Billy Fabian is a wildlife guide for Jackson Hole EcoTour Adventures where, among other job responsibilities, he creates Instagram videos of Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem wildlife from bears and bison to moose, elk and wolves.
In one January video racking up over 200,000 likes on the social media platform, three wolves chase the ankles of a bull elk about three times their size.
Fabian details the action like a color commentator.
“Oh, that other one almost got him,” Fabian said.
The group of wolves, which he’s counted as up to five in total, are new this year to Fabian. They’ve been drawing attention from wildlife guides while hunting elk near the convergence of the National Elk Refuge and Grand Teton National Park (GTNP). Fabian has spotted the group over a dozen times since December and has a hunch they’re a new pack.
“We’ve been calling them the 'Jackson Five,'” Fabian said. “I think they’ve been a little bit of a star attraction in the last couple of months.”
The wolves are part of a popular Northern Rockies population that has been listed and delisted from the Endangered Species Act several times over the past half century. Currently, they’re the only wolf population in the lower-48 not listed as endangered or threatened.
Officially, the wolves gaining stardom in GTNP aren’t a pack yet, according to Wyoming Game and Fish’s Ken Mills, a wolf biologist.
New packs form every year in northwest Wyoming, but only three to four times. About the same number of packs break up.
Mills said he first received reports of the potential pack Fabian spotted last spring. In mid-February, Game and Fish collared the wolves, adding to the 31 packs monitored in the state.
“If you put a radio collar on a wolf in a pack, you can monitor their territory, their pack, their reproduction,” Mills said.
Mills’ team will track if the wolves carve out territory among other wolves in a highly competitive ecosystem in Jackson Hole. Wolves already occupy most suitable habitat in the valley, so it is difficult for new packs to establish, he said. Buts Mills expects, they will be considered a new pack.
Wyoming manages at least 352 wolves in the state as of December 2023, with the aim of maintaining population objectives and minimizing human and livestock conflict. A new annual report with updated numbers is expected this spring.
