The increasingly popular viewpoint to observe the Teton Pack inside Grand Teton National Park has been closed to public access until July 1.

Here is the news release from Grand Teton National Park.

USFWS wolf manager for Wyoming, Mike Jimenez told me the large number observers might have been bothering the alpha female. She took all of her pups and moved them to one of the pack's older den sites some distance away from the viewpoint on top of Uhl Hill.

It's too bad this happened because watching the Teton Pack was as easy as watching any of the Yellowstone Park packs.

In other Wyoming wolf news, neither Jimenez nor the Yellowstone Park crew can find the Yellowstone Delta Pack, although one collared lone former(?) member of the pack was located south of Yellowstone in the Teton Wilderness of the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

Yesterday Jimenez was investigating the depredation of a cow on a ranch near Moran Jct. The cow might have been killed by the nearby Teton Pack, but he said new wolves could also be in the area. He was intending to trap a wolf and collar it, but decided not to trap for now because "the area is so thick with grizzly bears".

There has been continued controversy over the wolf pair that was thought to have denned between Farson and South Pass, WY. The Sublette Gazette and others have recorded complaints about the wolves from the sheep growers.

The whole thing might be illusion, however. No sheep are known to have been killed by wolves in the area, although the number taken by coyotes is about usual.

Wolf tracks have been occasionally seen, but there is no evidence of more than a wolf or two passing through.

A sheep guard dog was injured by something, but Jimenez said they were unable to get a good look at the injured dog. He told me that if denning wolves were around, he thought the wolves would have killed the dog outright.

The situation is being monitored, but a lack of sightings of resident wolves and no livestock losses isn't much to go on.

I mentioned in an earlier story that some of the ranchers in the area are "special" ranchers in that they have a lot of political clout.

The Carter Mountain pack has denned. Last spring the prospects for the pack didn't look good because the alpha male was controlled after killing livestock. That left the female with 5 pups to raise on her own, but she did. All survived. Then a male wolf found the pack, bringing it to 8 members. A yearling pack member was recently trapped and collared. He was given the number 503M.

It is thought that the long-standing Washakie Pack, the Sunlight Basin Pack, and the Greybull Packs have all denned.  The newest Green River Pack has also denned. This pack was wiped out in the past due to livestock conflicts, but it is clearly a place wolves will keep colonizing. Over the last several years numerous wolves have dispersed into the area, and each time they have killed some of the numerous summertime cattle and ended up being shot by the government.

There also now appears to be at least new 2 adult wolves in the area where the Owl Creek Pack prospered for a while last year until the pack was gradually terminated due to repeated conflicts with livestock, including a rare instance of killing and eating an adult horse.  A male wolf, 505M was recently collared in the Owl Creek area.

The den status of the Beartooth Pack and the Absaroka Pack is not known for now.

It also looks like there is more than one wolf to the south in the Big Piney area. Recently a horse was run into a fence there. Fur on the barbed wire was both gray and black wolf fur, indicating at least one wolf of each color.

Finally, a new pack has formed in the South Fork of the Shoshone area, south by southwest of Cody. It has 9  members, 4 adults and 5 pups. There is a growing concentration of wolves about 20-40 miles south of Cody. The Greybull Pack was the first in the area. Then came the Carter Mountain Pack, and now the South Fork Shoshone Pack.

The weather has been wet and miserable lately, so wolf management in the field has not been very active. Of course, the miserable weather is ending the multi-year drought and should be very beneficial to most of the ungulate herds.

Update 6-17. In the Wyoming wolf news update above, I forgot to ask Mike Jemenez about famous old wolf 253M, the former Druid beta male. He told me today that 253 still has two other adult wolves with him, and they think there is a den, but haven't done more than locate the general area where it might be east of the National Elk Refuge.

After a long period of last summer and fall of his whereabouts being unknown, 253M turned up on the National Elk Refuge last winter, and he and his companions spent the winter living well.