Call for Canadian Volunteers

Here’s another short piece from the CBC on Tony Clevenger’s project in British Columbia. They are looking for volunteers to bait camera-and-hair-snare stations. This involves carrying beaver carcasses in to the stations, so it’s not for the squeamish (beaver, according to everyone who deals with wolverines, is the favorite snack food of gulos everywhere.)

Aside from the fact that the project is offering a chance to work on a wolverine research project in a spectacular location, the best part of this article is the comments section. I was struck both by the politeness of Canadian commenters, and the astonishment with which they seemed to greet both the general premise of the piece – many of them thought the entire idea was a joke – and the notion that anyone would volunteer to trek around the wilderness carrying a beaver carcass, without a salary. I fully agree that the environmental field is underfunded and it isn’t fair to assume that we can continue to run research projects on volunteer energy, but in the US enthusiastic amateur scientists seem to be crawling out of the woodwork with time and resources to spare. For those who want to participate but don’t have the academic background or full-time commitment to work on a project in a more in-depth fashion, volunteering offers both the chance for participation, and a focus for being out in the wild.

Of course, I have a selfish motivation for painting things in this light – but more on that in a bit.

 

 

Volunteer Opportunities For Winter 2012-2013

Wolverine field season is approaching, and there are a few opportunities for people who are interested in volunteering and/or helping out.

In Canada, Wolverine Watch is looking for backcountry athletes to participate in tracking, and is asking for reports of track and/or wolverine sightings in Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay National Parks. There’s some more information here, including information on how to contact project director Tony Clevenger if you want to volunteer.

In the US, Cascadia Wild, based in Portland, Oregon, is offering wolverine tracking workshops on Mt. Hood this winter. Contact information for registration is here.

The Friends of Scotchman Peaks’ on-going wolverine monitoring project is up for funding from Zoo Boise again this year, and they are seeking votes in order to win a grant. You can vote for them at the Zoo Boise site; the deadline in October 28th.

We are still seeking reliable reports – preferably with documentation – of wolverines throughout Wyoming, to gain a better understanding of their distribution in the state. You can report those sightings either here, or by contacting the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative. Laminated pocket-sized wolverine track ID cards will be available this winter at the NRCC office for skiers who want them.

There will doubtless be other opportunities in the US Rockies this winter, so keep in touch with your local conservation organizations. Wolverine “citizen science” is all the rage these days, so there should be plenty of chances to get out and track. (And if anyone wants to make the wolverine-interested public aware of specific programs, let me know; I’ll post them.)

Wolverine weather has descended on the West, and I’ve been caught up in recovering from what we sometimes refer to as “reentry shock,” that annoying process of waking up each morning and remembering that you’re supposed to be speaking English instead of Mongolian. I’ve had some good wolverine-related adventures in the past few days, though, and should be back to updating this blog soon.

Haplotype C in the Cascades

The Cascades have a new female wolverine. She was camera-trapped in the Chiwaukum Mountains in the Weenatchee National Forest, about 100 miles northeast of Mount Ranier. DNA analysis suggests that she is not related to any of the wolverines yet recorded in the Cascades. The analysis also confirmed that, like other Cascades wolverines, her haplotype is C, which, in a 2007 study by the Rocky Mountain Research Station, was found only in wolverines from the Northwest Territories and Alberta, Canada. Here’s an excerpt from the project’s explanation of why the presence of this haplotype might be important:

Halotypes are a part of the DNA that can tell us a bit about the evolutionary history of the animal. All of the wolverines recorded in the North Cascades to date are halotype C. This halotype does not occur in the Rocky Mountains, where extensive genetic research has occurred on their wolverine populations. Because of this, researchers believe that our Cascades’ wolverine population comes from the north not the east, and that our Washington Cascades’ population is genetically unique from other US wolverine populations.

Look at a map, and this seems logical; the Canadian Rockies make a perfect travel corridor for wolverines dispersing into Washington. The fact that this wolverine is a female, at the southernmost tip of known resident wolverine distribution in Washington, is interesting, particularly if she is unrelated to other Cascades wolverines. Some people have suggested that female wolverines don’t disperse over the same distances as males, that they inevitably occupy territories as close to their mothers as possible; this wolverine might suggest that the hypothesis of more home-bound females is incorrect. It might also suggest that there are undetected wolverines in the Cascades, and that she is related to one of them. Either (or both) could be true. I’m curious about the haplotypes of the wolverines detected in northern Idaho, since they, too, could be easily influenced by animals from the Canadian Rockies, but are also in very close proximity to the Glacier population in Montana.

For people who enjoy the occasional visual of a wolverine, here’s a short video of a wolverine feeding on a brown bear carcass in Alaska. This is on a hunting site, and I had to endure an advertisement for four-wheelers before getting to the wolverine, but there’s some reasonable footage of the wolverine running, illustrating that unique gulo gait that might help you determine that you’re looking at a wolverine if you see one in the field.

For people looking for a consistent social-media stream of wolverine images, I’d also suggest “liking” the Scandinavian Lynx Project’s facebook page. In addition to images of wolverines, you’ll get some insight into how wolverines are interacting with the rest of their ecosystem in Scandinavia. And also, of course, don’t forget to “like” the Mongolian Wildlife and Climate Change Project’s facebook page, where updates on my own work in Mongolia will be posted.

note: In an earlier version of this post, I stated that this was the southernmost confirmed sighting in Washington. Wolverines have been confirmed near Mt Adams, which is further to the south – for some reason, I tend to confuse Mt. Hood, which is in Oregon, with Mt. Adams, which is in Washington. This wolverine has been sighted as recently as January of 2012. Thanks to Jocelyn Akins for some updated info on the Mt. Adams work. 

Gulos East

Authors Elizabeth Philips Shaw and Jeff Ford in front of a run pole used in wolverine camera trap set-ups.

Last month, the University of Michigan Press released The Lone Wolverine, by Elizabeth Philips Shaw and Jeff Ford. The book follows the peculiar story of a female wolverine who showed up in the Michigan Thumb in 2004, and who was subsequently tracked and documented by Ford, a high school science teacher who became intrigued by and eventually deeply devoted to the animal. The wolverine died of natural causes in 2010, but by that time Ford had obtained several DNA samples that sparked on-going controversy about the animal’s origins. I just finished reading the book yesterday and will review it here shortly.

In the meantime, Jeff Ford’s “Pretty Gal” continues to inspire Michiganders as she goes on tour throughout Michigan, in conjunction with Ford and Shaw’s book tour. Two articles  – here and here – give some details about the upcoming tour, while Ford’s book continues to generate buzz – including a poll by one Michigan news outlet, querying whether or not Michigan should consider reintroducing wolverines to the state. The results of the poll will be out on Friday, so weigh in while you can.

The origin of the Michigan wolverine remains contested. Either hypothesis – captive release or dispersal from Ontario – seems plausible, but ultimately her origin doesn’t matter.  The story of Ford’s relationship with this particular wolverine doesn’t depend on her birthplace to make its point, and regardless of where she came from, the Michigan Thumb is unlikely to ever support a breeding population of gulos. Tangentially related to this discussion, however, people are seeing and trapping wolverines (a previous post here and another incident reported here highlight two cases of male wolverines trapped this spring) in areas of southern Ontario where the species hasn’t been documented before, and that are well within wolverine travel distance of the Great Lakes. The Canadian Ministry of Natural Resources is asking people to report all wolverine sightings in the region. Wolverines are a protected species in Ontario (at least one of the trapping incidents was accidental.) If you do see one of these animals or sign in Ontario, document the evidence if you can, leave the animal alone, and let someone know.

Cree Stories: Wolverine, Wolf, and Fire Medicine

Wolverines feature in the stories, myths, and legends of northern peoples in both the eastern and western hemispheres. The Cree, who occupy a vast swath of southern Canada and some of the northern United States, have a long-standing relationship with the wolverine. I first became aware of the Cree wolverine stories through the work of anthropologist Robert Brightman, whose book Grateful Prey is a classic exploration of the complexity of human-animal relationships in hunting cultures – in this case, the Rock Cree of Manitoba. The material that Brightman analyzes in Grateful Prey is presented in its original form – the transcribed tales of Cree storytellers – in an older, out-of-print book called Acaoohkiwina and Acimowina: Traditional Narratives of the Rock Cree Indians. The books was published by the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 1990, and I managed to find a copy in an obscure corner of a library, the pages falling out, the whole thing looking as though someone had typed up an individual copy with a typewriter and then abandoned it like a message in a bottle, to be retrieved decades later only by a tried and tested wolverine fanatic.  Acaoohkiwina refers to the primordial time-before-humans, when animals spoke and had their own civilizations and when the Trickster Wisahkicahk adventured through the world. Acimowina refers to the time after humans arrived. So the stories incorporate both the history of the creation of the Cree world, and more recent events. Wolverines play a role in both.

Despite the fact that the book felt like it might fall apart in my hands, the stories were vivid and engaging, the voices of the storytellers enlivening the tales. Few wolverine lovers will have the opportunity to experience the deep cultural relationships that exist between humans and animals in subsistence hunting cultures, and I wanted to convey some of this here on the blog. So I wrote to Robert Brightman, and he kindly granted me permission to excerpt the wolverine stories. I also asked if it might be possible to get in touch with the original storytellers to ask for their permission, but they have passed on. So with respect and thanks to them for sharing their stories, I will present their wolverine tales here over the next few posts.

Here, narrated by Cornelius Colomb, is the story Wolverine, Wolf, and Fire Medicine:

There’s this wolverine and the guy who’s with him, Wolf, and they were out hunting one day. The wolf was the one that had the “matches.” They make a magic fire. They just jump over the dry wood and that thing explodes and they make fire. And the wolverine never had that kind of – - of power. So he asked that wolf to have some of the powers.

Oh, the wolf said, “ That’s right, brother. I’ll give it to you.” Because, of course, he was a brother of the animals. So wolverine tried it and the damn thing exploded. “Oh,” wolf said, “ You’re alright, brother. As long as you don’t just play with what I gave you.”

Oh, the wolverine said, “No, no, I wouldn’t do any such thing. I need the fire.”

So later wolverine is monkeying around the shoreline. Sometimes old beaver houses, that’s where you see lots of dry wood. Every time wolverine sees dry wood he wants to make fire. Pretends that he’s cold. Throw a few sticks, jump over it, jump over ‘em, and it explodes. Few minutes, he’s done with the fire and away he goes again.  So every morning, wherever he goes, you see about five or six fires. That wolverine. Making fires all morning for nothing.

So the wolves got mad at him. Said, “I guess our little brother is making fun of our medicine. Every time we see him going he always fires all the way. Gotta cut off the ‘match.’”

So happens, the next fire, wolverine couldn’t make the fire. Tried it again. No. So one cool morning he went up on the hill. Seen lots of fires. All different kinds of animals making different fires. All kinda different smoke from there. One of them’s got different smoke from the other. And him, he had nothing. He was cold. So he hollered, “Brothers! Sisters! I don’t have no lights, no match, no way of making fire. But they’re’ll be people in years ahead. They’ll be wanting to make fire. But what they’ll do is start hunting us when they see our fires… [I]f we don’t have any fire…that way we’ll make it. But if we have fires, they’ll clean us out….” Oh, all the animals agreed with him. “I think that’ll be true,” they say. “If there’s gonna be any people, they gonna hunt us out.” So they holler at him, “Okay, brother, no more fires!”

So that’s how come there’s no fire for the animals. Otherwise they’d be hunted out. [laughs]. It would be lots – - people would be making lots of money as firefighters nowadays. Animals would be putting on all the fires like wolverine.

Wolverine World Tour, and Wolverines Near Glacier Park(s)

It’s mid-March, the grizzlies are up and about, and wolverine research season is drawing to a close. Wolverine kits all over the Rockies (and presumably the world) are marking their one-month birthdays, and wolverine researchers are gearing up for the tasks that can be accomplished during the snow-free months – investigating GPS collar food sites and exploring possible den locations, trekking back to Mongolia to interview herders and explore summer snow-patch methods for finding tracks, writing up the winter’s results, and, of course, preparing for next season’s work.

Among the interesting projects in store this summer, Evergreen College student Dallas LaDucer is preparing for a Wolverine World Tour to study the interactions of captive wolverines in zoos around the world. As a researcher and as a writer, the wolverine fixation can be challenging, because we have very few opportunities to interact face-to-face with wolverines. The animal’s elusiveness is part of its mystique, but it also leaves us with big gaps in both scientific understanding and compelling narrative about individual animals. Dallas, on the other hand, is one of the fortunate people who get to spend a lot of time with actual wolverines. From raising a captive female kit, to working as a zookeeper, to his current senior project investigating the interactions of wolverines to better understand their body language and social life, he’s spent a lot of time with gulos, and has observed that interactions vary according to the individual personalities of the animals, as opposed to strict gender or age hierarchies. He has looked at only a very small sample, however, because so few zoos in North America have more than one captive wolverine. His senior project will take him to Europe to watch wolverines in zoos in Russia, Finland, and Sweden. The major application of the work may be to help zookeepers better understand how to care for captive animals, but more knowledge about wolverine sociability could also inform conservation efforts. And, from an authorial perspective, I simply want to know more about what makes individual wolverines tick, because that information helps make good stories. So there are a lot of reasons to be interested in this project, and I am eager to hear how things go. Dallas is fundraising for the project here, so if anyone is interested in contributing, check it out.

A few other news items of interest have, as usual, slipped by me in the rush of activity that comes with spring. Skiers at Whitefish outside of Glacier National Park, Montana, should keep their eyes open for a wolverine that was spotted there earlier this week. Keep a camera handy too and maybe someone will be lucky enough to get a photo of a wild wolverine. Meanwhile, in Glacier National Park, British Columbia, Canada (not to be confused with the previously mentioned Glacier National Park, Montana) a wolverine photographed and videoed itself playing with a rope or cable that was part of a camera-trapping effort. It’s a brief glimpse of the wolverine’s playful side, although one of the scientists involved with the Trans-Canada Highway study, of which this particular camera-trap was a part, apparently takes issue with the notion of anthropomorphizing wolverines to the point of admitting that they play. In an article on the project in the Revelstoke Times Review, scientist Kelsey Furk states that she thinks that the rope was just smelly and therefore drew the wolverine’s attention, although no one seems to object to the repeated reference to the wolverine “dancing” with the rope. Play behavior has been demonstrated in many mammal species and I’m pretty convinced that wolverines not only enjoy messing around with stuff for the sake of messing around with it, but that they also have a particular mustelid sense of humor. I’m spending enough time playing with a 20-month-old human boy these days to understand that flinging a smelly rope around in the snow is no less intellectually edifying (and, in fact, is perhaps more so) than repeatedly plugging in and unplugging various electronics. Bottom line: if the kid’s behavior counts as play, so does the wolverine’s.

On a more serious note, the article about the Trans-Canada Highway project highlights an important study that will help us better understand the effects of transportation corridors on wolverines. The journalist repeats a few things as fact, however, that are actually still speculative. The most important is the idea that wolverines are disturbed by recreation. There are limited anecdotal suggestions that this might be true, but there’s also an intimation from on-going research that it might not be true. We still don’t know.Until we do, we need to be careful about the claims that we make.

Parks Canada is asking people who see tracks in this area to report them to wolverine2012@pc.gc.ca You can find a copy of the NRCC track ID info and other details about the study here.  A downloadable version of a pocket-sized track ID card is available at the NRCC website (.pdf)

Wolverines in Ontario

The Cree, whose collective territory stretches from the Labrador coast west to the Canadian Rockies and south to the Great Lakes, are one of the few peoples who have had a long-standing relationship with wolverines. The relationship has existed long enough to become enshrined in the origin stories of some Cree groups. These stories are recorded by anthropologist Robert Brightman in his book Grateful Prey, about the Rock Cree of Manitoba, and by anthropologist Rémi Savard in his book Carcajou et le Sens du Monde (Wolverine and the Meaning of the World; available in .pdf form in French here) about the Montagnais-Naskapi of Quebec and Labrador. In these tales, Wolverine is a trickster and an occasional buffoon, but he possesses powers strong enough to shift the course of events for humans and animals alike. Like most tricksters, Wolverine is sexually voracious, socially inept, a bringer of chaos and trouble, but ultimately indispensible to the functioning of humanity in the world. In Brightman’s work, Wolverine – Omiðacis in Cree – defeats a monstrous Great Skunk who is threatening the world, marries a wolf, convinces the other animals to give up fire and, by implication, culture (placing them at a disadvantage relative to humans), and eventually annoys his wolf in-laws so much, by stealing meat from them, that they kill him, along with all of his children except for one that looks and acts like a wolf. In the Montagnais-Naskapi tales, Wolverine has affairs with human women, defeats the same monstrous Great Skunk with a combination of sorcery and strength, gets into a mountain-climbing contest with a rock, tricks a whole flock of ducks into his cook pot, and then loses his dinner when he falls asleep, leaving his anus (yes, I’m pretty sure I have that translation correct…) on guard; the anus fails to warn him of other people taking the food from the pot, and when Wolverine wakes up, he’s left with nothing but bones. Another set of stories details Wolverine’s further adventures in obtaining food. In one version, he visits Beaver and asks to be fed, at which point Beaver kills and cooks his son and gives him to Wolverine to eat. At the end of the meal they put the bones into the water and the young beaver reincarnates. In the version of the story in which the hungry Wolverine visits Caribou and asks for food, Caribou cuts off a piece of his wife’s dress (her hide?) and serves it to Wolverine. Later, when Caribou is hungry, he visits Wolverine and asks for a similar favor in return, but Wolverine is unable to live up to his obligations. Not only does he cut off the entire back of his wife’s dress, exposing her backside and embarrassing her, but her garment turns out to be inedible to Caribou, who leaves, disgruntled by Wolverine’s inability to reciprocate his social responsibility.

Wolverine in these stories serves as a powerful reminder of both the strengths and the pitfalls of individuality in the face of pressure to conform to social expectations. An individual hearing these tales could chose to be a wolf or a caribou or a beaver – well-socialized, adapted to living in groups and cooperating – or could chose to be a wolverine – a trouble-making, occasionally brilliant but more frequently destructive being incapable of living in harmony with other animals or fulfilling his social obligations.

These stories are fascinating, but the Montagnais-Naskapi tales evoke more than morals about social order among the Cree; they also reflect ecological change over the past century. Wolverines are believed to have been extirpated from eastern Canada, perhaps in conjunction with declines in caribou herds and the development of southern Ontario and Quebec. Likewise, wolverines have long been considered extirpated from Cree territory in southern Ontario, although Audrey Magoun’s surveys, conducted between 2003 and 2005, found them to be present in northwestern Ontario.

Then, sometime in January, a trapper near the coast of James Bay, in southeastern Ontario, began seeing strange tracks along his trapline. His marten began to disappear from his traps. Stories began to circulate through the town of a tough, crazy animal that no one around there had seen before. Eventually, they realized it was a wolverine. The trapper finally caught and killed it, although not before the animal had become legendary. At an educational conference for the Mushkegowuk Cree two weeks ago, writer Joseph Boyden chose to use this wolverine’s (tragic, if the events he narrates are accurate) story to illustrate the toughness of the landscape and of the Cree themselves. In the full piece, which deals with broader issues around Aboriginal rights in Canada, the wolverine’s story is found under the section entitled Act 2. I’ll excerpt it here:

Here’s a lesson from the land that is Mushkegowuk:

My friend William has been trapping marten all winter. One day in early January, he began to notice that a number of his marten traps had been destroyed and their contents eaten by some sort of powerful animal. It was strong as a bear, managing to pull traps right off the trees, traps hammered on by four inch spikes. But clearly, it wasn’t a bear. And a fisher wasn’t powerful enough to do this. Soon, when he identified the tracks, it dawned on William. A wolverine had come into his territory.

About that time, stories began to circulate about this wolverine. Another trapper had actually snared the wolverine but it somehow managed to fight its way out despite nearly severing its own head, cutting itself to the windpipe. And then, a few days later, the conductor on the Little Bear surprised this wolverine and the animal, not having seen a train before, ran down the tracks to try and escape it. But the train caught up and hit the wolverine so that it flew into the bush. He survived this, too, scampering away into the forest.

And, so, the wolverine kept destroying William’s traps, devouring the marten. For a month, William tracked it and set conabear traps for it, and for a month, the wolverine tried to heal from its wounds and kept escaping the wily William. But finally, its luck ran out. William and his son Ben finally managed to snare the animal. They found it, still alive, in a conabear trap one morning. Knowing how ferocious the animal was, they didn’t want to get near enough to club it, so Ben shot it in the neck to try and put it out of its misery. Once he did that, Ben approached the wolverine, now lying on its back, and poked it with a stick. The wolverine flew into a rage, managing to grab the stick in his paws and pulling it from Ben’s hands. That’s when William walked up, and finally ended the mighty struggle with one more bullet.

That’s a true story. And the lesson here? That’s an easy one. You got to be tough to live in Mushkegowuk. And wolverines are nicknamed demon bears for a reason.

I read this story a couple of weeks ago and I thought it was just another trapping tale, until I stumbled across a story about Joseph Boyden’s brother snowmobiling 800 miles to go to a Tragically Hip concert. Buried in the text of this story was another reference to this wolverine, giving it a location – which, as it turns out, is a place where wolverines haven’t been confirmed for many, many years.

What does it mean? One of the tricky things about science is the fact that we can never prove a negative. Are wolverines really gone from Labrador? Were they really extirpated from southern Ontario? We don’t know for sure – maybe they’ve been hanging out there all along and no one’s seen them. Or maybe this animal – hungry, injured, obviously trying to eke out a living – was the first of its kind to venture through the region since the days when Wolverine was still the great Trickster of the Cree. The wolverine in question, tough as it was, is dead now, and maybe no one will see one for another generation or two. On the other hand, maybe wolverines are coming back, making themselves more visible, ready to become part of our stories once again.

As part of that effort at visibility, here’s a video from the Scotchman Peaks wolverine project, where USFS recently captured a gulo on film in the Cabinet Mountains. And here is a video of Jasper the wolverine, of Chasing the Phantom fame, in an upcoming National Geographic television show, “America the Wild.” An episode entitled “Wolverine King” will air this Sunday, March 11th. A second clip features Jasper “rescuing” the host of the show from a contrived avalanche. Enjoy.

Wolverine Birthday Contest, and News Briefs

Wolverine Birthday is coming up on February 14th. This is the symbolic birthday of wolverine kits around the world, although in reality, of course, wolverine births range from January to March. Valentine’s Day makes a good reference point, though. I admit to a certain bias, but the birth of wolverine kits seems way more interesting than a fat little cupid and some chocolate. So to encourage Gulo fans around the world to broaden the celebration of love to include love for all species, I’m challenging readers to come up with ways to celebrate Wolverine Birthday in addition to Valentine’s Day. I’ll be hosting a Wolverine Birthday Party, which will include only foods that wolverines eat. Salmon, elk, and berries will be on the menu, and we’ll have a screening of Chasing the Phantom for an audience that hasn’t seen it before.  If you are also celebrating Wolverine Birthday, let me know how. You could even combine the two holidays, for example by creating a wolverine dinner date – climb or ski to the top of a snow-clad peak, and dig a week-old elk haunch out of the snow (only try this with someone you’ve been seeing for a while, and only if they have a sense of humor.) Or maybe just ski in wolverine habitat and see if you find any tracks. I leave the creativity to my readers. If you do decide to do something, leave a description of the event as a comment. The most creative endeavor will win a piece of original wolverine artwork. You have until February 21st to post your story.

In wolverine news, the most recent update for the Central Idaho Wolverine and Winter Recreation study is now available. The project is in the middle of its third field season, after two highly successful years collaring wolverines on the Payette, Boise, and Sawtooth National Forests.  Their rates of trapping success, particularly of denning females, leaves me envious and in awe. I haven’t participated in this project, but I’ve kept track of it from afar, and I am continually impressed not only with the number of wolverines that they monitor, but also by the fantastic support of the recreation community and local businesses. The report includes a couple of great images, including one that amply illustrates the use of sub-snow downfall at a denning site.

The tracking workshop hosted last week by Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation and Wild Things Unlimited seems to have been a success; they found tracks and collected DNA, reaffirming that citizen science can be valuable to research efforts. It was inspiring enough for a post and description by one enthusiastic participant. Wolverines are converting people at a pretty rapid clip, which provides an opportunity (for awareness-raising, for conservation, and for research) but also a potential liability (one of these days, I’ll get around to writing about the way in which charismatic species are the fossil fuel of the conservation movement….)

Canadian papers are picking up a story - three months after the fact – about a wolverine using a highway overpass in Banff National Park for the first time (these overpasses are landscaped and pretty posh, as far as wildlife crossings go.) Nine wolverine crossings have been recorded at nearby underpasses, but this is the first use of an overpass. The underpass crossings seem to have picked up over the past two years.  In the article, researcher Tony Clevenger states:

“We don’t know a lot about wolverines, but we do know there’s a learning curve, which we’ve seen for grizzly bears and black bears as well…Perhaps this is what we’re seeing, that it’s an initiation of a learning curve, that they’re starting to figure out what these things are and starting to use them.”

This made me start to think. We’ve “seen” wolverines following other wolverines around in GPS and telemetry data, and  scent marking might help wolverines navigate the landscape. If wolverines follow the scent-trails of other wolverines, scent-marking a route across an overpass or underpass might encourage wolverines to use the structure more quickly. Of course, acquiring wolverine scent would be tricky, so maybe this isn’t such a brilliant idea. But I’m betting that now that one wolverine has crossed, others will follow with increasing frequency, if there are others in the area.

Speaking of dispersal, High Country News published a thought-provoking piece about the popularity of corridors in conservation discourse, and the very real challenges to actually protecting them. I am a  landscape ecology geek and I love all of the thinking that goes into figuring out sizes of protected areas, island biogeography, and the configuration of dispersal corridors, but….I also worry that in taking an approach that relies heavily on technical problem-solving, we’re ignoring the bigger issue of how we relate to landscape and development. Maybe the focus should not be on setting aside limited areas for wildlife dispersal. Maybe the emphasis should be on setting aside limited areas for development instead, so that we maintain a permeable matrix of natural landscape by which human settlements are surrounded, instead of the other way around. (Yes, yes, I know I’m a raging idealist in addition to being a geek.)

That’s the wolverine news for early February. Looking forward to hearing how you celebrate Wolverine Birthday.

Wolverine News and Volunteer Opportunities

A quick review of wolverine news over the past week, as well as a volunteer opportunity for the coming weeks:

Wolverines made the news in Calgary, Canada, with a short video piece on a study of the impacts of the Trans-Canada highway on the species. The segment contains some photos of camera-trapped wolverines, and highlights a different camera-trap method from the one employed by Audrey Magoun in Oregon.

Earlier this week, I had an interesting conversation with Forrest McCarthy, who is the public lands director at Winter Wildlands Alliance and who has worked with several wolverine projects in the past. He pointed me to two interesting sites.  Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation is an organization dedicated to combining adventure in the wild with intellectual stimulation and exploration. In association with Wild Things Unlimited, ASC is hosting a wolverine and lynx tracking workshop from February 3-5.  Information is available here; at last glance, they still had room for volunteers. The work will take place on the Gallatin and Helena National Forests and requires solid backcountry skills.

Forrest also suggested that I check out Bedrock and Paradox, a blog maintained by Dave Chenault, who works with the ongoing Glacier National Park DNA and camera study. Some of the entries deal with the wolverine work (the most recent here), and the rest with interesting questions about outdoor gear and existential crisis (not necessarily always linked….) He’s a good writer and an interesting thinker, and since Doug Chadwick doesn’t have a blog, this might be the best way to keep up with events in Glacier gulo land.

The Idaho Panhandle wolverine project has stepped up its PR with regular blog updates every Wednesday – be sure to check these out, as they also offer the opportunity to keep up with an on-going project, as well as  insight into such esoterica as how to deal with a gigantic shipment of skinned beavers. Another account is available from the Idaho Conservation League. All of these pieces on wolverine work are heartening; it’s great that people are so inspired.

Finally, here’s an article from the New York Times on why introverts need solitude in order to do their best work. Is this related to wolverines? Kind of, because wolverines are the Solitary Creature par excellence, and, as a raging introvert, that’s one of the reasons I fell in love with them immediately. I’ll avoid the very long exploration of these connections and my own personal feelings about people who don’t understand the introvert mode of creativity, but suffice to say that this is on my mind because I’ve been having some issues (from the time I first went to kindergarten right on up through last week….) with people who think that doing good work and being a decent human being rely on formulaic group interactions and enforced collegiality. For people who truly are introverts, the choice is clear: do mediocre work by engaging in these enforced situations and keeping your own impulses suppressed, or do brilliant work by embracing the gulo model of existence and scaling the peaks that need to be scaled. I am not a creature of the lowlands, and I am not a herd animal, so I really appreciate public attention to this issue of different ways of getting things done. I know that associating this issue with wolverines is purely totemic, but once in a while it’s okay to admit that our fascination with the natural world is about the reflections and lessons that its features (and creatures) invoke.

Wolverines in Canada

More on Oregon wolverines shortly, but in the meantime, here’s an article about wolverines in Canada. The article begins with an account of the first confirmed instance of a wolverine using a wildlife overpass, near Banff National Park, and goes on to give a good summary of the state of knowledge about Canadian wolverines. Of note, Tony Clevenger, the head researcher responsible for monitoring wildlife use of highway crossing structures, states in the article:

“A strong argument can be made that wolverines – not bears and caribou – should be our focus when assessing the overall health of some ecosystems. They certainly may hold the key to our understanding of landscape fragmentation.”

This notion of wolverines, ecosystem health, and habitat fragmentation is worth considering in greater depth, but I’m going to defer that discussion until after the holidays. The article is worth the read. Enjoy!