Gray wolf

Wolves eat meat.

The pack hunts big animals together, like deer and elk. Sometimes wolves also catch rabbits and fish, and eat berries.

Wolves are carnivores that hunt as a team. Working together, a pack can catch animals much bigger than a single wolf, such as caribou, moose, deer, elk and bison. Wolves also catch smaller animals like beavers, rabbits and fish, and sometimes eat berries.

In Yellowstone National Park, about nine out of every ten animals wolves eat in winter are elk. When wolves make a kill, ravens, magpies and coyotes come to share the leftovers, so wolves help feed many other animals.

Wolves are cursorial, cooperative hunters: packs chase prey and sometimes drive it toward other pack members waiting in a trap, using speed, teeth and claws. Large ungulates such as caribou, moose, deer, elk and bison dominate the diet, with beavers, hares and rabbits, fish and occasionally berries as extras.

In Yellowstone, the National Park Service reports that about 90 percent of winter prey is elk, with more deer in summer and bison of growing importance. Kills feed a whole community: ravens and magpies arrive almost immediately and coyotes wait nearby, which is part of why wolves are studied as a key influence on ecosystems.

A wolf pack is a family.

There is a mom, a dad and their young. Wolves howl to call their family together. A lost wolf howls so the pack can find it.

A wolf pack is a family: a mother and father, called the dominant pair, and their young from the last few years. Most packs have five to eight wolves, but some have had as many as 36. The pack shares a territory and defends it from other packs.

Howling is how wolves talk over long distances. A howl can gather the pack, start a hunt or warn other packs to stay away. A wolf that is separated from its pack makes a special 'lonesome howl', and when the pack answers, it howls back so they can find each other.

The pack is essentially a family group: a breeding pair, sometimes mated for life, and their offspring, typically five to eight animals but occasionally up to 36. Social living brings measurable benefits documented in Yellowstone: cooperative care of pups, group hunting of large prey, defense of territory and carcasses, and support for injured members.

Vocalizations include growls, barks and howls. Howling reassembles the pack, stimulates hunting and advertises territory; a rising 'lonesome howl' from a separated wolf, if answered, gives way to deep, even howls that help the pack locate it. Territories are also maintained by scratching, urine and scent marks, and howling increases in the January to April breeding season.

Long ago, people chased wolves away from many places.

Now people are helping wolves come back. In Yellowstone Park, wolves were brought back home.

For hundreds of years, people hunted and poisoned wolves to protect farm animals, and wolves disappeared from many countries. By the early 1900s they were gone from most of the United States.

Then people began to protect them. From 1995 to 1997, 41 wild wolves from Canada and Montana were released in Yellowstone National Park, where wolves had been missing for decades. Today wolves are listed as Least Concern worldwide, but some populations are still small, and people work to share the land with them.

The IUCN Red List (2025 assessment) lists the gray wolf as Least Concern with a stable trend and about 145,000 to 200,000 mature individuals. Regional pictures differ: the Smithsonian notes that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed several populations with statuses from Endangered to Delisted due to recovery.

Yellowstone is the best-known recovery. After extermination by the early 1900s, the northern Rocky Mountain wolf was listed as endangered, and 41 wolves were released in 1995 to 1997; numbers in the park have fluctuated between about 83 and 123 since 2009. Competition with livestock farming remains a major concern where wolves return, and programs that compensate ranchers for losses aim to reduce it.