation, lopped two months off the season.
McGillivray, a self-professed “dog guy” said he hated wolves when he started trapping them 15 years ago. “I thought they were the scum of the earth,” he said. But today, he told me he has found a real respect for them. “They’re efficient at what they do, they’re good at what they do,” he said. “But still, they’ve got to be managed.”
New regulations last year allowed individual hunters and trappers to take as many as 15 wolves apiece. “They could do a hundred wolves a person and I don’t think any of that’s going to change,” McGillivray said. “It needs to be a longer season.”
Weird weather
By just about any measure, this winter was barely a winter at all. Temperatures broke records from Missoula to Great Falls. As of early March, 24 of 232 federal snow-monitoring stations across western Montana showed the lowest snow depth in recorded history, according to USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. Another 78 stations indicated the top five worst years and nearly all the stations were below the 50th percentile in snowpack.
The hot, dry weather could have big impacts on water supply and wildfire come summer. But it had also had an effect on wildlife and hunters alike. Kujala said the state’s knowledge is anecdotal at this point, but the balmy winter might have played two, sometimes competing, roles in this season’s lower-than-average harvest.
First, the lack of snow had implications for where and how animals moved. In a normal year, deer and elk congregate at low elevations, searching for forage. Wolves follow. This year, Kujala said, ungulates spread out across the landscape. They were able to disperse more and find food at higher elevations. That likely meant the predators pursuing them were harder to find, as well.
“There are people that want to save every wolf and people want to kill every wolf. I think there’s somewhere in the middle to meet and have a management plan that works.”
Joe McGillivray, heavy equipment operator, wolf trapper
Low snow also complicated access for recreationists. Thawing ice and bare ground can make snowmobile access tough for trappers. But in the same way I found myself on a trail in February that I normally wouldn’t hike until April, hunters on foot could access areas that might be buried deep in powder on normal years.
While McGillivray pointed to the short trapping season as the main reason for Montana’s failure to lower the wolf population, he agreed that weather also played a major role this season. “A lot of spots I snowmobile, I just went in and pulled my [traps] because I was tired of snowmobiling on dirt,” he said.
McGillivray says it can take years to scout, track and pattern packs to make trapping successful. “It’s a needle in a haystack,” he said. This season, despite the weather, he found his needle: he harvested eight wolves. Other friends of his, he said, didn’t fare so well. He knows some hunters who are usually highly successful at tracking wolves in the snow. But this year, the lack of snow made that endeavor next to impossible.
So did the warm winter make things easier or harder for wolf hunters? “Right now, both those reports — they both make sense,” Kujala said.
The Greater Yellowstone-area hunt
Although northwest Montana is home to more wolves than Greater Yellowstone, wolf hunting near Yellowstone National Park perennially animates the state’s discussion about managing the species. This year, the total number of hunter-killed park wolves fell more or less in line with years past. However, those successful hunts took place farther afield than in average seasons.
Montana maintains two tightly regulated hunting units along the park boundary — some call them “buffer zones” — where harvest is capped at three wolves per unit. The goal is to limit pressure on park wolves, which hold outsized importance to the region’s tourism economy and can become tolerant of people.
In Wolf Management Unit 313 near Gardiner, Montana, that quota, which usually gets filled relatively fast, was maxed out by mid-November. But there was a twist. The wolves killed there were not from Yellowstone packs. “Typically, all or most of this unit’s quota is filled by YNP wolves within a mile of the park boundary,” Linda Veress, a spokesperson for Yellowstone, told me in an email.
In the neighboring unit near Cooke City, only one park-based wolf was killed, leaving that quota of three wolves unfilled. Both that wolf and another, poached near Jardine, came from the park’s famous and highly visible Junction Butte pack.
The trail where I ran into the wolf hunter was just a couple miles over the boundary of one of the “buffer zone” units in a surrounding area known as Region 3, encompassing a broader swathe of southwest Montana. Hunters usually fill their quota there, but this year fell short — killing 54 of 60 wolves allowed by law.
However, the majority of Yellowstone-based wolves killed legally in the hunt this year were taken in Region 3, rather than in the buffer zones. Five wolves from the 8 Mile pack were killed near Gardiner — not far from where I ran into the wolf hunter — and another three from the Wapiti Lake pack were taken near Hebgen Lake just outside the West Entrance to the park.
“Yellowstone packs rarely travel more than several miles outside the park boundary and annually spend more than 95 percent of their time within the park,” Veress said.
This year, Yellowstone biologists also noticed that wolves crossed the park line more frequently than normal. This might be due to the mild winter, since wolves were forced to travel farther to find vulnerable prey. It’s also not uncommon for wolf packs to change how they use the landscape over time, she said.
By the end of 2025, park staff had documented 84 wolves in eight packs — a 22 percent drop from the previous year. Veress said that’s likely due to low pup survival, not hunting. She said park biologists are currently evaluating why fewer pups than usual survived last year.
She said no current members of Yellowstone-based wolves were killed in Idaho or Wyoming, the other states surrounding the park, this season. However, sometimes wolves leave their packs and disperse from Yellowstone. At least one dispersing, former Yellowstone-based wolf was legally harvested in each state this season.
‘Sustainable levels’
The relatively low number of wolves taken this winter is sure to crop up in upcoming debates over wolf management.
When Montana lawmakers passed the 2021 legislative mandate to lower wolf numbers, state models put the wolf population in the Treasure State at roughly 1,100. The law called for reducing the population from its current size to “sustainable levels,” but not below a floor of 450 wolves, which equates to about 15 breeding pairs. To FWP, there’s a clear high and low end for the wolf population — 1,100 and 450 respectively. Beyond that, the target for the wolf population is murky.
“We don’t know what that number is,” Kujala said.
It’s not yet clear what the relatively mild harvest this season means for Montana’s overall wolf population size. The latest population projection is expected in June.
If numbers haven’t declined significantly, FWP expects additional debates over measures that help hunters and trappers kill more wolves. Last year, the Fish and Wildlife Commission ultimately rejected a measure that would extend wolf season, allowing hunting to begin in early summer. In a contentious, all-day hearing, opponents argued the lengthier season would put pressure on wolves when pups were still young and vulnerable.
The commission will meet in August to debate and finalize next season’s regulations, where this or other measures to reduce the wolf population will likely be heard.
“There’s two sides to every story and I get both sides of it,” McGillivray, the trapper, said. “There are people that want to save every wolf and people want to kill every wolf. I think there’s somewhere in the middle to meet and have a management plan that works.”
For now, Montana wildlife managers know the limits of its wolf population — just not the target.
