A lack of snow, inclement weather and bad timing has hampered the Yellowstone Wolf Project’s attempts to dart and collar animals this winter.

“We’re running out of darting time,” said Doug Smith, Yellowstone National Park’s wolf biologist, referring to the use of darts to temporarily capture the animals. “I like to be done by March 1st.”

Smith is extending the work window this year in hopes of getting more collars on wolves in the Gibbon Meadows pack, the largest in the park this year with 17 animals. Right now, only one of the pack’s members is collared. Smith would prefer to have three or four wolves in the pack collared since if that one wolf died or left, the park wouldn’t be able to track the Gibbon wolves.

“I would not want to go through the year with them uncollared,” Smith said.

Winter provides the best time to dart the wolves from a helicopter for several reasons — the wolves are more concentrated, they’re easier to see and move slower in the snow.

The Bechler pack, which roams the southwestern corner of the park, has no collared animals right now. The pack had a collared 11-year-old male, but the animal died last summer. Because of the animals’ more remote location, the Wolf Project doesn’t get many opportunities to dart the wolves.

There’s supposition, however, that a pack of eight wolves frequenting the Mammoth Junction area this winter may be the Bechler pack. But the Wolf Project hasn’t been able to dart or collar them. If they were darted, the wolves’ blood could be compared to a database of other Bechler wolves.

“We’ve had lots of ground sightings of that pack,” Smith said. “But they’re always calling them in when we don’t have a helicopter. When we have a helo we do go after them, but we haven’t been lucky.”

In six days of helicopter work, the crew has captured 14 of the park’s 56 wolves. The park’s wolf population has declined precipitously from only two years ago when 171 wolves roamed the territory. In a normal year, about 25 wolves have been captured and collared, Smith said.

In early April the wolves will den. By the second week of April most of the wolf pups are born.

Contact Brett French at french@billingsgazette.com or at 657-1387.