Dr. Douglas Smith provided me with a near complete pup count for the Park this year. He stressed that for the packs where all pups have been visually counted, this is a high count, meaning that already a few have disappeared, probably dead.
Most surprising to me was Oxbow with 12 pups, eleven still alive. This was an odd double liter — one female with eleven pups, one female with one (which has died). He believed that eleven pups is a record sized litter for a gray wolf.
Slough Creek Pack, which had multiple litters, had the high count in the Park with 13 pups.
The Agates had 9 pups.
Druids had 6. Delta had 6. The Hayden Valley Pack, for the first time had an average sized litter — 6 pups. That’s now down to five. In the past, their litters were very small.
The new Gardiner’s Hole Pack (which has replaced the Swan Lake Pack almost exactly in terriotory) had 5 pups.
Mollies Pack had 4 or 5 pups.
The Leopolds, who have often had large litters, had just 4 pups.
The Snake River Pack which formed last year and had about 5 pups, but then moved south of Yellowstone Park, returned to den in the Park and had 4 pups.
Cougar Creek has a count of only one, but that pack lives in the thick regenerating lodgepole pine and probably has more than one.
Still unknown is the Gibbon Pack (which acted as though it denned and probably did) and the Bechler Pack. The SW corner of the Pack is the home of the Bechler Pack, but they haven’t been located on the last two flights.
