If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That’s definitely the motto an unnamed wolf pack was living by last week when the animals tried five times within the scope of a few hours to bring down a bull elk in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park.
Billy Fabian caught the hunt (or should we say “hunts”?) on video as he was guiding with Jackson Hole EcoTours. Fabian and other onlookers narrate as the wolves nip an elk here, get kicked by an elk there, and continue to go after various bull elk over and over again.
“A yet to be named wolf pack, which formed last winter, has been successfully hunting elk on the National Elk Refugee for the last month. Yesterday morning, the pack crossed the Gros Ventre River north into Grand Teton National Park,” Fabian wrote in an Instagram post sharing the video. “Over just a few hours, the wolves attempted five separate hunts of bull elk in the park, though all five proved unsuccessful.”
The same bull elk was the target of at least two of the hunts in the video, Fabian says. He reports that the wolves never took that elk (or any other elk) down as he watched. If you’re Team Elk, this is good news. If you’re Team Wolf, you’ll have to trust that the pack had a more successful time later that day once they were beyond Fabian’s lens’s range.
Watch a wolf pack try over and over again to take down an elk in Grand Teton here: