Mike Stark of the Billings Gazette has picked up on the missing Nez Perce pack, and done an article, " Wolves start trek earlier this year." In it Doug Smith hypothesizes the pack leaves its home range every fall/early winter to look for food because its central Yellowstone territory is not  prey rich and this is the most difficult time of the year for wolves. This year, however the pack might have broken up as suggested by 72F alone way down south in the upper Green River and the discovery of a couple more members near Old Faithful.

August through November is the hardest time for wolves because their pups are almost adult size and so require a lot of food. However, pups of this age contribute little to the hunt. Their prey, however, are strong and not hindered by snow. On the other hand February through May is time of the wolf with weakened prey, and later fawns and calves.

The food bottleneck of autumn for wolves in Yellowstone leads me to my own hypothesis about Idaho where the wolf population has now grown well beyond that of Wyoming and Montana -- human hunters are in considerable part responsible for helping the Idaho wolves through the bottleneck period.

Unlike Yellowstone, where there is no hunt inside the Park, Idaho has a very long hunting period in its wolf heartland -- central Idaho. It begins in late August with archery hunts and continues through various special hunts and general hunting season until late December. Human hunters do 2 important things for wolves -- they leave gut piles and whole animals they shot, but never found. Secondly, they provide wounded animals, which to wolves are very much like the winter weakened prey of March and April. Central Idaho also has a much larger area that is officially off-limits to roads and/or has remained undeveloped and semi-developed due to the massive sea of mountains.

Locales with short hunting seasons would saturate the wolves with too much extra food, but central Idaho's slow, long hunt may be just what the wolves need.

Studies around the boundaries of Yellowstone show that unlike grizzly bears, wolves do not move toward hunters and their kills. Idaho, however, has no national parks. Hunting takes place everywhere, so wolves will by necessity commingle with human hunters and learn to use the massive food resources they provide. In fact wasn't the ancestral dog a wolf that learned to following prehistoric human hunters?

This is a hypothesis. I haven't tested it, but it can and should be tested.