06/26/2026
In 2012, a two-year-old wolf left his pack, walked more than twenty-five miles through the suburbs of Victoria, British Columbia, swam nearly two miles through open ocean currents, and climbed ashore on a tiny island within sight of the city. He lived there alone for eight years.
The Songhees First Nation, whose reserve includes much of the island chain, named him Takaya, from Stqéyəʔ, their word for wolf. Discovery and Chatham Islands sit in the Salish Sea off the southeastern tip of Vancouver Island. On a clear day you can see the lights of downtown Victoria from the shore. Takaya made his home in this archipelago and did not leave it for nearly a decade.
Wolves are pack animals. A lone wolf is usually a dead wolf. Takaya lived alone and thrived, which is the part that confused biologists. He ate seals, sea lions, shellfish, mussels, crabs, and whatever else the tide brought in. He dug for fresh water during dry spells. Chris Darimont, a wildlife biologist at the University of Victoria, said Takaya pushed the boundaries of what scientists believed to be ecologically possible for a single wolf.
When conservation officers first spotted him, they closed the provincial park on Discovery Island and set traps. The Songhees Band Council passed a formal motion stating the wolf should remain free. The officers backed down. Takaya avoided the traps anyway.
Conservation photographer Cheryl Alexander began documenting him with special permission from the Songhees. She traveled to the islands for six years, setting trail cameras and observing his behavior. The footage became a CBC Nature of Things documentary in 2019, which aired internationally on the BBC and on ARTE in Europe. Takaya became one of the most-watched individual wild animals on earth. Tour boat operators detoured through his islands so passengers could see him. He would sometimes sit on a stretch of shoreline in the open and watch the boats pass.
On January 25, 2020, Takaya left the islands. Nobody knows why. He may have been searching for a mate, or the marine food supply may have thinned. He swam to the Victoria shore and was spotted walking down a residential sidewalk in James Bay, the oldest neighborhood in the city, a few blocks south of the provincial legislature. Police warned residents to keep pets and children indoors.
Conservation officers tranquilized him in a backyard the next day. They decided not to return him to the islands. The wolf left for a reason, they said. On January 27, they drove him roughly two hours northwest and released him near Port Renfrew, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, into coastal temperate rainforest that bore no resemblance to the semi-arid arbutus woodland and rocky shoreline he had known for eight years.
He was disoriented. Alexander, who tracked his movements over the following weeks, said he was released half-drugged down a logging road into unfamiliar territory occupied by at least two established wolf packs. A lone older male entering another pack's range is not tolerated.
Takaya tried to go home. He headed east toward Victoria, made it as far as Sooke, apparently hit a pack boundary, and turned back. On March 22 he set out again, this time heading southeast toward Shawnigan Lake on a route that could have taken him back to the strait and his islands. Two days later, on March 24, he rose out of a culvert ditch near a logging road and encountered cougar hunters loading their dogs into a truck. One of them shot him. No special license is required to kill a wolf in British Columbia. There is no limit on the number a hunter may take.
Takaya was eleven years old. He had lived alone on an island for eight years, eaten food no wolf textbook said he should eat, avoided every trap set for him, and survived in a territory no wolf was supposed to be able to hold by itself. The Songhees painted a memorial on the wall of the old foghorn building on Discovery Island, in a spot where Takaya used to sit.
Source: CBC News / Hakai Magazine / Focus on Victoria / Cheryl Alexander, Takaya: Lone Wolf / BC Conservation Officer Service.
