Wolverine Birthday 2013

It’s February 14th once again, which, as everyone knows – or should know – is a very important day: Wolverine Birthday. This is the approximate date of birth for wolverines all over the world. Mid-February marks the descent of pregnant female wolverines into their snow dens, there to give birth and attempt to raise their kits, moving them uphill through a series of maternal dens until they are big enough to emerge. This happens sometime in late spring, usually mid-May, after which the kits hang out in their parents’ territories, sometimes alone, sometimes following their mother, sometimes their father, until they set out to find a territory of their own, about a year after they’re born.

A photoshop sketch of a wolverine mom and kits in their snow den, made several years ago and scrapped because it was way too cute, and the kits look weird (also, these guys are a few weeks old, not newborns.) But whatever. Happy Wolverine Birthday.

At least, this is the basic outline of the first year of a kit’s life. Bob Inman and Audrey Magoun published a paper in 2012 reviewing all recorded wolverine births, as well as information obtained from trapped carcasses of pregnant or lactating females, and the birth dates generally ranged from late January through mid-March, with reports from the 1950′s of wolverines giving birth as late as April. So the February 14th date is a handy mnemonic device that doesn’t necessarily reflect an absolute reality. The lack of an absolute reality is interesting, as are the reports of much later births earlier in the century and further to the north. Wolverines mate in the summer, but the fertilized embryos don’t implant until later. The exact triggers for implantation (the technical term is nidation) remain unclear, but probably have to do with the female’s body condition – without a certain level of fitness on the part of the female, the embryos will simply dissolve without ever implanting. The range of birth dates means that there is also a range of nidation dates, which could be solely dictated by the percent body fat of the female – or could also be triggered in part by environmental factors. Maybe, then, there’s some range of potential adaptation to changing climate conditions? This is speculative, of course, but if it turns out to be true, it’ll make my valentine’s day every year for the rest of my life.

All of this just complicates my agenda to turn an otherwise annoying holiday into something with real meaning, however. So for now, let’s just stick with February 14th, and I hope everyone out there is having a great Wolverine Birthday. More posts soon!

 

Quick Summary of Listing Rule, and Press Rundown

In (very) brief, and with promises of more detailed discussion to come: the 127-page proposed rule for listing wolverines as threatened under the ESA warrants an attentive reading by anyone interested in the species. The introduction summarizes the state of the science and discusses how and why weight is given to certain studies, and in and of itself, this is valuable to consider. For those who are just looking for the major points, though – wolverines are threatened due to climate change. Reduction in suitable denning habitat, which is projected to contract by up to 63% in the coming decades, is of major concern, but the synergistic effects of climate change and other threats – notably, trapping in Montana – are also referenced. While acknowledging that trapping has not provided a serious threat in the past and probably wouldn’t in the future in the absence of climate change, the rule states that ongoing trapping in Montana is not viable for wolverines, especially when inadvertent take and by-catch are taken into consideration. Recreation, including snowmobile use, is not deemed to be of concern. A reintroduced population in Colorado could substantially bolster the Rocky Mountain population and increase genetic viability over the long term, but this population would be given 10(j) status as an ‘experimental, nonessential population,’ to reduce management conflicts. The comment period on the proposed rule is open through May, and the USFWS seeks input from people with scientific knowledge and meaningful contributions to an understanding of management challenges. In a single paragraph, that’s the gist of the rule.

The circulation of the proposed rules for wolverine listing have generated a flurry of press – this is just a rundown for people who are interested in keeping up with what’s being written. At 10:00 this morning, there were three news articles on wolverines listed on Google; at 8:30 this evening, there are 233. That’s probably more press than wolverines have gotten in a single day, ever.

The official US Fish and Wildlife Service press release summarizes the rule and its implications. A summary at OnEarth Magazine of wolverine conservation is a good overview of the situation, with some quotes from Jeff Copeland, although the article is in serious need of some copyediting (punctuation issues lead the piece to suggest that sheep are carnivores, and that wolverine populations are greater at the southern edge of their range, and – most entertainingly – Gulo gulo is stated to mean “glutinous glutton,” which leads to images of wolverine-shaped loaves of bread.) The Huffington Post and Fox News (You can search it on your own; I refuse to provide a link to this outlet, even if they are covering this story), published an AP article detailing the rule and featuring commentary from various wolverine and legislative authorities, discussing both the potential reintroduction to Colorado, and the fact that the decision cannot be used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions despite the fact that climate change is the primary threat. This piece has appeared in papers in Canada, across the US, in the Guardian in the UK, and as far abroad as New Zealand.

The announcement earned an article in the New York Times, and a mention on the New York Times energy blog, a full piece on Reuters (and also on Reuters’ UK site), and an article in the Los Angeles Times. In wolverine territory, the AP piece appeared in regional newspapers through Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The Jackson Hole News and Guide put together a good piece that touches on the issue of the poorly-known wolverine population in Wyoming, the status of gulos in the Tetons, and possible avenues by which the Colorado reintroduction would proceed. The Great Falls Tribune has an article that highlights statements from Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks regarding trapping – tentatively, and reading between the lines, it suggests that they are going to take their stand around wolf trapping, defending it against concerns about incidental take of wolverines, rather than around wolverine trapping itself, but we’ll see what happens. The Yellowstone Gate, featuring news from Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, has a piece that details the times, dates, and locations for a series of public hearings on wolverine listing that are part of the process of finalizing the rule. In Idaho, the Spokesman Review has a blog post on the decision.

In Colorado, several pieces of press have appeared recently in the Summit County Voice, including a piece last week that highlighted the interconnected concerns of wolverines and the ski industry, and a piece today featuring commentary on the rule and the proposed reintroduction. Another short piece appeared at Aspen public radio, focusing primarily on the reintroduction prospects. The Durango Herald has an article about the proposed reintroduction too.

Washington state has cultivated its enthusiasm for wolverines with several pieces over the past few weeks, including this one, in the Seattle Times, discussing the rebounding wolverine population in the Cascades. This article features another video of a growling wolverine in a trap. The foamy drool in the video is pretty typical of wolverines in traps, so don’t worry that the animal is rabid.

Finally, from several weeks ago and not at all related to today’s decision, there’s a great Alaska Dispatch piece on wolverines in Chugatch State Park. If only we all lived in places where our state parks were big enough and cold enough to host a population of wolverines.

I’m sure that the press coverage will continue to snowball, and I will try to keep up. Let me know of any other pieces that I’ve failed to post. I’m out in the field for the next few days but will try to post a few thoughts here soon.

Proposed Listing and Reintroduction Rules Available

Although it won’t officially be entered into the Federal Register until Monday, the proposed rule to list wolverines as threatened under the ESA is now available in .pdf format on the Federal Register website. Accompanying this proposed rule is a second proposed rule regarding experimental-nonessential status (10j, in short form) for reintroduced populations in Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico.

I’m currently reading through these documents so my analysis is not yet available – I’m initially confused by the inclusion of Wyoming in the 10j rule, since there are breeding populations there, but I’ll wait to say anything until I’ve actually read the full rules. Stay tuned, and in the meantime enjoy reading them yourselves.

 

 

A Question of Scale

Two weeks ago, Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks and the coalition of environmental groups who sued the state to end wolverine trapping withdrew from a hearing that was scheduled for January 10th, after the USFWS indicated that they will recommend wolverines for listing under the ESA. This meant the total closure of the 2012-2013 trapping season and, pending the ESA recommendation, possible closure of wolverine trapping in Montana until the species recovers. The relief among wolverine enthusiasts, advocates, and researchers was tempered by Montana’s announcement that they will pursue an exemption if the species is listed, in order to continue to trap. Presumably, the legal argument for an exemption comes from the fact that, in the 2010 “warranted but precluded” decision, climate change is listed as the primary threat, with trapping as a secondary factor. Advocates issued responses (here and here) condemning Montana’s decision and deriding MFWP for “brash intransigence” and for making politicized decisions that ignore the “best available science.”

While all of this has been unfolding, I’ve been involved in some wider discussions, and some private consideration, about what science is, what it means when an individual claims to do science or to be a scientist, and the consequences of granting prestige to ‘science-based decision-making,’ especially in a culture where scientific literacy remains hazy. I could take this post in several directions, all of which I hope to eventually address on this blog, but I am going to focus here on the immediate questions at hand: What is going on with these competing claims about managing wolverines based on the “best available science?”  What is the “best available science?” And is it possible that no one is incompetent in this scenario, and that two sets of science, with evidently conflicting results, are both correct?

Here’s the background – MFWP contends that it has managed wolverines and continues to manage wolverines based on ‘sound science,’ and that years of data from track surveys and from carcasses turned in by trappers suggest that the population is healthy enough to bear the low levels of mortality caused by trapping (the current season is set at five individuals, with a female subquota of three.) They claim that wolverines have continued to expand their range despite a season that until a few years ago had no quota. They are also defending a methodology that they developed at a time when no one else was keeping track of wolverines at all and when there was very little precedent – or technology – available for more sophisticated studies. This methodology was applied, and apparently worked, for decades, and institutions are slow to change systems that have worked.

Over the past 15 years, however, a set of studies, funded and implemented by federal agencies (including the Forest Service and the National Park Service) and non-profit research organizations (including my host institution, the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, as well as the Wolverine Foundation, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and a number of others) have employed much more sophisticated technology and analytical methods to investigate wolverine populations in the Rockies. Many of these studies have been based primarily in Montana, but they have also documented reproductive wolverine populations in Wyoming, Idaho, and the Cascades, and dispersers as far abroad as Colorado, California, and eastern Oregon. These studies suggest two things: the wolverine population in the western US is indeed continuing to expand, and it is also under threat from shrinking snowpack as temperatures increase in the face of climate change. Taken together, the research from both MFWP and these wider studies paints a striking and complicated picture: a story of a species that is poised at a tipping point between a triumphant, unassisted return to habitat from which it was extirpated a century before, and a coming century in which the species might suffer a second extirpation, much more final than the last. These stories both seem to be true, and like everything else about the species, the conservation debate is therefore uniquely challenging.

Both sides of the discussion want to default to well-worn arguments: the advocates claim critical danger (in some cases, erroneously, because of ‘declining populations’) and the pro-trapping managers claim that the rebounding population indicates that there is no problem with removing such a small number of animals each year. I obviously am a biased individual in this debate, and those biases run too deep for me to be truly objective, but I hope that I can make an honest attempt to illustrate why we need to push for a different understanding of conservation when we think about wolverines, and why that understanding can encompass both of these perspectives and still end up requiring the closure of the trapping season. So let’s start, today, with how you do ecological research. Later this week, I’ll get into the implications of the science that has been done, but for now, I’ll focus on the question of scale.

When you ask an ecological question, scale is one of the most important and immediate parameters to define. There are several types of scale to consider, and the most obvious is geographical scale. For example, if you’re interested in wolverines, are you interested in a single population node (a mountain range with at least one reproductive female), several interacting population nodes (say, the several occupied mountain ranges of southwestern Montana and northwestern Wyoming), or the entire metapopulation of the US Rockies, the Cascades, and maybe even the Sierra Nevada? You can ask the question “Is the population healthy?” at one geographical scale, and get a very different answer at that scale than you might at another scale.

In the world we live in, we also have to consider questions of jurisdiction, and whether or not we are spatially bounding our questions based on political borders. If we are, we have to ask whether imposing these artificial boundaries on our research limits the results – in other words, if we’re asking questions about twenty population nodes in a metapopulation that contains a hundred population nodes, are our answers applicable to the entire population? Or just to our study nodes? And if we ask only about the population nodes within our jurisdiction, are we confident that we understand the relationships among the study nodes and the nodes outside the study area?

Scale is also temporal, and temporal scale is directional, so your questions and your answers will be further bounded by whether you ask about trends that have occurred in the distant past or the recent past, and trends that you predict in the immediate future or the distant future. The question “Has the wolverine population in Montana been healthy enough to bear trapping in the past century?,” is substantially different from “Is the wolverine population healthy enough to bear trapping for the next two decades?” And that question, in turn, is different from the query, “Will trapping now have an effect on wolverine populations a century from now?”

These are management questions, not questions about simple knowledge (“What happened to the wolverines of Maryland, Virginia, Spain, and the Czech Republic at the end of the Pleistocene?” is an example of a question that is mostly about knowledge, with very few management implications) and at this point in the post, there’s an implicit subtext involving the influence of values on science and management, but we’ll get into that later. Right now, I’m going to assert that wolverines exist in a metapopulation that is interconnected throughout the Rockies, and that we must ask questions at that scale, and with a forward-looking temporal orientation, if we are going to figure out how to conserve the species.

MFWP has been asking questions about the population in Montana, based primarily on data and trends from the past, and without a clear articulation of how those trends might change in the face of climate change. The broader body of science conducted by other agencies and groups has been asking forward-looking questions, with data-collection frequently occurring at limited scales (Glacier National Park, the Greater Yellowstone region, the Payette National Forest) but always with a view to extracting broader trends in addition to information about specific populations. Papers like Copeland’s 2010 article on climate change and snowpack, Inman’s recent work on habitat modeling, and Schwartz’s papers on genetics all come out of large-scale questions.

Wolverines are in a unique situation: a once wide-ranging species was inadvertently extirpated and then began a process of recolonization that was monitored for decades by a state management agency at a small scale, and then other scientists began larger-scale studies that included some speculation about the future, and the results have entered the conservation debate at a moment when the trends of the past will be skewed by unprecedented climate disruption in the future. If we hope to protect the species, the science that we look to for management insight will have to be multi-scale, and it will have to integrate past trends with what we know about wolverines’ habitat requirements and our understanding of what will happen to that habitat in the future. There are, of course, serious political considerations at play in the discussion as well, but from a purely scientific standpoint, this is how these different studies operate and interact – not entirely at odds with each other, but at different scales, using different methodologies, and looking in different directions.

This is a pretty basic analysis. I have a series of doodles, constructed while watching the series Firefly during an epic descent into purely visual thinking (more about that later, too), which attempt to illustrate a model that encompasses both sets of science and that also tries to create a working picture of a wolverine metapopulation from 1900 through about 2100. Needless to say, it’s pretty rough, but if I can make it comprehensible, I might put a version up here. In the meantime, here’s another article, concise but nuanced, that also features a video of F5 in one of the live-traps in Glacier. This film highlights the endearing nature of the species. Enjoy.

Wolverines to be Listed as Threatened?

With apologies for the long silence, here’s an article in the Missoulian, more or less officially confirming news that we’ve been expecting – wolverines will be listed as threatened later this month. The news comes as part of a district’s judge’s decision not to hear a case, scheduled for January 10th, about the Montana trapping season: “District Judge Jeffrey Sherlock ruled it made little sense to debate a trapping season that was soon to become moot.” More details are available in an article from the Great Falls Tribune, which makes clear that the judge signed an order ending the 2012-2013 trapping season, even without the hearing, and that Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks decided not to fight the decision. In another piece in the Helena Independent Record, however, FWP indicated that they do plan to contest the lawsuit, should it go forward in March or April of this year. If wolverines are listed, though, today’s decision should represent the permanent closure of Montana’s trapping season – except in the unlikely event that we can slow down the effects of climate change enough to protect the population, or in the equally unlikely event that science somehow determines that trapping is not a threat despite the risks of climate change. This would be scientifically tricky to uphold, though, since removal of reproductive females from the population has the potential to significantly disrupt source nodes within the metapopulation, especially when habitat is decreasing.

More about this soon; I’m in the middle of several wolverine related projects (naturally) and haven’t had much time to write.  Meanwhile, here are a few other articles that have appeared over the past month:

NRCC Executive Director Jason Wilmot weighs in on the upcoming decision in a Greenwire article. This, too, basically stated that a “threatened” status was recommended; I plead guilty to being too absorbed in hanging out with my family over the holidays to post.

The Billing’s Gazette profiles the WCS wolverine study and the work of Bob Inman. The descriptions of the rigors of wolverine field work are pretty accurate, so if you’re contemplating a career in wolverine biology, ponder these carefully. He also raises an important but generally neglected question: the status and distribution of wolverines in Wyoming. This could be critical for a fully interconnected Rocky Mountain population, particularly if wolverines ever make it to Colorado. I hope that the state of Wyoming takes note, and prioritizes a study immediately. Bob also raises the issue of the inherently transboundary and transjurisdictional nature of wolverine conservation, which I hope will provide us with a new model for conservation of widely-dispersed metapopulations.

Much further afield, here’s an update on the tour of Michigan’s last known wolverine, tracked by teacher Jeff Ford for several years until her death in 2009.

Finally, here’s an interesting piece from Smithsonian, looking at adaptive plasticity in tree frogs in Panama. What does this have to do with wolverines in the Rockies? Adaptive plasticity is the range of behavior available to a species in light of environmental variation – including changes in climate. Since we cannot, as a society, muster the will to do anything about emissions, the continued presence of wolverines in the Rockies may well depend on the species’ degree of adaptive plasticity. This is one of the most important aspects of the comparative work in Mongolia and the US, too.

So there it is, for now. Enjoy the good news – but remember that putting a species on the list is not the equivalent of actually conserving it, and that the challenge for wolverines (and for other species) will be moving from symbolic protection to actual management strategies in the years to come.

note: I originally posted this as “Wolverines to be Listed as Threatened,” statement, not question. I was reiterating the headline of the first article that my friend sent me; I don’t have independent confirmation of this, and on reflection, I shouldn’t have stated this as a fact. Although the decision is due out sometime soon, and although we have indications that they will be recommended for protections, I do not actually know that they will. Hopefully this hasn’t caused any confusion or bad feeling, and hopefully readers will forgive the lapse in the usually-rigorous standards on this blog. 

The Art of Wolverine War

For years, I’ve whispered two secret, wolverine-related prayers to the great karmic mechanisms that pivot the universe. These pleas have, to some degree, contradicted each other, but they have been equally sincere. The first had to do with keeping our research animals out of harm’s way during the Montana trapping season. The second involved hoping that the wildlife advocacy community had enough wits not to escalate the wolverine’s profile in a way that recruited the species as a mascot for pre-existing conservation conflicts and thereby created an anti-wolverine constituency.

In 2006, when I first volunteered on a wolverine research project, the species’ public profile was miniscule. By 2008, when I began grant-writing for gulo work in the Yellowstone region and started establishing my own project in Mongolia, the wolverine research community had begun to discuss how to introduce the wolverine to the wider American public in a way that would build a broad-based constituency and that – crucially – would not repeat the divisive mistakes that had been made in previous carnivore conservation efforts. We knew that the wolverine’s profile was increasing and, with Doug Chadwick’s book, Gianna Savoie’s PBS documentary, and a new listing decision all due out by 2010, we anticipated an explosion of interest. The last thing anyone wanted was to see the wolverine shoved into the same predictable narrative track that has plagued the West for decades now – a quick path, for Gulo gulo, to becoming just another symbolic totem in an on-going identity war. I had looked this animal in the eye, I’d read all the science, and I’d developed an incredible respect for the researchers. I’d also spent enough time with hunters and trappers in Mongolia and the US to understand that most of these individuals  respected the landscape and wildlife, even if they did so in a way that was very different from my own relationship with these entities. I wanted them to be part of the constituency as well. I wondered if there was a chance that we might be able to convey some of this rich picture in a way that allowed wolverines to become a different kind of carnivore conservation story, one that respected the integrity of the animal, the science, and the scientists, instead of one in which an endangered species was lobbed around like a hand grenade in the service of people’s existential anxieties and moral agendas. When I started the blog in 2009, I did it because I’d already been writing about wolverines for a while and I wanted to continue to do so in a way that experimented with a new medium and allowed some degree of critique of my work. But I also started the blog because I wanted a nuanced narrative out there in the public domain well before the advocacy community and the states’ rights folks began honing their blades for the fight. If we were lucky – if the advocates in particular played it smart – I thought we had a chance of avoiding a conflict and also gaining some degree of support for the species.

A few tricky, treacherous regions were already on the map when I began writing. One was the prospect of an ESA listing decision, which is high profile and always invites litigation. Another was trapping, which is a cultural activity for some and a moral abomination for others; the scientific ambiguity around wolverine trapping was unlikely to calm anyone’s outrage if the issue was pushed. A third challenge was recreation, particularly snowmobiles, which, according to anecdotal evidence, might pose a threat to denning female wolverines; there was no proof, but the advocacy community, already opposed to snowmobiles, began to make some claims that wolverines were definitely sensitive to disturbance. This situation was partially defused when the snowmobile community came forward with funding for a study in Idaho, which is entering its fourth year and yielding good data, although the results have yet to be published. Finally, there was a minor issue around fear that wolverines might depredate on livestock, although it is clear from global research that this is really only an issue if you have a widely scattered herd of small, semi-feral reindeer in your care.

The array of players and issues felt like the set-up for a round of aikido combat, one in which the advocacy community would never need to go on the offensive, but only artfully step to one side and let the energy of any objections to wolverine conservation dissipate and fall flat in light of the fact that wolverines are entirely non-threatening. The match might involve a few artful blocks and deflections, but on the whole it hardly seemed to call for the kind of brutal medieval siege warfare tactics that have been employed (by everyone…) around, for example, wolf conservation.

To the credit of a number of people in the advocacy community, wolverine conservation did go forward with minimal combative rhetoric. When the advocates spoke up, it tended to be more or less in the mode of blocking or deflecting. The lawsuit following the 2008 ‘not warranted’ decision was  legitimate, because that particular ruling seemed so politically motivated. The lawsuit following the 2010 ‘warranted but precluded’ decision dealt with a range of species on the candidate list, and avoided putting wolverines in the spotlight. Conservation groups sponsored and hosted a number of talks by wolverine researchers, which focused on the science and the inspiration without getting anyone riled up. Rumblings about trapping and snowmobiles remained at a low level, and advocates tended to be respectful of the lack of evidence in the scientific literature. Rumors circulated that a decision for wolverines was due out sometime in early 2013, and if that decision was in favor of listing, then wolverines would gain protection with minimal controversy – something almost unheard of in large carnivore conservation in the West. All we had to do was keep a low profile until then, and if the decision went in the other direction, then it might be time to consider new action.

So it was with substantial horror that I watched a particular faction of the advocacy community roll out its catapults and trebuchets and crusader knights and line them up for unnecessary battle as 2012 drew to a close. In the space of two months, two lawsuits filed by advocacy groups sought to accelerate the listing decision and put an end to trapping. In the wake of the lawsuits, animal rights groups started petitions to submit to the state of Montana; in some cases, the petitions were factually inaccurate and insulting to management agencies. All too predictably, these tactics brought a buzz of negative attention to wolverines, as well as the sort of self-righteous moral support that, publicly aired, tends to exacerbate conservation divides rather than accomplish anything useful. This situation can be tracked in the comments that people leave on online articles, and although I realize that comment boards tend to amplify and simplify polarized dialogues, it’s still striking – and disappointing – to see the same old arguments appearing more frequently in these responses to wolverine-related media.

Here’s the kind of dialogue – these brief examples are from an article in the Missoulian – that I am particularly interested in avoiding:

“…The kind of subhuman who would find recreation in this kind of evil torture of one of our most magnificent creatures is not someone whose interests we should have anything but utter disgust for. To place the life of even one wolverine beneath the depraved motives of these fools is a calumny on the very concept of civilization.“

This sort of assertion results in inaccurate and inflamatory responses like this:

“Wolverines are not endangered! They exist in large numbers all over the northern hemisphere. Montana just happens to be on the southern edge of their habitat. This is just another excuse to further the agendas of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, the Wildlands Network and Agenda 21. The re-wilding of Northwest Montana and the reduction of people in the region and shutting us out of public lands. The wolf, grizzly bear, wolverine are key species to bring it about. Doubt it? Do an in depth study on these groups and learn the facts.”

It’s worrying to see wolverines lumped in with wolves and bears as the objects of elaborate conspiracy theories. This was certainly not the case a year or so ago, when articles about wolverines were greeted with support, or at worst a vague lack of understanding, but seldom with outright opposition or invocation of anti-federal arguments. Again, I realize that comment boards are not the best medium for doing social science research, that thoughtful people make thoughtful comments, and that trolls are just trolls. I also realize that there are a lot of rational people out there who don’t engage in this kind of argument. Nevertheless, I am sure that these dialogues represent some sample of the broader population, and I hope that we don’t reap the fight that the more litigious members of the advocacy community have been so diligently and unnecessarily trying to sow.

Conservation is not about minimizing conflict – it’s about accomplishing conservation objectives, and sometimes that will involve contention. Lest it seem like I am trying to appease people and smooth away a fight just for the sake of avoiding conflict, I want to clarify that I do see the point of taking a stand when that stand is necessary and there are no other options. But wolverine conservation efforts in late 2012 did not present such a situation. Wolverine conservation efforts in late 2012 presented a situation in which smart diplomacy was a good and viable option. I wonder whether, for some people in the environmental community, the fight itself, the need to think of oneself as a warrior, has become a greater objective than the conservation outcomes. I understand this impulse, it’s deeply seductive and I have been known to succumb to it once in a while, but in the end, if you frame yourself as a warrior, you have to have a war, or you don’t have an identity. And if you have a war, you have to have an enemy, and that enemy has to contain some essential identity that opposes your own. If you go looking for an enemy, you’re certain to find – perhaps even create – one. The same thing applies when you go looking for a fight.

I had hoped that, for wolverines, we could talk about conservation in a way that rebuilt some of the lost social capital of the wolf era – and again, there’s a reason for this, besides just aversion to conflict. Wolverine conservation needs a broad-based constituency not because conflict is bad, but because the wolverine population exists at a scale, and within an embedded set of conservation challenges, that require support from everyone in order for wolverines to succeed. Wolverine conservation is not as simple as stopping a single destructive activity like trapping or logging or development. It’s about connectivity across the entire Western US, and it’s about climate change. Reducing direct mortality is part of this picture, reducing disturbance to denning females is part of this picture – but when those discussions are over, we still need every single person who cares about the outdoors, in any capacity and by whatever standards, on the side of wolverines in order to address the much larger and more complicated issues facing climate sensitive wildlife and ecosystems. And just as we need landscape connectivity, we also need institutional connectivity – that is, functional relationships among state management agencies, various conservation groups (including hunting groups), the federal government, researchers, and supportive individuals. We need these relationships to work because wolverines move across state lines, across jurisdictions, across the physical territory of so many different communities with so many different cultural affiliations. Creating divisions among these groups isn’t smart; it’s the equivalent of setting out a line of traps or building a six lane superhighway through a likely dispersal corridor. The socio-cultural ecosystem is just as important as the physical ecosystem, and you can’t protect one while compromising the other.

Wolverines are powerful little animals that live outsized lives across vast geographical scales. If you want to practice the art of war on behalf of wolverines, every action that you take, everything you say in support of wolverines, must be taken or said with this scale in mind. I’m deeply appreciative of the many people I know who have taken this approach thus far, but at this moment of escalating attention – a moment likely to continue through the January 10th hearing and the listing decision – a few cautions bear repeating. No matter what your personal moral outlook on certain issues, remember that wolverine conservation isn’t about enacting (let alone legislating) your own sense of identity. Even if you loathe trapping, don’t make wolverines a platform for fighting about it, or else you do a disservice to the species. It’s fine, of course, to say that you’re supportive of the decision to suspend wolverine trapping, especially if you acknowledge that this is your emotional response – and I am most definitely happy, because this does, in fact, constitute an answer to my other appeal to karma – but don’t gloat. It’s fine to talk about why science suggests that trapping might pose a threat, but it’s not okay to say that science proves your moral position. If you find yourself tempted to rant about evil trappers, or Agenda 21, or to employ the phrase “calumny on the very concept of civilization” in service of either side of this discussion (or ever, for that matter), take a deep breath and refrain. Say a private thank you to the universe. Put the catapult back into storage. Practice inviting someone you might previously have considered an enemy to talk strategy for building a broad-based wolverine constituency. That is what it’s going to take to keep this species on the landscape, and in the end, maybe the best warrior is the person who knows when to put the weapons down and engage in a little metamorphosis instead.

More Press Coverage for M56

Here’s another article about M56, Colorado’s lone (known) wolverine. Colorado papers seem to revisit this issue every few months, and this piece doesn’t contain much new information, although it does cite a definite date for the listing decision – January 18th, 2013. I’ve been way out of the Colorado loop and the listing loop since I went to Mongolia in July, so I don’t know if this is definite. Shawn Sartorius, who is in charge of the USFWS status review, also goes on record to say, “It does not look like wolverines are particularly sensitive to human activities.” This is good news for wolverines and for the ski industry. Bob Inman, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s wolverine biologist, emphasizes the need to see ski resorts as endangered by the same factors that might threaten wolverines, and suggests that resorts might serve as allies in wolverine education and conservation efforts. If a Colorado introduction does go forward, it’s good to contemplate the prospect of a conflict-free carnivore – an anomaly in the West, but one that we should celebrate.

The evolution of certitude about how many wolverines are in the Rockies is interesting to watch; when I first started hanging out with wolverine biologists, those biologists refused to give numbers to reporters, even though that was inevitably the first question the reporters asked. These days, the numbers are raining down like particularly confusing confetti. This year alone I’ve seen claims ranging from 25 (this reflects a conflation of effective population and total population; the former represents the number of breeding adults contributing to the gene pool) to 300. This article claims that 250 ‘survivors’ (actually, they are probably recolonizers following a 20th-century extirpation) are clustered in the northern US Rockies. Does anyone really know how many wolverines are out there? No. And even if we did, wolverine survival on the landscape is not purely a matter of numbers. As we move forward with conservation plans, I hope people can detach themselves from commitment to a number, and start to talk about demographics instead.

In any case, I hope that if a reintroduction does happen, it happens in time for M56 to become part of the effective population. I know that’s sentimental on my part, and it’s just as likely that he’ll get booted out of his territory by some younger, stronger male, but… poor guy, he’s been hanging out alone for the past four years. He needs some company.

 

 

 

Monks in Bozeman, and Environmentalists in Court

A delegation of Mongolian Buddhist monks arrived in Bozeman last week, and will be in town until the 20th as part of the Tributary Fund’s work on encouraging environmental leadership within religious communities. I will be talking with the monks in a small group session about the potential for monasteries to participate in environmental monitoring (including monitoring of wolverines, pikas, and other climate sensitive wildlife), and on the 17th TTF will host a public discussion at the Bozeman library to talk about citizen science in a broader sense. I hope that we will have a chance to talk with more specificity about wolverine citizen science and about the differences between citizen science in the US and citizen science in Mongolia. Please join us if you are in town; the library discussion session is a brown bag lunch, and runs from 11:45 to 1:00. As a bonus, my friend and colleague Marissa Smith, environmental anthropologist extraordinaire, who has accompanied me (with great patience and endurance) on several Mongolian wolverine expeditions, will also be there to contribute to the discussion.

In other news, environmental advocacy groups have apparently launched another lawsuit against the state of Montana, as part of an on-going attempt to shut down the trapping season. I’ve already written extensively about this issue, and I have several draft posts about the broader issue of the strategies that the environmental advocacy community  employs around endangered species protection, but they are not ready for posting. Instead, I defer to friend and colleague Arthur Middleton, who explores this issue in a recent column about wolf conservation in the Wall Street Journal (you can get free access by searching for the title of the piece and clicking on the search result). Wolves and wolverines are different creatures with different sets of biological and social challenges, and we are very fortunate that wolverines create none of the problems for people that wolves and bears do. But the point about the destructiveness of endless litigation remains the same.

Montana Judge Upholds Wolverine Listing Lawsuit

Very briefly, here’s something for people following wolverine news in minute detail. Apparently a group of environmental organizations sued the US Fish and Wildlife Service, asserting that the warranted-but-precluded decision of 2010 was incorrect because it evaluated Montana’s trapping season as only a secondary threat to the wolverine population in the Lower 48 (climate change being the primary threat.) The USFWS responded by urging dismissal of the lawsuit since they are already on track to issue a final decision on the wolverine’s status by sometime in 2013, possibly as early as January. A judge refused to dismiss the lawsuit yesterday, but ruled that the lawsuit will be considered moot if the USFWS issues a decision by January 18th, 2013. The judge also ordered that the USFWS must tell the court whether it will issue a January decision on or before December 14th – the day before Montana’s trapping season begins.

It’s exciting to have a potential date on which the decision will be issued, and I look forward to hearing whether this is a definite deadline. The actual media article – widely published in news outlets throughout the west – is pretty short, so we’ll have to wait for more information. There’s are a few more details at Ralph Maughn’s Wildlife News blog. Maughn’s post discusses some of the reasoning behind this lawsuit and the timing – mainly having to do with the implications of both the wolverine trapping season, and possible accidental deaths as wolf trapping is opened statewide. I don’t have time or inclination for further commentary on trapping, advocacy, strategy, and lawsuits, so I’ll leave you all to your own opinions. I will say, though, that I was recently face-to-face with a wolf trap out in the Mongolian countryside, and the park ranger with whom I was talking at the time said that wolverines are caught, with some regularity, in wolf traps here. I’ve heard the same story again and again from herders for the past three years. So while I’m not sure that constant lawsuits are the best way to go, there may be some cause to worry about wolverines getting into wolf traps. Of course, that assumes that wolverines and wolves are using habitat the same way in Mongolia and in the US, which doesn’t seem to be the case. I hope wolverines stay well out of the way as wolf trapping goes forward in the States.

Wolverines (and smaller friends) around Dalai Eej

Wolverine geography in northern Mongolia: the Sayan mountains enclose the Darhad Valley to the west, while Lake Hovsgol, little sister of Siberia’s Lake Baikal, is to the east. East of the Lake is an intriguing area of low forested hills, which may or may not host a breeding population of wolverines.

The mountains around the Darhad Valley are likely one of the strongholds of Mongolian wolverines, and most of our fieldwork will take place in this region over the next couple of years. To the east of the Darhad, separated by the Horidol Sardag range of the Sayan Mountains, is Lake Hovsgol, the vast expanse of water that Mongolians refer to as Dalai Eej, the Mother Ocean. At the southern tip of the lake, the town of Hatgal hosts the central administration of the regions’ several protected areas, including Lake Hovsgol National Park, the Horidol Sardag Protected Area, the Ulaan Taiga Protected Area, and the Shisged River zone. Ulaan Taiga and the Shishged were designated this year, and encompass nearly half our proposed route for the upcoming spring 2013 ski trip; the Horidol Sardag is also on the route. The presence of so many protected areas – particularly the two new ones – rendered some face-to-face diplomacy with the protected areas’ director necessary, in the interest of getting permits and of guaranteeing the long-term viability of capacity building exercises with rangers and the community. So last week I found myself in Hatgal, which I had last visited ten years ago on a snow leopard research trip. I was interviewing about wolverines around the southern part of the Lake, but securing good will from official quarters for gulo research was the larger objective.

Meetings and interviews went well, and I also spent a few days out in the relative wilderness on the east edge of Dalai Eej. The habitat here is much lower than that to the west of the lake, but for years we’ve heard unconfirmed secondhand reports that wolverines are living and breeding over here. Five interviews conducted over several days suggest that this opinion is widely held by people living on the east side of the Lake, although I didn’t see any pelts and the one woman who told me she had one showed up the next day with what turned out to be a manul (Otocolobus manul, also known as a Pallas cat.) I had the opportunity to interview one of the Lake Hovsgol park rangers, as well as several older people, who seemed somewhat better informed and who identified wolverines from among the assorted pictures that I carry with me. The evidence was  ambiguous but there are rumors of more concrete proof – more on that to follow.

I spent the last night of my brief trek in the home of a shaman, and when I left, his wife gave me a bag of aruul, “to eat on the road.” Aruul, which is dried yogurt sometimes mixed with flour and sugar, is sustaining, but also potentially tooth-cracking and monotonous. It’s also heavy. When I reached the last small pass leading back towards Hatgal, I climbed up to the ovoo, the shrine to the Owners of the area, and left three pieces of aruul and a roll as a thanks for the safe trip. I was lighting incense when I noticed that the roll had disappeared. The culprit soon put in a second appearance, and then a third, and then a fourth, as it efficiently made away with the shaman’s aruul. It was a smile-inducing end to the trip, and a reminder that sometimes the little wildlife is just as interesting as the bigger and more impressive sort.

Ovoo with three pieces of aruul stacked in front of miniature stupa, and small opportunist just below.

Rodents are not my strong point, but I think this is either a Mongolian silver vole (Alticola semicanus) or a large eared mountain vole (A. macrotis)

Two down, one to go.

On that note, I am going to be taking a break from this blog for the next week or so. I have to do some writing about Mongolia and conservation issues in a broader sense and so, like my friend the vole, I’m holing up and remaining incommunicado until I get some of my ideas sorted out. I will be updating my other blog, which deals with Mongolian conservation and culture; I’ll post a link to that once I start working. This blog will resume regular updates soon.