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.

 

 

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.

Montana’s Trapping Season Suspended

A judge in Montana today placed the state’s wolverine trapping season on hold until at least January 10th as the court prepares to hear arguments that may close the trapping season permanently – always assuming that an endangered species listing doesn’t preempt the process, since a listing decision is due out in mid-January. The trapping season was due to open tomorrow. The notice is up on the Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks website, and also on the Western Environmental Law website. A longer article from the San Fransisco Chronicle gives further details. At posting time, articles continue to pop up from various sources around the West, so google it if you want to keep up with all the reporting.

Although I am not philosophically opposed to hunting or trapping, and although I remain skeptical of endless litigation as a means of accomplishing environmental objectives, I’m also not going to pretend that I am anything but pleased to hear this. Montana’s wolverine population has continued to expand despite a trapping season that, until a few years ago, was unlimited, so FWP’s contention that management has been based on sound science is reasonable. As the effects of climate change accelerate, however, the resilience of the population may diminish, and a pause to talk about this issue is probably a good idea. Maybe we will find that there are indeed enough wolverines in Montana that offtake of five animals per year – the current quota, although actual harvest tends to be lower – is sustainable. But let’s make sure of that, and let’s take the time to consider the extent to which extra dispersers contribute to genetic diversity in other states, and how connectivity is likely to be affected by diminishing snowpack, and what the implications are of removing reproductive females from the landscape, before continuing.

I know that trappers, for whom wolverines are a sort of holy grail, will be disappointed, and I know that environmentalists, for whom rare carnivores are a different sort of holy grail, will be excited. I’d ask environmentalists to please take this as an opportunity to focus on the science and on communicating about climate issues, and to be conscientious about avoiding negative comments about trappers and trapping in general, or about the acumen of wildlife management agencies. Wolverines are awe-inspiring animals and although some people are inevitably going to be frustrated by this decision, we’d like to see as broad-based a constituency as possible for wolverine conservation – and we definitely don’t want a dedicated group of people opposed to it because wolverines have become a symbol of environmental moral hauteur. Likewise, I hope that trappers who are interested in one day getting a wolverine will express their respect for the animal by prioritizing its continued presence on the landscape, if the science says that is what is needed.

This doesn’t mean that the Montana wolverine trapping season is over forever, and it certainly doesn’t indicate anything about a listing decision, but it does give wolverines, including F3, M57, and their (as-yet undocumented) kits a bit of breathing room, and perhaps, for kits all over the state, a few weeks head start on setting out for Wyoming, Colorado, Oregon, California….or beyond.

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.

 

 

Climate Change, the Election, and a Few Brief Notes

Now that the election is over, and Obama finally got around to mentioning climate change in his victory speech – better late than never, although Ms. Wolverine’s nip on the heels would be well deserved – the environmental media is abuzz with speculation about whether or not the president will use his political momentum to exercise leadership on climate change. At Yale Environment360, William Becker writes about actions that Obama might take to begin the shift to a better future. Among the suggested strategies, Becker includes some interesting information on recent polls from the Yale climate change communication project suggesting that a majority of Americans accept anthropogenic climate change and would like to see action at the national and international levels.

If, for the remaining portion of the population, physics and Ms. Wolverine’s sharp teeth aren’t enough to convince of the magnitude of the issue, David Remnick’s eloquent piece in The New Yorker might do the trick. This compelling plea for action emphasizes some points that might appeal to the identity-based political leanings of climate-change deniers. First, the fact that the Pentagon sees climate change as a serious threat – this is an issue of national security. Second, the fact that 50,000 people died in the European heat wave of 2003, and that’s only one of a number of instances of human deaths resulting from severe weather events tied to a warming planet – action on climate change is a moral issue, an issue of the protection not just of cute animals and spectacular glacial scenery, but of human life. And third,  insurance companies estimate the annual cost of weather related disasters at $34 billion a year, although they will have to revise those estimates for 2012, since Hurricane Sandy has cost the state of New York alone $33 billion – climate change is an economic issue, an issue not only of the cost to vaguely defined ecosystem services, but of serious damage to private property and business. This sacred triumvirate of conservatism – security, the sanctity of human life, and economic prosperity – should be enough to convince anyone of the need to act. And for climate change action advocates, I wonder if it’s time to change our strategy from one of attempting to educate people about the science, to flat-out manipulating whatever values they respond to. I’m not above such strategies. Talk about god, morality, precious little babies dying of starvation, the need for a strong America and a strong military, the pressures climate change will place on the free market and the economy, as long as it gets stuff done.

In other, more specifically wolverine related news, here’s a short bit from Canada about the personal experiences of park employees with wolverines. It’s on the human interest side, but it’s another account of face-to-face encounters. Enjoy!

Ms. Wolverine on the Presidential Election

A while ago, this blog received a visit from an advice-dispensing wolverine who attempted to sort out people’s relationship issues from a gulo-centric standpoint. Although this didn’t necessarily go over so well (there are many things that wolverines don’t really understand about human society – starting, for example, with the notion of “society”) Ms. Wolverine has recently made me aware that she understands that she is living inside the borders of a political entity called “the United States of America,” governed by a democratic system that involves voting for people who have some impact on her species’ prospects. She and I sat down for a chat about wolverine perspectives on the major issues in the upcoming election.

RW: Thanks for agreeing to meet and talk about politics, which I realize must be kind of a weird idea for you.

Ms. W: Well, recently the wolverine community has been talking about what to do about saving you people, and they concluded that we need a better understanding of humans before we can come up with a management strategy. Since I have some experience with people, I got a grant from the other wolverines to spend some time researching how you function.

RW: A grant?

Ms. W: Yes. They’ve agreed to supply me with some extra meat so that I can take a month or two off from hunting, scavenging, and patrolling, in order to observe you and produce a report.

RW: Interesting. What have you deduced about the political scene thus far?

Ms. W: First, let me just say that I think it’s pretty unfair that we don’t get to vote. I understand that you European people fought a war over the issue of taxation without representation when you first came here. You people are steadily eroding our habitat in multiple ways, taking it for your own profit and purposes, and that amounts to taxation as far as I’m concerned, since it’s taking away the only assets that we have as a species. So I think we should have representation. If we can’t vote – and let’s face it, getting to polling stations would be hard for us since most of those stations are below 6000 feet, not to mention the fact that we lack opposable thumbs for filling in the ballot – then we’ll have to rely on you guys to stand up for us, so please do.

RW: Hopefully we’ll be able to do that. So, what are the biggest concerns of the wolverine community for the next four years?

Ms. W: Greenhouse gas emissions and energy policy are the number one issue for wolverines. Obviously, climate change is our biggest long-term problem and we have to address it. Reduction in snowpack is resulting in a housing crisis for reproductive females, and the future of society depends on these females and their offspring. It’s making it harder for our young to disperse and establish territories – it’s especially difficult for the young males, who tend to travel further. On that basis, we have to prioritize reducing carbon emissions over everything else.

This election represents a choice between looking forward with creativity and optimism, versus blindly clinging to old models that have reached the very end of their utility. A long time ago, the fossil fuel industry was built with subsidies from the government. Why not put the same effort into building a world powered by the wind and sun?

RW: Yeah, I knew that would be your answer. What would you say to the candidates, if you could speak English? How should this energy policy look?

Ms. W: I’d start off a conversation with the candidates by biting Romney for his stupid statements about how he doesn’t care about sea level rise or saving the planet. This guy says he doesn’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, which illustrates the fact that he’s not much of a thinker in the first place, and also encourages a highly superstitious and anti-scientific attitude among his followers. Also, it shows that he doesn’t care about wolverines at all. I’d encourage all of you to make your opinions of this attitude clear by biting him, too.

RW: Actually, as a brief insight into how the human governance system works, biting people isn’t really an acceptable form of political expression.

Ms. W: It isn’t? Hmmm. How do you get someone you don’t like out of your political territory, then? Because clearly we don’t want this guy occupying the territory of the White House.

RW: That’s the point of democracy – everyone can vote, which takes the place of having to fight. Could you tell us a little more about how wolverines see the issue of energy policy and climate change?

Ms. W: Sure. Here’s what I’d say to the candidates and the voting public to illustrate this issue. Wolverines in the wild live in huge territories, primarily because we need huge territories in order to get enough calories to survive and reproduce. In places like Glacier National Park, our territories are slightly smaller because the prey density is greater. In places like the Yellowstone region, territories are larger because we don’t have as much prey. We have to work harder to get what we need, and we fiercely defend our territories against other wolverines. So there’s only room for a few wolverines on the landscape. This is basically an issue of energy availability.

But I also know some wolverines who live in captivity. About twenty of them, on a small piece of land, where they are fed every day by very kind humans. These wolverines just hang out, and play together all day, and don’t get into fights. They can live at that density, and get along with each other, because they have a reliable source of energy that they don’t really have to work for. These wolverines are kind of lucky, because their prosperity is handed to them. But they are are also kind of fat, and a little lazy, and honestly, a bit deluded. Despite a lot of rhetoric about being “badass wolverines” and “fierce individualists” and stuff like that, some of them might not make it in the wild if the flow of energy was cut off and they were turned out. And if one day those humans stopped feeding them, and they remained in that fenced-in piece of land where they live, then they would turn on each other and there would be carnage.

Right now, you guys are the fat, lazy, captive wolverines, living in your magical fenced-in enclosure (we think of it as “magical” because of your strange belief in lines on the landscape that no one else can see, but that you adhere to without even scent-marking), talking about how independent and freedom-loving you all are. You’re not living in the real world. The efficiency that you’ve exploited through the infusion of “free” energy from outside your ecosystem has allowed you to expand all over the place, and build something that isn’t sustainable. In your case, that energy source is finite. You can either deal with that reality now – and vote to deal with it – or you can pretend it’s not a problem, and you’ll force your descendants to deal with it. There’s a very clear choice here.

RW: So you support Obama, on the grounds of energy policy and environmental protection?

Ms. W: Yes. I would give him a nip on the heels, because he hasn’t been entirely satisfactory, but at least he’s going in the right direction, and he’s done it in the face of a lot of opposition.

RW: Wouldn’t it be better to vote for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, who is much more thoroughly environmentalist?

Ms. W: If you’re an idealist, maybe. But politics doesn’t seem to be a realm in which idealism prospers. Also, right now, Ms. Stein is like a disperser – she’s new to the scene, she doesn’t have any connections to help her defend her territory even if she managed to occupy it. I like to think about politics in terms of territory, by the way, even though I know that that’s gulopomorphizing you humans, so let me tell you how this works with wolverines. Female wolverines in particular tend to occupy a territory close to their mothers or sisters – wolverines allied to them, in other words, and less likely to interfere with them. In the case of wolverines, this is an alliance by blood; in the case of politics, by party affiliation. Obama, to a certain extent, was also a bit like a disperser; he occupied a territory unexpectedly, and he won the fight in a very spectacular way, but he didn’t have a lot of allies for his vision, even in his own party, and then suddenly all those hostile Republicans came in and made it their mission to kick him out of his territory no matter what. So even though a politician may be the nominal leader, his or her leadership depends on sharing his territory with other wolverines – people, I mean – who will not spend all their time just trying to kick him, or her, out. I don’t think that Ms. Stein would  be able to defend her political territory effectively. What you all need to do first, you need to elect a lot of Green Party people at lower levels of government over the next decade. Then you elect a Green president.

RW: When I lived in Massachusetts, I always voted for Nader, because the Democrats would win the electoral votes anyway, and then I felt like I wasn’t compromising my principles. But as I’ve gotten older, I guess I’ve come to believe that investing your entire identity in politics – the idea that a candidate has to be a 100% reflection of your own preferences – is a little naive. You vote to achieve pragmatic ends, ends that relate to governance, not to morality – or you should, anyway. Right now, I feel like our entire system is bogged down in screaming at each other about issues that are essentially moral issues.

Ms. W: You mean all that sex-and-death stuff?

RW: Elaborate, please.

Ms. W: You know: squabbling over who can mate with whom, and when, and whether or not the government should be allowed to dictate what happens between consenting adults in private, or when and if you bear kits, or whether you can permanently share a territory with the person you love, even if their pelt is a different color or they happen to be the same sex as you. Getting worked up about all that stuff reflects a primal fear of the uncontrollable forces of sex and death. People who are hung up about such things have serious psychological issues. Mating, reproducing, dying – these things happen. That’s nature. Deal with it. You can’t regulate those things with laws; the role of government is not to legislate a moral outlook or to define and enforce ‘moral’ behavior among citizens.

RW: What is the role of government, in your view?

Ms. W: Remember those captive wolverines I mentioned? Even if they knew that the humans were about to stop supplying them with meat, even if they knew that their external energy source was about to be cut off, they wouldn’t really have the ability to get together and make a decision about what to do. Wolverines are extremely independent animals; we don’t organize at broader levels. I’ve spent much of my life happily solitary, patrolling a huge territory that is shared only with my mate, my kits, and an occasional disperser or two (don’t tell my mate about that, though…he doesn’t read your blog, so he won’t find out on here, just don’t mention it in person.) I like my family, but wolverines are not in need of mechanisms to organize our population. We are individualists. The organizing unit of the wolverine population is the individual wolverine, defending its individual territory. That works well for us.

You, on the other hand, are social primates. We always laugh when we listen to you yapping about American individualism and freedom. All the big apes congregate, and all of them have social hierarchies and organization that help them distribute available resources and keep the group going. Wolves are similar – the individuals sacrifice for the sake of the pack, and they live all crowded together in ways that make us cringe. You humans take it to an even greater degree, you’ve organized beyond the pack level, into varying kinds of super-packs, and you’re so crammed together on the landscape that it makes us queasy, and so you have to have these mechanisms to keep those super-packs in order and make sure everyone gets a share of the kill – at least enough to stay alive, right, so they don’t rebel? Social animals have to take responsibility for other members of their pack or troop or nation-state, or whatever level of organization they’re talking about. That’s the essential biological reality.

Americans have some very, very strange ideas about their own nature – I won’t go into those weird people who think that you aren’t even primates, that would be like denying that wolverines are related to weasels, just because we’re bigger and smarter, and I don’t think there’s a single wolverine out there who would be that idiotic. But let me tell you the ecological reality behind American prosperity: you all came here, wiped out the original human inhabitants due to an unlucky (for them) combination of malicious intent and accidental microbial misfortune, and then had an entire continent and all of its resources – most of which had never been exploited with any intensity before – at your disposal. Anyone who was dissatisfied with how things were working could just pile all that useless crap you guys haul around with you into a cart, and move to some new place and start again there, which meant that you were constantly siphoning off any real discontent with misfortune or inequality, because there was always the lure of wealth somewhere else. You think it takes special national character or talent to build an empire when you have a low population and a huge resource base? It was like the wolves coming back into Yellowstone after all those decades of prey buildup in the absence of predators. Those wolves were prosperous, prolific, and very successful over the first decade – the first few generations of wolves had things really good. They were huge, individually, and they had huge packs with multiple sets of pups each year. And if an individual wolf didn’t like things in her own pack, if she felt crowded or disrespected or whatever, she could disperse over to the next drainage and find another patch of vacant territory full of elk, and voila. New wolf pack.

And then Yellowstone filled up. Wolves started getting sick, dying of mange and distemper, killing each other in inter-pack conflicts. Young dispersers couldn’t just set out with their individualist dreams anymore, because the entire landscape was likely to be occupied. If they wanted a new territory, they had to fight for it. Out beyond the borders of the protected areas, wolves were killed for getting into livestock, trying to supplement their energy source by poaching it from humans – I guess you could see that as an ongoing but failing invasion of another nation, the wolf nation invading the human nation to get fuel, just like you guys did with Iraq. Anyway, the point is that a naive landscape with a lot of resources can accommodate a whole bunch of people (or wolves) who want to live in an extravagant way, and equally importantly, it can accommodate social discontent. A full landscape with a growing population and increasingly limited resources can’t. So like the wolves, you are going to either have to get used to a lot more internal conflict over the resources that remain, or you need to determine a way to mitigate the effects of those resource shortages so that you don’t have conflicts.

To me, the role of government is to think strategically about how to minimize those conflicts. You humans are lucky that you have the capacity to do this. There is one candidate who is talking in a smart way about how you can think ahead and anticipate a major resource shortage – namely, fossil fuel energy – by replacing it with another source. He’s also talking about how to make sure that everyone in the pack gets a share of the pack’s prosperity, even though the world is getting more crowded and it’s going to take more care to manage the discontent that will result. And there is a second candidate who is ignoring this ecological reality of energy and resource shortages, and spends all his time talking about entrenching hierarchies and inequality and making sure that only the alpha wolves get a share of the kill that all of society helped to take down.

Also, you know, once you let all the power and wealth become concentrated in a few hands, you have a very bad situation for the people who don’t have power or wealth. Our cousins in Siberia tell stories about what it was like in Russia before the Communist Revolution, when they were governed by a system called feudalism. Not that we support communism or anything, but feudalism sounds pretty bad. We figure people in America must not know what this is, but it was a time when just a few rich people controlled everything, and the rights of those rich people superseded the rights of everyone else. Once in a while this was good for wolverines, because starving peasants sometimes die in the woods, and you know, carrion is carrion. Of course, the same could be said for revolutionaries shipping all the rich people to Siberia, shooting them, and dumping them in the woods – they all taste the same, despite the rich people’s pretensions of superiority. But on the whole, it’s probably not a direction you want to take.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, wolverines are individualists, biologically and ecologically. Humans aren’t. You guys are in this together, so you better figure out a way to manage yourselves, your population, and your resources, so that you don’t all end up cannibalizing each other in a few generations. And your democratic governance system is the means by which you currently do this. It’s way better than a dictatorship or a plutocracy, so take care to protect it.

RW: Ergh. Yes. Thanks for that thought about cannibalism, that’s why I am not having children.

Ms. W: Smart girl, although I bet your descendants would be too scrawny to tempt anyone unless the potential cannibals were in really dire straits. It’s all these plump, succulent people who sit around watching TV who should be worried.

RW: Somehow it makes me uneasy that you’re thinking about humans as succulent.

Ms. W: Don’t worry. We have no plans to start harvesting you. Mountain goat and elk taste a lot better. No offense, but that corn-based diet makes you kind of bland.

RW: I’m not even going to ask how you know that. Let’s get back to the election. What else are wolverines concerned about?

Ms. W: Wait a second – we don’t attack humans. I just want to clarify that. Sometimes people have accidents, and we’re scavengers, you know. But we have no bad intentions towards you.

Anyway, on to other issues. If you talk to the wolverine community at large, there’s a certain sentiment that the government should create incentives for more humans to hunt large ungulates, because we get a good supply of carrion from these people. I know Romney would characterize this as a socialist scheme to supply lazy wolverines with meat that they don’t deserve and haven’t worked for – redistribution of biomass, so to speak – but we certainly support ethical hunting. By ethical, I mean hunting using copper bullets, and making sure you leave all the scraps in places more accessible to wolverines than grizzlies. It’s really exhausting to have to fight a grizzly.

RW: So you don’t see providing for the less fortunate in society as a bad thing? You were being sarcastic with the redistribution of biomass comment?

Ms. W: Kind of. But you know, ecosystems are inherently inefficient. At each trophic level – that’s each level of the food chain – you lose about 90% of the available energy as its transferred from one being to another. Money is the energy of the economic system, so to me it makes sense that some of it goes back into the general system as it makes its way upward. I mean, you can take that analogy only so far, but compare a 90% energy loss rate with whatever those guys are paying in taxes, and they’re way ahead.

Anyway, we like it when you guys hunt a lot of ungulates and leave the gut piles for us. Do that. We work really hard to stay alive, a little bonus now and then hardly means that we’re morally deficient.

RW: I really wish we could stop talking about morals and morality, but I’m glad you’ve picked up on the fact that this is such an ingrained part of our political dialogue.

Ms. W: Yes. The human obsession with these things is perverse, but since those are the terms in which we are dealing, let me say that I don’t understand how anyone could  conclude that there is any more pressing moral issue than finding a way to live sustainably, to keep the planet healthy. This is the ultimate imperative for keeping not just wolverines alive, but people as well. People who claim that they value life but then don’t seem to care how their kits or their kits’ kits will live – that’s troubling. We find it extraordinary that you possess a fear of disorder that will drive you to spend time and money arguing about who should mate with whom, but that this fear of disorder somehow abandons you when it comes to talking about the potential destruction of your own ecological life support system. Could you please clarify the chain of logic that leads to these conclusions about how to allocate your political energy?

RW: Actually, I can’t. I don’t think that any chain of logic exists.

Ms. W: Hm. I really don’t understand you. I mean, not you, but humans in general. You’re really telling me that there’s a political party whose platform includes giving constitutional rights to a blastula or a corporation, but doesn’t include protecting the environment on which the potential kit, and the economy, will both rely? I’m sorry, but this makes no sense. And it represents a total failure of your capacity for imagination.

RW: How so?

Ms. W: Humans are very imaginative, you know. Wolverines don’t imagine half as much; we just go about our business, and mostly, if we imagine anything, we imagine a big supply of food that will last all winter. But you….you people do all kinds of crazy things. You pull things out of thin air. This is an amazing capacity. Right now your job is to pull a new world out of the old one, but you have to use your capacity for imagining a better world than the one you live in now. No one is imagining the new, healthy, sustainable world; you guys are like two grizzled old wolverines fighting over a six-month-old carcass, ready to kill each other for the scraps that remain. You need to be a young, robust wolverine instead – the kind who imagines she can go out and take down a moose all on her own – which, by the way, has been done….even though it might seem beyond credibility that a 30 pound animal could kill something that big. If that Alaskan wolverine could tackle a moose, you guys should have the guts to tackle climate change and build a world powered by renewable energy. Anyone who wants to stay and gnaw on the scraps of the fossil-fuel based world can do so, but I’d much rather by out tracking down the bigger, better future and jumping on it. Leave Romney his rotten old rib bones. Go hunt your moose with Obama.

RW: I really enjoy wolverine metaphors.

Ms. W: Thank you. We’re not particularly imaginative, but we do have a perspective that I like to think is useful and unique.

RW: Are there any other issues that you’d like to mention?

Ms. W: I could go on and on about things, but I’m not going to pretend that I understand the intricacies of the human world, and this conversation is getting long; I’m feeling the need to climb a mountain by myself to recover from all the socializing. But I will say this: we’ve talked about the national election, but it seems to me that you have to pay equally close attention to your local government. So vote wolverine the whole way up and down the political scale – pick candidates who stand up for the health of the planet, people, and the ecological community at every level. Support candidates who are in favor of open space, community-based sustainability plans, regional energy strategies, science education, and so forth. These guys don’t always fall out along party lines, either – some of my Idaho relatives know some Republicans there who have been supportive of environmental work for decades. You need to make these issues bipartisan, because they are inherently about protecting humanity as well as the rest of the planet.

RW: I’m glad you mentioned that. At the very beginning of our conversation, you said something about the wolverine community wanting to know what could be done to save us. What did you mean by that?

Ms. W: A lot of wolverines, believe it or not, are interested in human conservation. We find you entertaining, and mystifying, and you also bring us certain benefits – like carrion during hunting season, and those funny little log constructions with the neatly-prepared beaver snacks – so we don’t like to think about you going extinct, or about stochastic events that might result in a profound population reduction. But we can’t figure out why you’re so self-destructive. It’s puzzling. You manage to defy ecological rules and constraints again and again at certain levels, but you’re still bound within the larger system and one of these days it’s going to come back and bite you all. In the meantime, we realize that the decisions you make are having effects on us, and we want to know how we can urge you to expand your imaginations to include space for all of us to prosper. So remember this: the future in which you deal with climate change ahead of time is potentially beautiful, for humans and wolverines and other species alike. The future in which you don’t deal with climate change until it’s a necessity is bleak and miserable, for everyone, including humans. You are voting for one of these two futures. If you believe in the beautiful future, be sure you get to the polling stations tomorrow and cast your vote, for your sake as well as ours.

RW: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. I try to keep this blog non-political and non-partisan, but I feel like this is important, so I appreciate you sharing your perspectives.

Ms. W: You’re welcome. I mean, it’s not like I really understand how this whole political scene works, so take my thoughts with that in mind, but I think that both our species – and all the rest here in the Rockies and around the world – are in this together. And remember, the work doesn’t stop at election day, no matter who wins the presidential election tomorrow. So be prepared with ideas about how to create the better future. And be in touch if you have any questions about wolverine perspectives on anything else.

I’m off to tackle a moose.

Trekking

Wolverine practices route-finding using maps of uncertain quality.

Forty-three topographic maps of dubious quality are currently piled on the coffee table in my apartment. The Russians created these maps in the 1970s, and there are rumors that the Communists intentionally made them a few degrees off, to thwart invading armies and, latterly and perhaps unintentionally, wildlife biologists. I am worried about these maps. I can navigate, but what do you do if the maps are wrong? I’ve spent the last few weeks staring at them, staring at Google Earth, and wondering how many herders are in the Khangai backcountry, and whether they’ll be able to direct us if we get lost.

At this point, there’s not much we can do; we leave in three days, to trek about 250 miles through the Khangai, surveying for wolverines and pikas and interviewing the herders we find. My original hiking partner, the one with whom I wrote the proposal and who had some backpacking and wildlife experience, bailed immediately due to other obligations, and finding another hiking partner – someone who could foot the bill to get to Mongolia, since the grant covers only in-country hiking expenses – has been a challenge. This year, with a mining boom gripping the country, tickets are ridiculously expensive, and so are in-country living and transportation costs. It’s been a bit of a shock, and it’s meant that the only real option has been finding someone who is already here. A friend of mine, Marissa Smith, who is doing her anthropology PhD research in the city of Erdenet, agreed to give it a try, even though she has never been backpacking before. Her work focuses on the intersections between urban and rural communities, the ways in which Mongolian professionals in the city maintain critical ties with the countryside, so this is a research trip for her, too. I am impressed by her spirit, but a little concerned at being the only one with any kind of backpacking experience, especially since my own experience is mostly limited to places with reliable maps.

Wolverine conquers a big pile of borts, dried meat. Knife for fending off wolves in foreground.

Still, in the past few weeks, we’ve gone through all of our available sources – guidebooks in several languages, interviews with people who have relatives in the countryside near our route, discussions with ex-pats who run ger camps or tourist operations in the area – and the lack of exact knowledge promises to lend the adventure of discovery to the trip. We hear rumors of monasteries and sacred trees, meditation sites of old mendicant Buddhist monks, ice age petroglyphs depicting ostrich and mammoth, strings of bronze age tombs scattered through the valleys. We have the coordinates for hidden hot springs. We know where talus slopes host pikas, and we have GPS layers showing the densest concentrations of argali and ibex. We have a single small map that tracks traces of snow leopards across the range. We have the wolverine snow model, and the phone numbers of various tanil – acquaintances – in the countryside. We should be okay.

Wandering the mountains has an honored history here. Supplies for traditional mendicant Buddhist monks, National History Museum, Ulaanbaatar. Note wooden frame backpack against wall. (Photo: Dan Sirbu)

List of supplies for mendicant monks. We are omitting ” Tibetan large pot,” but otherwise the equipment seems pretty constant. (Photo: Dan Sirbu)

As we ‘scotched’ our 43 Russian maps – a ghetto version of laminating in a country without laminating machines, involving rolls of clear packing tape and a great deal of patience – Marissa commented that so far, backpacking trips bring to mind being involved in a coke packaging operation. This analogy is a first for me; let’s hope the rest of the trip doesn’t resemble drug dealing. I was also vehemently informed by the Ovorhangai Aimag Fire Department that I would definitely be eaten by wolves, because twelve people had recently been pulled off motorcycles and devoured. I pointed out that I wouldn’t be on a motorcycle, but that didn’t seem to reassure anyone. I did buy a very big knife, just in case.

This will probably be my last post before we set out, so here’s some information for people who want to try to keep track of us as we go.

Below is an image of our approximate route, starting in Tsetserleg (“Garden”) and ending in Uliastai (“Place with Aspens”), with each week’s distance marked in a different color. Chuluut (“At the Rocks”) and Khangai (“Rich Land”) soums are two small towns that we will visit to resupply. Ikh Uul (“Big Mountain”) and Tosontsengel (“Oily Happiness” – I can only assume this refers to the oil used in butter lamp offerings, although fat in general has positive connotations here) are potential bail off points if we run into any trouble in the very sparsely populated western part of the range. We will probably catch a ride, if there is one, to Uliastai from the vacation camp beneath Otgontenger, due to time constraints. I set up a Spot page, where you can allegedly see our progress in real time, at http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0miBnXWyHoPYOqJYENL2TKghZUeCI6Qnu

I have been trying to test this for the past few days and have had issues with the system, now including being locked out of my account until I can contact customer service – which, of course, is quite a challenge from Mongolia. Hopefully it will be functional again when we set off.

I am going to be posting updates to my Facebook page, and these will be reposted to the Mongolian Wildlife and Climate Change Project’s Facebook page. So if you want to follow these posts – I will immediately send a message if we see wolverines, snow leopards, a yeti, or a gang of wolves on motorcycles – then “like” us and you too will be among the first to know what amazing creatures are roaming central Mongolia.

So that’s it for the next month! Thanks to all of you who have followed this blog, who comment and engage with wolverine work, and who show your support in so many ways. I look forward to being back in touch in mid-September, and till then, safe travels and good adventures to all.

Petition to End Trapping in Montana

Eight conservation groups are petitioning the state of Montana to end the wolverine trapping season. As I understand it, the petition is not a lawsuit, it’s simply a request, with accompanying background information, that the state put an end to wolverine trapping before the beginning of the 2012 season in December. The state approved the trapping season on Thursday; they have 60 days to respond to the petition, but seem unlikely to change their position. Current regulations allow for take of five animals, with a female subquota of three, which means that if a female wolverine is trapped in any of the three regions where take is allowed, the season in that region ends.

Trapping is a major source of mortality for wolverines, and while the species can probably handle the pressure in a place like Alaska, where distribution is continuous across the landscape, it creates bigger problems for meta-populations inhabiting high-altitude habitat islands. These high altitude islands are predicted to shrink in coming years as climate change affects snowpack. In Montana, the smaller mountain ranges are likely to hold one or two reproductive females at most; trap one of these animals, and you knock the reproductive potential of that range back by 50-100%. Eventually, these ranges may be recolonized, but recolonization can take years, and those years represent lost time for wolverines to gain a stronger foothold, with greater levels of genetic diversity, across the region. Trapping creates mortality sinks on the landscape, and the loss of a single breeding female has a disproportionate effect on the overall population. The 2010 USFWS ruling that designated wolverines warranted for protection under the ESA suggested that a viable population of wolverines throughout the Rockies must include 400 breeding pairs, which means 800 animals¹ contributing to the population. We currently estimate that we have no more than 300 wolverines, total, in the Lower 48, and that only about 50 of these are contributing to the population. That means that the population is 750 breeding animals short of sustainability, and given the slow reproductive rate, we can’t afford to be taking reproductive wolverines out of the population.

The wolverines of the Rockies face added pressure as they disperse across vast swaths of lowland non-habitat in which growing human population and ever-increasing infrastructure create a potentially deadly obstacle course. These wolverines have to make it across hundreds of miles to find new territories, and the more young wolverines that set out, the greater the chances of one of them reaching and establishing a new territory and beginning to contribute to the population. Young wolverines have a high mortality rate even before dispersal, so the population needs as many young as possible to maintain viability over the long term. We can also speculate – although this is based on intuition, not data – that because wolverines do disperse so widely, wolverines in Wyoming, Idaho, and points further south do or will depend on infusions of DNA from dispersing Montanan wolverines. So there are compelling reasons to end the trapping season in Montana, and the most compelling is encapsulated in one phrase: In the Rockies, every wolverine counts.

Balanced against this, however, are a couple of points that deserve mention, because they were glossed over or else misrepresented in the petition and the news articles linked above. By the early 20th century, wolverines had been extirpated from the Lower 48 (and they were never “prolific across the West,” as the petition claims; “prolific” implies the production of numerous offspring. Humans are prolific. Wolverines, due to their breeding biology, are not and never have been.) They are currently recolonizing and expanding their range; they are not currently retracting, and they are not “on the brink of extinction,” as a representative of one environmental group claimed. They have continued to push into unoccupied habitat in spite of a Montana trapping season that, until several years ago, allowed unlimited take. Many of the statistics cited in the petition, on trapping as a percentage of recorded wolverine mortalities, come from this earlier period of unregulated trapping, and Montana has been commendably responsive to the concerns of conservationists; they’ve scaled back the trapping season twice in the past few years and closed two of the regions where trapping was previously allowed. Several wolverine biologists with whom I’ve spoken feel that trapping really isn’t a big problem for wolverines when weighed against the long-term threats of climate change. I don’t think any of us like wolverine trapping, because there’s always the risk that an animal that you know and respect will be caught, and I wake up each morning of trapping season with a worried heart, but as one biologist put it to me, “If you’re going to argue against trapping, just go ahead and admit that it’s an emotional stance you’re taking, not a scientific one.”

So, yes, I admit that it’s an emotional stance, although I’m not convinced that science contradicts emotion in this case, because we don’t know enough about how populations behave at the southern edges of their range. Maybe it’s a coincidence that wolverines have started popping up in Colorado and possibly Utah in the years since Montana scaled back its season. On the other hand, maybe, with human-created mortality sinks removed, the landscapes to the north are more fully saturated, and the entire population is more rapidly pushed south into unoccupied habitat. It’s not really a question of whether wolverines can make it in the short term with some additional offtake from trapping; it’s a question of how much faster they would recolonize new habitat without that offtake, and whether that additional speed provides them with an edge as snowpack shrinks over the longer term. It would be great if we had the funds to monitor this, but we don’t, so in the meantime we should err on the side of caution and do all that we can to keep every breeding wolverine alive and contributing to the population.

Whether this particular strategy – throwing a petition at the state of Montana when there’s already a rapidly-approaching deadline for a federal listing decision – is the best way to achieve this goal is, however, up for some pretty fierce debate. I’ll get into that later, but in the meantime, don’t take this post as an anti-trapping advocacy position statement. It’s not. It’s simply an attempt to clarify some of the ways in which trapping might, or might not, affect the population, and why we might think about being precautionary in this instance.

¹ The warranted-but-precluded decision doesn’t specify whether this refers to 400 unique pairs, or whether it refers to wolverine breeding habits observed in studies, in which a single male usually mates with two females whose territories overlap with his. So we may be discussing 800 individual breeding wolverines, or we may be discussing 600 – 200 males and 400 females. Either way, it will take decades to build the population to these levels.

A few additional resources:

George Wuerthner, the only individual to sign the petition, has a blog here.

The story has received widespread (not “prolific”) coverage across the West, in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, California, Alaska, and Washington, to name a few. Almost all of these articles are the same AP piece, of which two versions seem to exist; a longer piece, and a shorter. An article also appeared in USA Today. Here’s another one from the Summit County Citizens Voice.  And here’s an opinion piece from the Missoulian. I’m hoping to do a post analyzing some of the language in these articles, press releases, and blog posts, but if I don’t get around to it before I leave on my trek, I’d be interested in knowing what people think, not just about the issue of trapping, but about how the discussion is represented in the media.