Wolves in the Flathead Valley?

It’s happened before and Paula Dickinson says it happened again with a pair of canines going after an elk herd just east of Columbia Falls Stage Road on Monday.

Dickinson was on her way to work in Kalispell from her home in the Kokanee Bend area when she came across an elk herd at about 8 a.m.

When she pulled over to watch the herd of nearly 50 elk about 100 yards east of the road, Dickinson noticed two large, light-silver colored canines near the herd. As the pair approached, a large cow elk charged out of the herd, chasing them off.

The cow elk ended up chasing them several times before they retreated past the treeline, Dickinson said.

“There was a bunch of cars lined up there with people watching,” said Dickinson, who is convinced the elk was fending off two wolves.

“They were big. I knew they weren’t dogs just by the way they were acting ... I see coyotes in the field all the time and I know what they look like,” she said. “These were a lot bigger.”

Dickinson reported her sighting to Kent Laudon, the regional wolf biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Laudon said it would be consistent for wolves to follow their prey into winter range areas. The average territory size for a pack is about 190 square miles, but a pack doesn’t use all of that country, particularly in the winter.

“They tend to be in the winter range portions of their territories at this time of year,” said Laudon, who was unsure whether wolves near Columbia Falls Stage Road would be from a known or unknown pack.

Last year, the Snowy Pack was detected in the southern part of the Whitefish Mountain Range but Laudon has yet to capture one of those wolves to fit it with a radio collar.

“They haven’t been collared yet so we don’t know what their exact territory is. We’ve had reports of them in Canyon Creek area,” he said. “This spring we did some snooping around in The Trumbull Creek and Haskill Mountain area and I found wolf tracks.”

Laudon said he has yet to detect wolves in the northern part of the Swan Mountain Range.

It wouldn’t be the first time for wolves to show themselves in a populated part of the Flathead Valley.

Laudon noted that years ago, a radio-collared wolf was shot by a person who thought it was a coyote, mainly because he couldn’t imagine a wolf being in the east valley area.

Laudon monitors about 40 wolf packs in Northwest Montana, and because he has become spread so thin, it has become more difficult to detect how many wolves are in each pack.

Laudon and other state wildlife officials long have stressed that their formal wolf population numbers are minimum counts and they acknowledge there are more wolves on the landscape.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.