The Expedition Begins

The week before any trip to Mongolia, I start to exist in a liminal space, in which time and outlook are skewed, a bubble that encompasses the place where anticipation, nostalgia, and panic crash into each other with unrepentant ferocity. I love Mongolia, I love my research, I love adventure, but there is a significant inertia that drags at me with the demands of having to reorganize my cultural mind, my primary language orientation, my living arrangements, and my entire social life. During this liminal week, I develop a subdued sort of hedonism that is entirely absent from my life at any other time. I voraciously eat fruits and vegetables; I soak in the bathtub for hours, reading The New Yorker; I dress in my fanciest clothes just to run to the grocery store; and I sleep, as intentionally as one can do anything while unconscious, luxuriating in a comfortable mattress, real pillows, and soft bedding. Baths, bedding, fruits and vegetables, and dress-up opportunities being substantially absent through most of Mongolia, I guess that these small indulgences are reasonable, but in the 48 hours before leaving, they assume a disproportionate importance, as if I cannot possibly bear to leave them.

Then, somewhere in line at the airport, usually after I’ve cleared security, the switch flips and the liminal space retreats into the distance and I’m fully engaged in whatever adventure I’m embarking on.

This morning at 4:30, reality hit in the Bozeman airport when I stumbled through the door and saw my fellow Mongolian Wolverine Ski Expedition team members hauling a mountain of bright red dry bags, ski bags, and backpacks towards a check-in counter manned by a woman who was trying to look stoic about the impending task of sorting through all this luggage. Suddenly I was elbow deep in energy bars and dehydrated food, sorting and rearranging weight, shifting heavy items to my carry-on bag, and desperately wishing for some caffeine. On the ride to the airport, I’d stared out at the lights of town and thought, “I cannot believe that we are really doing this. What the hell possessed me, to think that skiing 400 miles across northern Mongolia in spring was a good idea?” By the time the plane took off and my fellow team members – wolverine biologist Jason Wilmot, adventure geographer Forrest McCarthy, and Gregg Treinish, director of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation – pulled out maps of the Darhad, we were so elated about the prospect of the trip that bleary-eyed passengers requested that we tone it down, 6:00 a.m. being apparently too early for proximity to unfettered enthusiasm.  Still, the switch had been flipped, from backward-looking to forward-looking, from anxiety to excitement.

 

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.

Wolverines Everywhere!

A brief update on wolverine news, with a promise that future posts will be more in-depth:

On Tuesday, April 10th, Montana State University will host a showing of Wolverine: Chasing the Phantom. If you haven’t yet had a chance to see the film on the big screen, find your way to the Procrastinator Theater (Is that the real name? If this isn’t a joke, I appreciate the stoicism with which MSU accepts its students’ priorities….) at 7 pm. Director Gianna Savoie will be there, and the event is free to all.

If you happen to live in the Rocky Mountain foothills near Alberta, keep your eyes open for a wolverine that made its way through the small town of Airdrie earlier this week. The wolverine stayed a few strides ahead of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as concerned citizens called 911 all over town. Someone managed to get a good picture of the animal as it crossed the street. Several commenters on the article expressed the opinion that this might be an April Fool’s joke, suggesting that wolverines don’t venture “that far out onto the plains.” Airdrie seems to be (a scant, for a wolverine) 40 miles or so from the mountains, so if this was a joke, it’s one that would be well within the bounds of possibility. An Alberta wildlife biologist decided it was probably a dispersing juvenile. The animal was last seen heading north. This may be overly cautious, but people in the region might want to keep their pets in for a while, especially at night. Wolverines strolling down Main Street might bode ill for domestic animals.

Further north still, wolverine made a brief appearance in Iditarod news when it shared the course with a dogsled team for a short distance, apparently not quite willingly. This is just a one-sentence mention, but it’s fun to think that a wolverine ran part of Iditarod – and then, perhaps, decided that it was too short a distance to bother with, and went and did something more badass instead.

 

 

 

 

 

NatGeo Wild’s “Wolverine King” Episode Airs Tomorrow

NatGeo Wild’s America the Wild is airing an episode entitled “Wolverine King” this Sunday, March 11th. The episode airs at 8 pm eastern and Pacific time, 7 pm central time, and 9 pm mountain time.

Except for a chance encounter with one of the camera crew in a Bozeman bar, I haven’t actually met anyone involved with this production, so I can’t comment on the quality of the show or its contents. It does, however, star Jasper, one of the same wolverines whose upbringing wolverine afficionados followed in Wolverine: Chasing the Phantom. So if nothing else, it will offer an opportunity to see Jasper again.

Some promotional materials for the NatGeo show have appeared in the press over the past few days. A short piece on the Huffington Post by Casey Anderson, the host of the show, includes two embedded videos of encounters with Jasper. I agree with Anderson’s lament over the lack of attention given to the wolverine, and am glad he’s doing his part to generate wider awareness. But some of the claims and statements beg the question: is widespread but inaccurate exposure better than no exposure at all?

Perhaps, but it’s still frustrating when hype and facile narratives take precedence over real information. So just a bit of scientific armor with which to gird yourselves before watching the show: in the first video clip, Anderson frames his encounters with Jasper as “training” for going out and meeting wild wolverines. Some of the promotional materials suggest that Anderson is risking his life in trying to get close to wolverines. If he really is meeting Jasper in order to figure out how to get close to wild gulos, he’s setting up the only situation in which a wild wolverine would actually be dangerous to a human: messing with it. If you are in the wild and encounter a wolverine, you shouldn’t even attempt to get close to it or interfere with it in any way. Respect wildlife on its terms when you are in its territory, and you won’t have a problem. Your life certainly won’t be at risk. Of course, maybe he isn’t trying to pet wild wolverines, maybe he’s just trying to understand their behavior, which is fine. But the moral of this paragraph is, leave wild wolverines alone if you’re fortunate enough to see them. They are not a threat to people.

Anderson also makes a statement in his piece that wolverines “….are disappearing at a rapid rate.” This is untrue. As far as I know, the only study that suggests a decline was conducted on traplines in Canada and the methods used are, to my mind, not robust (my skepticism is backed by the skepticism of the folks who really know: Audrey Magoun, Jeff Copeland, Kevin McKelvey, Keith Aubry, and Eric Lofroth, the rock stars of wolverine research, issued a commentary on this study in a 2011 issue of Population Ecology; they open by stating that the study “…reports conclusions that are unsupportable…”) In fact, right now wolverines appear to be undergoing a range expansion as they return to regions of the US (and maybe Canada) from which they were extirpated during the 20th century. The threats to wolverines come from long-range, landscape-level issues that involve climate change and connectivity. They aren’t disappearing right now, but they may within the next century, and we shouldn’t be deceived into complacency by current celebratory reports of wolverines in places like Colorado and California.

Nor should we revert to a simplistic narrative of immediate crisis, however.  The conservation movement has gotten a lot of mileage out of endangered species crisis narratives, but we’re moving into an era when these stories are much more complicated and much less linear. I don’t honestly expect a one hour episode on TV to adequately address this complexity, but I would issue a general challenge to people involved in environmental media: find a way not to tell the same old story, especially when that story isn’t true. Shake things up. Surprise us. Challenge us. Make us think harder.

Finally, in the realm of “generally absurd,”  the host claims in another interview that, “After an avalanche, a wolverine just might save your life.” During the film clip in which Jasper pulls the host from the snow bank, wolverine foster father Steve Kroschel explains that this is how wolverines extract carrion from beneath the snow. Just to clarify, ‘carrion’ means dead stuff. If you were buried by an avalanche, and you were under the snow long enough for a wolverine to find you and dig you out, you would be dead already. A wolverine is not going to rescue you from an avalanche.

All of that said, I also haven’t seen the episode, and maybe it’s a great, nuanced look at wolverine conservation, with a few glitches in the promotional materials. I don’t have a television so I may not find out for a while. If anyone sees the episode and wants to share an opinion, please do. I hope that no matter what, it will help build a constituency of wolverine-interested people.

Upcoming Gulo Events

Gianna Savoie will be speaking about her film Wolverine: Chasing the Phantom at REI in Bozeman on October 19th. The talk runs from 6:30 to 8:00pm. The event is free, but limited to 30 participants. You can sign up, and find details about the location, here; there are 16 spots left, so register now if you want to reserve a seat.

Further out on the calendar, on November 9th wolverine biologist Audrey Magoun will give a talk on the discovery of wolverines in the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon. Audrey pioneered wolverine research in Alaska and developed a unique system to identify wolverines via camera-trap; it was the deployment of these camera stations last winter that provided the first evidence of wolverines in eastern Oregon since 1936.  The talk will be held in Portland, at the Billy Frank Jr. Conference Center of the Ecotrust Building, 721 NW Ninth Ave. An overview of the event can be found here. This lecture is also free, but requires registration. (Are wolverines so popular that we now have to impose limits on attendance? A good sign of a growing constituency, I hope….)

Doug Chadwick on Wolverines in the Lower 48

As a quick foreword, I completely failed at this live blogging experiment. I’m too meticulous (neurotic?) a writer, I suspect, to respond to circumstances unedited. The below was written in real-time, but a medical incident in the middle of the speech threw everything off and I didn’t get around to posting until today. If you never have a chance to see Doug Chadwick speak live, hopefully this will give you some idea of how entertaining he is. 

With promises to catch up on the two remaining talks that occurred earlier today, I’m going to cover Doug Chadwick’s speech, which is about to start. He and I had a great conversation earlier this afternoon, during which I promised that if he got anything wrong, I would mercilessly make fun of him on this blog. So he’s under a lot of pressure….

Beginning with a reading from his book, Doug speaks first to the desire that many of us have to be humbled by our experiences in the natural world, and then adds that you don’t know what it is to be humbled by nature until you’ve tried to follow a wolverine. He tells the story of his background with the project, how he got involved as a way to be outside in the landscape he loves, and how he eventually became so compelled by the species that he decided to write a book about them.

A pause. Then, looking towards the GYC staff, “Can I say badass? I like saying it.”

Now the humor ramps up and the slide show kicks in. We are hearing the story of the traditional view of wolverines – their awful reputation, the lack of scientific data, the adoption of gulo identity by a badass superhero with anger management issues.

“The things that are true about wolverines that seem like myths – they bring down full grown caribou…and they’ve been reported bringing down full grown moose. It’s like you open your curtain in the morning, and look out, and your housecat has got a deer. But they do that. The other thing that’s been reported by reliable people is, they will drive a grizzly off a kill. That’s scientifically known as ‘unmitigated badass behavior.’”

We are hearing the story of F5, the young female who climbed Bearhat Mountain in Glacier National Park in the dead of winter for no apparent reason. We are seeing photos of researchers in wild conditions – blizzards, blowing snow, 90 mph winds. The audience is rapt, leaning forward, some with their mouths literally open. (Though one guy, across the table, appears to be asleep; either that, or he’s closing his eyes to better envision the deprivations of wolverine research…) Doug describes the sound of a wolverine growl: “It’s like a Harley Davidson is mating with a chain saw, and you’re pretty sure that whatever is in the trap is the size of a velociraptor. Okay, I’m kidding, but these things are designed to intimidate.”

Doug goes on to describe conversations about wolverines with trappers in the region.

“So, we’d talk with these trappers, who didn’t believe that we were catching them. They’d say, ‘these creatures are so secretive and so wily, we can’t even catch ‘em once, and you’re saying that you catch them multiple times?’ And we’d say, “Well, we have a trick.” And the trappers’d say, “Yeah? What’s that?” And we’d say, “It’s easy. When we catch ‘em, we don’t kill ‘em.”"

This gets a round of applause.

“So, what is this animal?…It’s a member of the weasel family, but I don’t like that name, because unfaithful lovers and hedge fund managers are giving weasels such a bad name.” More laughs. Doug is going on to explain the physiological characteristics that make wolverines so unique – enlarged thyroid glands, enormous feet, and so on.

Now we’re on to climate change effects, not only the issue of snow denning, but the apparent preference that female wolverines show for locating den sites among whitebark pine downfall. Whitebark pine is, of course, suffering a massive die-off in the Rockies due to beetle infestations and disease, part of which can certainly be attributed to warming temperatures.

The compelling story of Jeff Copreland’s hunch that gulo dads were getting a bad rap draws exclamations, and then further exclamations, and then we realize that some of the exclamations are from a table where a woman has collapsed. 911 is called, we all take a break, and I sit with my fingers crossed that in the excitement of picturing all of the crazy activity that Doug’s been describing, wolverines haven’t actually killed someone after all. The paramedics arrive and the woman responds and we all breathe easier as the presentation resumes.

Doug picks up with the full-on climate change segment, referencing Dan Fagre’s work on climate change in Glacier National Park, monitoring of retreating glaciers and climbing tree lines. “So the wolverine is going to tell us the same thing, but maybe in a more dramatic way, as the pika and the mountain goats and the hoary marmots. Their range is going to be constricted.”

“What makes Glacier whole is the knowledge that it is animated by wolverines traveling the landscape, bears sleeping under the snow….it’s not just a list of animals, it’s the fact that they’re all interacting with each other, that there’s a full carnivore community in place.”

The story of M1 climbing Mount Cleveland, 5000 ft in 90 mins, draws the usual gasps and laughs of disbelief. And then the statistics on how few wolverines a place like Glacier, with 1500 square miles, will hold. 350 grizzlies live in Glacier; by contrast, there’s room for about 40 wolverines in the same area. The Tetons are saturated with wolverines; we think that there are maybe four residents adults. The Centennials, according to WCS biologist Bob Inman, hold two adult females. The Cascades hold eight wolverines of which we are aware. The point that Doug is making is that connectivity between these tiny population nodes is critical for the long-term survival of the species.  Isolated parks will not be enough; there must be connectivity throughout the mountain ranges of the West. “This is the scale on which [wolverines] need wildness to be preserved.”

This is the ultimate message of Doug’s speech – that we need to push conservation to a scale that is meaningful for wildlife that evolved in the vastness of the unbounded, unfenced, undeveloped North America, and that still needs that space today.

Healy Hamilton asks what we know about historical densities of wolverines, whether wolverines have always been so rare or whether their current sparsity is “an artifact of the way we’ve treated the landscape.” Doug says he’s not sure, that there’s really no way to know because, “we rolled across the continent so quickly.”

One gentleman asks what the body temperature of a wolverine is. The answer: “Around 100.”

Someone asks whether there are wolverines in the Wyoming Range. Doug turns the microphone over to me, inducing a sense of panic and a long, babbling story about the female born in the Winds who traveled to the Wyoming Range for a while but then went back to the Tetons.

Judging by the long line of people waiting to buy the book – not to mention the excited crowds of people who come to share stories of wolverine sightings with me – people are inspired by the talk and ready to learn more. Which is exactly what we were hoping for.

 

And the Emmy goes to….

…David Attenborough. Alas. But congratulations, too. I cannot begrudge any honors to the man who brought us “The Life of Birds” and “Planet Earth” (which, by the way, does feature a short segment on the wolverine….)

Nevertheless, the nomination is a huge accomplishment for Gianna and for wolverines. So congratulations again and we look forward to seeing future work on wolverines and other fantastic conservation stories!

Good Luck, Gianna!

Yesterday, someone ended up on this website by googling “Can a wolverine take down an elephant?”

Aside from being my new favorite search term in the history of this blog (knocking “Do wolverines have an appetite for humans?” to second place), the query was a propos. Tonight at Lincoln Center in New York City, Gianna Savoie and her already-award-winning documentary Wolverine: Chasing the Phantom will be among the contenders for an ‘Outstanding Nature Programming’ Emmy; among their competitors will be a documentary on elephants. The event will not be broadcast (at least, I can’t find any schedule for it) but the results will most likely be available at the Emmy website.

The answer to the question is, in strict biological terms: wolverines and elephants don’t share habitat, so an encounter would be highly unlikely, although wolverines and mammoths did overlap during the Pleistocene. I’m betting that a wolverine probably couldn’t have taken down a mammoth, but I doubt that would have stopped one from trying, especially if the mammoth was a newborn. And at the very least, gulos scavenged mammoth carcasses. So we can speculate that wolverines did come out better from any encounter with elephant-family critters.

For the purpose of the wolverine-elephant encounter this evening, we can only hope that the answer is a definitive “yes.” Good luck, Gianna, and may you and the Gulos win!

Wolverine Documentary Nominated for Emmy

I first met filmmaker Gianna Savoie nearly two years ago. Over beer at Jackson’s brewpub, she explained her history in wildlife biology and nature storytelling, two trajectories that were, at that point, converging in the form of a wolverine documentary that she was making for PBS Nature. I’d already gone on one wolverine research trip with a cameraman for the documentary in tow, but at that point the idea was, to me, still abstract, and I was still a skeptic. I knew from experience that it was hard enough to do wolverine science; I couldn’t imagine how anyone – no matter how smart, talented, and energetic – could possibly create a viable film about such an elusive animal.

Seeing Wolverine: Chasing the Phantom, which first aired on PBS on November 14th, 2010, was enough to make me realize that my skepticism had been misplaced. If I needed any further confirmation that the documentary was fantastic (I didn’t, but still…..), that confirmation recently arrived in the form of an Emmy nomination for outstanding nature programming. The nominations were announced back in July (I was on a horse in wolverine habitat in the middle of the Altai in Mongolia, and still haven’t caught up on all the back news), but Montana State University, where Gianna is currently teaching wildlife filmmaking, published an article about the nomination today. Wolverine’s fellow nominees for the honor include David Attenborough’s First Life, Animal Planet’s The Secret Life of Elephants, and another PBS Nature film, Hummingbirds: Magic in the Air.

I had dinner this evening with Gianna and her husband Kip, who also worked on Wolverine. We wondered what might be the best comment on the Emmy prospects for the film, and (jokingly) concluded that neither hummingbirds, elephants, nor David Attenborough would stand much of a chance against wolverines in a face-to-face encounter; if art remains true to nature, the award should go to the gulos.

Joking aside, Gianna is, as ever, humble about her work, and emphasized that her biggest interest is in drawing attention to the wolverine’s conservation needs. As she stated in the interview for the MSU article:

“I didn’t merely want to put the species on the radar, I want to create a place for them in the hearts of the public,” Savoie said. “I want people to fall in love with them as characters, as individuals.”

In fact, Savoie said that her first thought when she learned of her nomination for the prestigious award was not about what dress she would wear, rather it was the attention it might bring to the wolverine, one of the world’s toughest, yet least understood mammals.

“Anything that helps put the wolverine on the radar so that people will want to learn more about them is fantastic,” she said.

This documentary has already created momentum for wolverines and wolverine conservation, and in that sense, it has already started to do what Gianna hoped it would. An Emmy would further that goal and would also recognize the work and the artistry that Gianna, Kip, and the entire crew put into making the film. The awards ceremony for News and Documentary Emmys will be held on September 26th. Congratulations to Gianna on the nomination, and let’s hope that it is the prelude to more good news for wolverines.

Where in the World is the Wolverine?

And now, a confession – if any of my regular readers noticed a decrease in the number or quality of posts at this blog over the past six months, there’s a reason: I’ve been out of the country. I left in early December, just before the listing decision was announced, and since then, I’ve been getting my gulo news (and fix) vicariously, keeping up with wolverine happenings from afar.

How far is ‘afar?’

Very.

I left the US to take a job that was ostensibly unrelated to wolverines, but that, ultimately, does concern the species. I’ll explain how, exactly, once I get to Mongolia and have a little more attention to focus on the world of wolverines.

In the meantime, for those of you who don’t know where I am – and I guess for those who do, too – I’m posting some photos that might give you a clue, or may provide some entertainment value. If you feel like guessing where I (and my book) are, leave a comment. I’m curious to see if anyone recognizes the locations.

Double points to anyone who can name the closest thing to a wolverine inhabiting the ecosystem where these photos were taken.

Special thanks to photographer Amanda Watters for bearing with my crazy requests.

A book for all occasions...

...and all locations.