"GIANT SEQUOIA NATIONAL MONUMENT, Calif. — On the morning of July 6, Michelle Harris saw a huge canid with yellow eyes dash across a fire road lined with charred snags and giant sequoias blackened by recent wildfires.

The animal “paused, started to pace and made clipped barking sounds — like it was very worried about something,” recalled Harris, a biologist who was working on a restoration project in the area. “Then it tilted its head back and let out a really decent howl.”

“All I could think was, ‘It doesn’t look like a coyote, but it has to be, right?’”

Animal tracks and DNA analysis of scat and hair samples determined it was an adult female gray wolf, the leader of a previously undetected pack settling into Giant Sequoia National Monument — a region of the Southern Sierra Nevada that hasn’t felt a wolf’s paw in more than a century."

Louis Sahagún reports for the Los Angeles Times August 30, 2023. [2]