A rancher shot a wolf near the tiny town of Carpenter, on the plains of far southeastern Wyoming, where wolves are practically unheard of.
Royce Breeden said he shot the wolf on Jan. 25, about 2 ½ miles north of the Wyoming-Colorado state line.
That means it’s possible the wolf came from Colorado, which started reintroducing wolves in December 2023.
However, most of the Colorado wolves have tracking collars. Breeden said the animal he shot didn’t have a collar.
“Who knows where it came from? I have no idea,” Breeden told Cowboy State Daily.
Wolves are known to roam great distances. In 2014, a 3-year-old female wolf that was captured and collared near Cody trekked all the way to Arizona’s Grand Canyon region.
First In The County?
Breeden’s family’s ranch is in Laramie County. There, as in roughly 85% of Wyoming outside the vicinity of Yellowstone National Park, it’s legal to shoot wolves on sight at any time, with no license required.
Breeden said he reported the shooting and checked the wolf’s carcass in with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
It was a male, roughly 80 pounds and estimated to be about 2 years old, he said.
Breeden said he was told that it was the first recorded instance of a wolf being legally shot in Laramie County.
Per state statute, Game and Fish can’t release or comment on any details regarding legally taken wolves, agency spokeswoman Amanda Fry stated in an email to Cowboy State Daily.
“Game and Fish is only able to release aggregate numbers of legally taken wolves, and we cannot provide further details,” she stated.
Gigantic Tracks
Breeden said that he and his father occasionally hunt coyotes on their property, to protect their cattle from predators.
The day before he shot the wolf, they were on a two-track road, when they spotted two sets of tracks, one on either side of the road. One set was gigantic.
“We thought, ‘Holy cow, those tracks are really big for a coyote,’” he said.
“There was a set of coyote tracks on one side of the road and a set of what we now know to be wolf tracks on the other,” he said.
At the time, they weren’t sure what to think.
“We didn’t know if somebody’s livestock dog had gotten out, or what had happened,” he said.
“We did have it in the back of our minds that there could be a wolf out running around,” he added.
‘That Ain’t No Coyote’
The next day, they went coyote hunting. That entailed “setting up and calling” in spots that looked promising for luring in coyotes.
Breeden said he uses an electronic call that mimics the sounds of a small prey animal in distress, to attract coyotes.
A few minutes into one set-up, he and his father were scanning in different directions.
“I looked in the middle between us, and about 320 yards away, I say a huge animal near a rock,” Breeden said.
“I said, ‘That ain’t no coyote, I think that’s the wolf that made the tracks,’” he added. “At first, my dad thought I was joking with him.”
The animal stood up and stretched, “exactly like a wolf would do,” he said.
Breeden and his father watched the animal for a while. Once they were reasonably sure it was a wolf, he took the shot.
He plans to have a taxidermist do a full-body mount of the wolf.
Prior to finding the tracks, then shooting the wolf the next day, Breeden said he’d never seen any sign of wolves in the area.
There have been rumors of wolves on neighboring ranches on the Colorado side of the state line, but never any confirmed sightings, he said.
“We’ve darn sure never seen a wolf before around here,” he said.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
