For roughly a century, California had no wolves. The last known wild wolf in the state was shot in Lassen County in 1924, the end of a campaign that cleared an apex predator from a landscape that had held it for millennia. Then, in 2011, wolves were documented entering California from Oregon. They did not stay long at first, but they were the first. Others followed.
That return is the backdrop for an unusual evening at UC Berkeley on October 19, when the university's California Wolf Project, in collaboration with the Rangeland Foundation, hosts a free, open-to-the-public screening of "In the Company of Wolves: An American Journey," a documentary directed, photographed, edited and produced by Susan Kucera and narrated by Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges.
The film is not a straightforward wildlife portrait. It follows wolves and other animals — wild and domesticated alike — as co-travelers through American history, from the shores of England to the birth of the New Republic and on into the colonization of the American West. Its argument, as the filmmakers frame it, is that the human relationship with wolves and other animals shaped folklore, ideas of nationhood, and the course of American history as profoundly as any human hand did. Kucera's film draws on interviews with historians, ranchers, Indigenous leaders and wildlife scientists, and it treats the wolf as both an ecological keystone and a cultural symbol — a creature whose story is inseparable from the story of how the West was taken, settled, and mythologized.
The choice of host is pointed. The California Wolf Project is a long-term partnership between UC Berkeley's Rausser College of Natural Resources and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, with additional support from the National Geographic Society. It is co-led by professor Arthur Middleton, with Kaggie Orrick leading research for the project. The project brings together scientists, wildlife managers and conservation communicators working with diverse stakeholders to study wolf spatial ecology, diet, predator-prey dynamics and recolonization — and, just as centrally, the human side of the equation: how ranchers, landowners, tribes and state policy shape whether coexistence works.
That dual focus matters in California more than in most wolf states. As the project's own researchers note, no other state with wolves combines California's dense human population, its limited native prey like elk and deer, and cattle grazing spread across shared landscapes. Wolf numbers have grown since the return, and the project expects the population to roughly double to more than 150 wolves within a few years, with range expansion accelerating. The return is an ecological opportunity and a live conflict at the same time.
Before the screening, attendees can walk through a pop-up photography exhibit, "Wolves of California," by conservation storyteller Malia Byrtus. Byrtus is a wildlife camera trapper who works alongside Orrick in the field, and her exhibit documents wolf recolonization through the work of the California Wolf Project in partnership with CDFW. It includes never-before-seen DSLR camera-trap photographs of the Whaleback pack, the Siskiyou County group that has produced some of the state's most notable litters in the modern era — seven pups in 2021, eight in 2022 (the largest known litter in California in over a century), another eight in 2023, and at least six in 2024. The images come from the field, from agricultural working lands, and from the lab, deliberately offering multiple vantage points on a species returning to a state that spent decades without it.
The pairing of film and exhibit is the point. One is a historical argument about how Americans have imagined wolves; the other is a contemporary record of what it actually looks like when they come back. Between them sits the science, the ranchers, and the policy decisions that will determine what happens next.
The screening is free and open to the public, with no ticket or capacity barrier described. It runs October 19 from midnight to 1 a.m. in the listing's terms — attendees should confirm the exact start time with the host before arriving. The Rangeland Foundation, the co-sponsor, is a grantmaker focused squarely on wolf and large-carnivore protection, funding work in coexistence, genetics, litigation and wildlife policy reform.
For anyone who has followed the arc from wolves crossing the Oregon line in 2011 to a state with multiple established packs, the evening is a chance to see both halves of the story in one room: the century of myth and eradication on screen, and the camera-trap evidence of the return on the walls.