Early results show that wild wolves don't seem to try to jump fences for prey. The most promising method comes from a ranch on the border of Voyageurs National Park, where wolf researchers are building a 6-foot-high fence with a skirt around the property. Ranchers have had mixed results using guard donkeys, which will charge wolves on sight, dogs, alarms, flags and other methods to scare wolves away.

Their effect on deer populations also has not changed since the late 1990s. Wolf depredations happen at about 90 farms a year. As wolf numbers have remained stable for nearly three decades, so too have those conflicts. Wolf attacks on livestock are rare.ĭespite such high numbers, wolves attack cattle, turkeys and other animals on less than 2% of livestock operations in Minnesota's wolf range. The stability of the population shows that wolves have likely already spread to every part of the state that has enough prey to support them and is far enough from humans. That's well above the original federal recovery goal of 1,400, which underestimated how adaptable wolves are and how close they can live to farms, ranches and homes without causing problems. The wolf population here has been remarkably stable, bouncing between 2,400 and 3,000 animals since the late 1990s. More than 2,700 wolves live in Minnesota, equaling rough estimates for the combined total of every other state outside Alaska. Minnesota has as many wolves as the rest of the Lower 48 combined. The wolves that now populate Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan descend from those survivors. Yet several hundred survived deep in the northern woods. The state offered bounties of $35 for each wolf hide as late as the 1960s. Minnesota, too, tried to eradicate them, dropping meat tainted with strychnine from airplanes and burning pups in their dens.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, wolves were almost entirely poisoned and killed out of the Lower 48. Minnesota is the only place in the contiguous United States to never kill all its wolves.īut it wasn't for lack of trying. Some of the techniques used by Minnesotans to avoid conflicts and cattle depredations may need to be adopted in other states if the predators continue to return. Here's a closer look at Minnesota's wolves, which have played an outsized role in the species' recovery and have shaped the way scientists study them. But in every place where wolves rebounded, fierce debates followed - about their numbers, hunting and trapping rights, and how close the predators could live to human civilization. Since Congress first put wolves on the Endangered Species List in the 1970s, the predators have slowly returned to more of their native range.

Civilization 6 national park