Montana set out to shrink its wolf population. The numbers tell a different story.
When Montana's legislature passed a mandate in 2021 ordering the state to reduce its wolf numbers, wildlife managers rolled out some of the most aggressive hunting and trapping regulations the state had ever seen. Night hunting got the green light. Baiting became legal. Neck snaring was permitted. Individual bag limits climbed as high as 15 wolves per person, and quotas were eliminated across most of the state. By every regulatory measure, it looked like the conditions were set for a dramatic drop in wolf numbers.
Then came the 2025-26 season results.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks reported that hunters and trappers harvested 247 wolves across the state — the lowest total in a decade, sitting below the 10-year average of 278 and the lowest since the 2016-17 season. Nine additional wolves were confirmed killed illegally since September, though that figure is not included in the official state tally. For a state that had been systematically dismantling every barrier standing between hunters and wolves, the outcome raised a lot of eyebrows.
The Law Said Cut. The Numbers Said Otherwise.
The 2021 legislative mandate didn't come with a clean target. State models at the time placed Montana's wolf population at roughly 1,100. The law called for reducing that number to what it described as "sustainable levels," with a hard floor of 450 wolves — the equivalent of about 15 breeding pairs. Everything between that floor and the 1,100 ceiling was, and still is, up for interpretation.
"We don't know what that number is," said Quentin Kujala, chief of conservation policy with FWP.
That ambiguity has made the management conversation complicated from the start. Wolves have been legally hunted in Montana since 2009. Federal protections were stripped for good in 2011, and ever since, the state has treated hunting and trapping as the primary tools for keeping wolf numbers in check. Over the years, regulations have been steadily loosened to make those tools more effective. And yet, this past season produced the smallest harvest in a decade.
State officials are not sounding alarms. "The total number of take is within the highs and lows that we've seen before," Kujala said. But the combination of a legislative directive to reduce the population and a harvest that came in below average has set the stage for what promises to be a heated summer of regulatory debate.
Who's Actually Out There Hunting
One of the more revealing details buried in the season's data has less to do with wolves and more to do with the people pursuing them.
Of more than 18,000 permit holders last year, 118 hunters and trappers killed one wolf. Thirty-one killed two. Only 12 hunters and 14 trappers killed three or more. The licenses are out there. The dedicated hunters, largely, are not.
Kujala explained that the overwhelming majority of wolf license holders are opportunistic hunters — people who pick up a tag on the off chance they run into a wolf while chasing elk or deer. They are not scouting packs, studying travel patterns, or running dedicated traplines. True wolf hunters, the ones who go out specifically targeting the species season after season, are a small and distinct minority.
That dynamic matters when it comes to evaluating the impact of looser regulations. Raising the individual bag limit to 15 wolves means little if most permit holders never encounter a single animal.
Joe McGillivray knows the difference firsthand. A heavy equipment operator who also runs a small cattle operation near Lolo, Montana, McGillivray has been trapping wolves for 15 years. This past season, despite the obstacles, he harvested eight. He knows hunters who usually do just as well — and who struggled badly this year.
McGillivray's relationship with wolves has evolved in ways that might surprise people who assume all trappers see the animals as pure pest. He was blunt about where he started: "I thought they were the scum of the earth." But over 15 years of tracking, scouting, and studying their behavior, something shifted. "They're efficient at what they do, they're good at what they do," he said. "But still, they've got to be managed."
His diagnosis for why the population hasn't come down isn't about bag limits or bait piles. It's about time. "It needs to be a longer season," he said. In late 2023, a federal judge in Missoula limited wolf-trapping season in nearly all of western Montana to January 1 through February 15 — a ruling designed to prevent grizzly bears, which are federally protected, from being accidentally caught in wolf traps during the period around hibernation. That order effectively cut two months from the trapping season.
McGillivray was blunt about the math: "They could do a hundred wolves a person and I don't think any of that's going to change." More liberal per-person limits don't move the needle if trappers only have six weeks in the field.
A Winter That Barely Felt Like Winter
Any honest accounting of this season has to grapple with the weather, which was unusual by almost any standard.
Temperatures shattered records from Missoula to Great Falls. As of early March, 24 of 232 federal snow-monitoring stations across western Montana recorded the lowest snow depth in their history. Another 78 stations ranked among the five worst years on record. Nearly every station in the state was below the 50th percentile in snowpack.
The consequences for hunting were significant, though not simple.
In a normal winter, deep snow at elevation pushes deer and elk down to lower ground, where they congregate in predictable numbers and wolves follow right behind them. The animals become easier to locate, and patterns become easier to read. This year, with snowpack at historic lows, ungulates spread out across the landscape. They grazed at higher elevations well into what should have been the dead of winter. Wolves dispersed with them.
"There are people that want to save every wolf and people want to kill every wolf. I think there's somewhere in the middle to meet and have a management plan that works," McGillivray said.
Kujala acknowledged the state's read on the weather's impact is still largely anecdotal. And the effects cut in two directions. On one hand, scattered prey meant scattered predators — harder to find, harder to pattern. On the other, mild temperatures and bare ground meant hunters on foot could reach terrain that would normally require snowshoes or a snowmobile. Some access opened up that is usually locked down until spring.
McGillivray felt the trade-off personally. He relies on a snowmobile to reach many of his best trapping spots in the backcountry. "A lot of spots I snowmobile, I just went in and pulled my [traps] because I was tired of snowmobiling on dirt," he said.
Scouting wolves takes years, not days. "It's a needle in a haystack," McGillivray said. Knowing where a pack travels, how it uses terrain, where it sleeps and where it hunts — that kind of knowledge builds slowly. When conditions change dramatically, even experienced trappers are starting over in some ways.
When asked directly whether the warm winter made the hunt easier or harder, Kujala didn't flinch from the contradiction: "Right now, both those reports — they both make sense."
Yellowstone's Wolves Move Differently This Year
Wolf management in Montana never happens in a vacuum, and nowhere is that more apparent than along the northern and western edges of Yellowstone National Park.
Park wolves carry an outsized significance. They are closely watched by researchers, beloved by wildlife tourists, and politically loaded in a way that wolves elsewhere in the state are not. Montana maintains two tightly regulated hunting units along the park boundary — often called buffer zones — where harvest is capped at three wolves per unit, a deliberate measure to limit hunting pressure on animals that have become accustomed to human presence and that contribute substantially to the region's tourism economy.
This season played out differently than expected near those buffer zones.
In Wolf Management Unit 313 near Gardiner, the three-wolf quota was filled by mid-November. That in itself was not unusual — the quota typically fills fast. What was unusual was the source of the wolves. In most years, the animals killed near Gardiner come from Yellowstone packs that cross the boundary. This year, the three wolves taken in that unit did not come from park packs.
Meanwhile, in the neighboring unit near Cooke City, only one park wolf was taken — leaving that quota unfilled. Both that wolf and another poached near Jardine came from the park's Junction Butte pack, one of Yellowstone's most well-known and most-watched groups of animals.
Across a broader section of southwest Montana known as Region 3, hunters killed 54 of the 60 wolves permitted by law — falling slightly short of the quota. But the majority of Yellowstone-based wolves taken legally this year came from this broader region rather than from the buffer zones themselves. Five wolves from the 8 Mile pack were killed near Gardiner, and three from the Wapiti Lake pack were taken near Hebgen Lake, just outside the park's West Entrance.
Yellowstone biologists noted that wolves crossed the park boundary more frequently than in previous years. Linda Veress, a spokesperson for Yellowstone, offered two possible explanations. The mild winter may have forced wolves to travel farther in search of vulnerable prey. It's also possible that some packs are simply shifting how they use the surrounding landscape over time — a behavioral change that has nothing to do with weather.
"Yellowstone packs rarely travel more than several miles outside the park boundary and annually spend more than 95 percent of their time within the park," Veress said.
By the end of 2025, park staff counted 84 wolves in eight packs — a 22 percent drop from the previous year. Veress attributed that decline primarily to low pup survival, not hunting. Park biologists are currently working to understand why fewer pups than usual made it through last year. No current members of Yellowstone-based packs were reported killed in Idaho or Wyoming this season, though at least one dispersing former Yellowstone wolf was legally harvested in each of those states.
What Comes Next
The relatively quiet harvest this season will feed directly into debates that are already heating up for the summer.
The Fish and Wildlife Commission is scheduled to meet in August to debate and finalize regulations for the upcoming season. The same proposals that failed last year — including an extended season that would allow wolf hunting to begin in early summer — are likely to resurface. Opponents argued last year that such an extension would put pressure on wolf packs when pups are still young and vulnerable. Supporters argue that without more time in the field, the legislature's population reduction mandate is essentially toothless.
The state's latest population projection is expected to arrive in June. If it shows that wolf numbers have not declined meaningfully, pressure to adopt stronger measures will only intensify.
McGillivray, who has spent more time tracking wolves across Montana terrain than most people have spent thinking about them, does not see the issue in black and white. He has watched the debate from both sides, understands the frustration ranchers feel when they lose livestock, and has also developed a genuine respect for the animals he traps. His view of where the conversation needs to go is measured.
"There are people that want to save every wolf and people want to kill every wolf. I think there's somewhere in the middle to meet and have a management plan that works."
For now, Montana's wildlife managers know the edges of the acceptable range for their wolf population. They just don't know where inside that range they're supposed to be aiming — and a decade-low harvest season hasn't made that question any easier to answer.
