10/02/2026
In December 2012, coyote hunters in western Kansas shot a canid that was too big to be a coyote. It weighed more than 80 pounds. A large male coyote in Kansas tops out around 35. The hunters did not load it up and drive home. They called a Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism game warden.
The warden contacted U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents. USFWS took tissue samples and sent them to a lab. While wolf-dog hybrids are sold through the exotic pet trade and many look indistinguishable from full-blooded wolves, the DNA came back clean. The animal was a full-blooded Great Lakes gray wolf. It was the first documented wolf in Kansas since 1905.
Gray wolves were exterminated from Kansas through poisoning, trapping, and bounty hunting during the late 1800s. The last confirmed record before this one was 107 years earlier. Kansas has no wolf habitat designation, no wolf management plan, and no resident population. The animal the hunters shot in Trego County was not supposed to exist in the state.
Because gray wolves remain on the federal threatened species list in Kansas, the kill became a USFWS enforcement matter. The hunters had been targeting coyotes legally. They recognized the animal was wrong for a coyote, stopped, and reported it to the state. The case disposition has not been publicly detailed in the same way the Michigan wolf case was in 2024, where a prosecutor declined charges because the hunters reasonably believed they were shooting a coyote.
Where the wolf came from is unknown. The nearest known breeding populations are in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula, all more than 500 miles to the northeast. A young male wolf dispersing from the Great Lakes population can cover extraordinary distances. In 2011, a GPS-collared wolf left Oregon and walked to northern California, a straight-line distance of over 200 miles through terrain it had never seen. Wolves without collars travel the same distances without anyone knowing until they turn up dead in a state that has not had one in a century.
The same month, a deer hunter in Missouri shot an 81-pound canid he believed was a coyote. That animal also tested as a full-blooded wolf. Two wolves confirmed in two neighboring states in the same season, neither from a known population, neither collared or tracked, both killed by hunters who did not know what they were looking at until the animal was on the ground.
Kansas has confirmed only two wolves in the modern era. The 2012 Trego County animal and a second in south-central Kansas in 2017. Neither produced evidence of a mate, a pack, or a den. Both were solitary males. Both were dead when they were confirmed. The species that was erased from the state 107 years ago keeps sending scouts back, one at a time, and the scouts keep being found the same way: by someone who went out to shoot a coyote and realized the animal in front of them was twice the size it should have been.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / Kansas Outdoors / Wichita Eagle
