Yellowstone wolf steals sign warning tourists about hungry grizzly bears

Visitors in Yellowstone National Park are expected to treat the landscape with respect and to refrain from taking or treading on anything they find there. However, how can anyone expect a tourist to hold that standard when the park’s residents won’t do it themselves? Taylor Rabe, a biological science technician working in Yellowstone, was monitoring the Junction Butte wolf pack on Monday when she noticed one of its puppies running across the road with a long, straight stick in its mouth. Rabe grabbed her spotting scope for a closer look. The young wolf had somehow managed to dislodge and carry off a sign put up by Yellowstone’s bear management team warning people about grizzlies in the area.

“(The sign) was set up to warn visitors to stay out of an area due to an active carcass with grizzly bears on it,” Rabe said when she posted the video on social media. “Clearly, this pup had better things to do with it.”

Rabe has spent the last 13 winters studying wild wolves as part of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, which has been conducting year-round observation and study of the park’s wolves since they were reintroduced in 1995. Based on her extensive experience, Rabe could tell the sign-stealing miscreant was one of the puppies from the Junction Butte pack. Almost a year old, these pups have survived the winter and wandered away from the adults in the pack. “This happens often, especially when the pups are interested in sticking around an area for a longer period of time,” Rabe wrote. “Usually, it has to do with something extra smelly, like an old carcass, or maybe something really fun, like a pond full of salamanders.”

Rabe believes the sign theft was just a young wolf having a mischievous moment with an incredible stick it found, something any domestic dog could do. “This young male found this really fun and interesting toy as he made his way through the valley,” she said. “Whatever the cause, when the pups are away from their elders, this is when we see them being extra mischievous.”

John Baughman, director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department from 1996 to 2002, got the top job right after wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone. When wolf incidents reached his desk, they were primarily damage claims from ranchers who had lost livestock to predation. He couldn’t recall any reports of theft by wolf. However, he wasn’t surprised that it was a young wolf that ran off with the sign. In his experience, it’s always the young wolves that pushed boundaries. “When there were sightings of wolves outside Yellowstone, it was almost always younger wolves,” he said. “They’d end up roaming into other states, the Red Desert, and eastern Wyoming, looking for whatever they’re looking for beyond ‘the dead line.'”

The Junction Butte pack is one of the most famous and popular wolf populations in Yellowstone. Their territory covers a large swath of the Lamar Valley up to the park’s northern boundary in Montana. According to Yellowstone guidelines, the Junction Butte pack had 15 wolves going into the 2025-2026 winter season. In September 2025, a 2.5-year-old female wolf from the Junction Butte pack was legally shot by a hunter in Montana after straying beyond the boundaries of Yellowstone. Many wolf watchers find independence and a brazen attitude as admirable qualities in a beloved wolf, but they were also among the factors that indirectly led to that wolf’s early death. Lone wolves can survive on their own, but can just as easily find an early death, by bite or bullet.

After carrying and chewing on his special stick for a time, Rabe observed the young sign-stealing wolf until he abandoned his new toy and rushed to rejoin the adults of the Junction Butte pack. There’s no indication that Yellowstone’s rangers cited the young wolf for theft and property damage, as would be expected for any tourist who committed such a brazen act. Wolves are protected, so long as they remain within Yellowstone’s boundaries. Once they step outside the park, they can be legally killed. Montana hunters and trappers killed 289 wolves in 2024. If the young Junction Butte wolf could read the sign he ran off with, it wouldn’t have helped him at all, since it was warning visitors to stay away from grizzlies. If he could read the other signs in the park and the writing on the wall, he would know to stick close to his pack and never venture too far. “Whenever you’d get an individual wolf doing damage or coming into a zone where wolves hadn’t been seen before, it’s usually a younger wolf,” Baughman said.