Free lecture with Pamela Flick

Co-hosted by the Los Olivos Library
Thursday, November 15, 7:30 p.m.
Los Olivos Community Organization Hall (formerly Santa Ynez Valley Grange)
2374 Alamo Pintado Avenue, Los Olivos

Featured photo of a wolf in the Shoshone National Forest. Photo by Amy Gerber

Once common throughout much of North America, the gray wolf (Canis lupus) was driven to localized extinction in most areas of the contiguous United States by the mid-1930s through bounties and wildly successful predator control efforts. The last wild gray wolf in California was shot in Lassen County in 1924.

Flash forward to late December 2011, when a young male wolf known as OR-7 entered our state from Oregon, making him the first known wild wolf in the Golden State in nearly 90 years. In Summer 2015, news rapidly spread that California’s first resident wolf family, dubbed the Shasta Pack for the massive dormant volcano near where they were discovered, had settled into eastern Siskiyou County. Just last summer, we learned about the Lassen Pack and their pups. Now we know that at least 18 different wolves have traversed northern California since late 2011. Wolves are no longer merely passing through; they’re settling in and making themselves at home here in our state.

This presentation will provide an overview of gray wolf natural history, ecological role, and current distribution and population in North America and here in California. The historic reintroduction efforts in the northern Rockies to bring wolves back from the brink of extinction will be discussed, as will implications for wolf recovery in the western states with an emphasis on the importance of coexistence and moving beyond myths.

Pamela Flick is Senior California Representative for Defenders of Wildlife based in Sacramento, where she works on federal land management focused on Sierra Nevada national forests and advancing conservation of carnivores, birds, and amphibians. She is a founding steering committee member of the Pacific Wolf Coalition and was an active participant of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Wolf Stakeholder Working Group convened to help shape a plan for conserving and managing wolves as they recolonize their historical habitat in our state. Prior to joining Defenders in 2005, Pam worked for eight years to protect public lands and rivers with the California Wild Heritage Campaign, the Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign, and Friends of the River. She is a third-generation California native and hails from Mariposa.