Wolf Pack, Wolf Skin

On Friday, the Mongolia ski expedition team set out for a shakedown – a trial run to test equipment, fitness, and group dynamics. It’s the first time all of us have been together since we started planning this trip more than a year ago; I spent the summer in Mongolia, and team member Forrest McCarthy has been in Antarctica all winter. Expedition organizer Gregg Treinish, of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, and I are both based in Bozeman, and Jason Wilmot, who is based in Jackson, has been through town a couple of times, but we’d never all been in the backcountry, or even in a room, together. So when we convened in the midst of a snow squall in a parking lot at the Taylor Fork off of Gallatin Canyon, with a carload of brand new gear and a whole lot of expectations, I was nervous and excited. In less than three weeks, we’ll be setting out on a 350-400 mile loop of the mountains around the Darhad Valley in northern Mongolia. This was our opportunity to  figure out how we function as a pack.

Two straightforward admissions: I like wolverines because they reflect an independence of character that I think I possess. I’m not a creature of hierarchies or groups, I’m incapable of engaging in competition or dominance games (I just zone out or leave situations in which these things are important), and I know that working well with others is not always one of my strong points. And also, I have been worried all winter about being the only woman – and a small, lightweight woman who hasn’t been winter camping in 12 years  – among a group of incredibly fit, strong men who are backcountry experts. It’s one thing to carry a 50 pound pack when it’s 25 or 30 percent of your body weight; it’s another thing altogether to carry it when it’s 50 percent of your body weight. All winter I’ve been hauling bait and camera station supplies around the mountains, hoping that this would render me tough enough, but no matter how frequently I go out, I still end up exhausted after a few hundred yards of hauling a burden uphill through thigh deep powder. I consistently felt like a failure. The complex dynamics of working in Mongolia also weighed on my mind. I’ve set out to traipse through the mountains of Mongolia alone or with a few good friends, for work or for fun, dozens of times over the past 13 years, but I’ve never felt so responsible for the experience of people who, at least in the case of Gregg and Forrest, I don’t know that well, and who have absolutely no experience working in Mongolia or on long-term, community-based international conservation and research projects. So as we divided up the new gear and packed it into our bags, I was on the verge of hyperventilating. What if I couldn’t keep up? What if I wimped out in the cold? Worse yet, what if we all simply hated each other?

Gregg’s girlfriend was also along for the weekend, and she, Jason, and Forrest had all brought their dogs, so we were a big group as we embarked. We left a car at Taylor Fork and then drove north to set out from Big Sky. Our route would take us over approximately 25 miles of mountain terrain, over the course of two days. As we wound our way up into the mountains on the first evening, we left the well worn trail and pushed further up towards the passes that would lead us back to the Taylor Fork drainage. The pack didn’t feel anywhere near as heavy as I’d feared, although I was still behind – until we left the trail and set out over crusty, unconsolidated snow. The guys, along with our three canine companions, began to punch through the crust. I stayed on top and pushed ahead. Forrest, veteran of a zillion expeditions and instant source of calm confidence for anxious novices, neatly summed it up by pointing out that what might seem like a weakness can, in certain circumstances, turn into a strength. This is how wolverines take down moose and reindeer. My trepidation diminished.

We spent a spectacularly starry night testing our tents and bags, which were surprisingly comfortable and warm. The next day we headed up towards the first pass. The sky was clear, Lone Peak arced up into the blue with breathtaking grace, and it was pure exhilaration to be out, with mountain peaks on the horizon in all directions. With the guys still punching through the crust and with me lagging on the uphills, though, we were concerned that we might have to turn around, but Gregg encouraged us to push on towards our original goal. It was a long day, with multiple tumbles on my part down steep slopes as I adjusted to the new skis. Jason and Forrest are both amazing to watch on skis, fearless and elegant, with their dogs bounding just ahead or behind. I am a lot less graceful, and it took some time to get used to the kicker skins and the weight and balance of the new pack. We arrived at our campsite after dark, mostly because I’d been so slow on the uphills. Halfway through the day I’d started to run a strange fever, concentrated in my ear lobes and the lymph nodes of my neck, and had become unbearably dehydrated. I felt pretty awful by the time I crawled into my sleeping bag, though I hoped this was all just an adjustment and part of the learning process. My sister, who is a marathoner, has been a source of confidence and inspiration as I’ve prepared for this trip, and I fell asleep thinking of her advice about the mental and physical fortitude that it takes to complete these big endeavors: once you survive it once, you know you can do it again. I’d made it through day one. Everything after this was just another day.

Skiing from Big Sky to the Taylor Fork, testing gear, skills, and the fortitude of Montana’s amazing dogs. Photo by Forrest McCarthy.

Sure enough, the next day was easier, with the exception of an absolutely terrifying, steep,  icy slope that I felt like cursing with eternal damnation. But the clear skies, the great skiing through rolling meadows below, the abundant tracks of ermine, marten, snowshoe hare, and squirrels gamboling through the forest, and the mountain views more than compensated for the moments of doubt up on the steep pitch. Gregg’s encouragement to press on towards the Taylor Fork, Forrest’s consistent confidence, and Jason’s absolute competence in all things related to being out in the mountains, were reassuring, and all paid off. I’ve been out on research trips with guys who have constantly put me (and other female companions) down for lack of experience or strength, and this is my number one test of any men with whom I hike – do they try to make me feel bad? Do I, in turn, find myself wishing that one or more of them might conveniently fall off the nearest cliff? Despite very disparate personalities in the everyday civilized world, we functioned pretty well as a group in the backcountry. I still feel like the weak link, but as Jason pointed out, as the only person who speaks Mongolian and has connections in country, I will be the critical piece once we’re in Mongolia. So we all have our roles to play, and like any wolf pack, each member helps the whole to function.

By the time I got home, my face, hands, arms, and chest had broken out in hives and I was running a serious fever. My ears were so hot that they felt like they might combust, my lymph nodes were hard as rocks, my fingers were swollen and painful, and I had huge welts across my face. This morning, I went to the doctor, who said it was probably just a bad reaction to the sun. Later in the day I saw my Mongolian friend Badmaa, who is here in Montana on a Fulbright scholarship. She said that the condition looked to her like something that Mongolians refer to as huiten alergiin, an allergy to cold – she described the symptoms right down to the burning ears. And then she added that the other name for it, in Mongolian, is chonii hurgan, or “rough wolf skin” – a suitable initiation for a temporary transformation into a creature of the pack.

Second Graders Rock My World

Students at Irving Elementary sharing knowledge about wolverines and Mongolia. Out of focus, but full of fun.  (Photo by Claire Sands Baker)

If you’re ever feeling glum about the future of humanity, go hang out with the second graders at Bozeman’s Irving Elementary School. They’re smart, self-assured, clearly psyched about creative work, and welcoming to visitors – and they also know more about wolverines than most adults. During a half hour class about wolverines in Montana and Mongolia, the 14 students were able to tell me, before I even began to talk, that wolverines:

1. Are members of the weasel family.

2. Have five toes.

3. Look a bit like a skunk and a bit like a bear.

4. Live in cold places.

5. Are found in Montana.

6. Have a reputation for being fierce.

7. Count at least one superhero in their family.

Not only that, but they also managed to reason through the consequences of climate change, figure out why wolverine kits are born white, draw connections to the conservation of polar bears, and confidently locate Mongolia on a map, unassisted. They also asked the kind of questions and said the kind of things that make you so grateful to live in a world filled with smart, funny kids:

” What’s DNA?” (I was totally stumped on how to answer this in eight-year-old terms, but one boy immediately piped up, “It’s a red and blue spiral thing.”)

“Wolverines probably don’t live in Antarctica because they don’t like penguins.”

“Wolverines can eat reindeer, but reindeer can fly.”

“Did you know that my dad petted a wolverine once?”

There’s something great about being around kids and the fluid world of their perceptions, and this school seemed an especially rich learning environment, with a very diverse group of students, and a program that is fostering some pretty knowledgeable naturalists and global citizens. So thanks to these kids for inviting me in to talk, and thanks also for the knowledge that they shared with me. I hope to see them all out in the field at some point in the future, exercising their knowledge of wolverines and the wider world to help us learn even more about how to protect the world that they, in turn, will pass on to their children.

Story Paralysis

It’s an exciting time to be a writer and researcher specializing in wolverines. I’m running my own small wolverine camera project in Montana, and preparing to set off on a 350 mile ski trip in search of wolverines in Mongolia. In the policy arena, wolverines are proposed for listing, with more press attention than the species has ever seen. Wolverines are poised to become the next celebrity wildlife icon, the standard-bearer for the effects of climate change on mountain ecosystems. Perversely, though, all of this action and activity has served to dampen rather than accelerate my motivation to write.

Part of this collapse of motivation has to do with basic physiological issues – ski or snowshoe six to 14 miles, four or five days a week, breaking trail straight uphill through thigh-deep powder with a 40 pound pack on your back, and see if you’re in the mood to write eloquent odes to wolverine research when you stumble back through the door after dark and realize that there’s no food in the house for dinner.

Part of it, though, also has to do with a certain authorial possessiveness, probably the same sort of pique that devout fans of indie bands feel when their beloved group makes it big, and the preppy, conventional guy down the street suddenly thinks he’s an expert on an art form that – in the eyes of the long-term devoted fan, anyway – he doesn’t really get. A good person, of course, is happy for the success of something they care about, but it’s difficult to escape a certain sense of dispossession. For the past five years, wolverines (as an actual entity rather than a legalistic abstraction….) have been the concern of a very small group of people. The narrative of research and conservation has been contained, manageable, and generally based on consensus. The people with the greatest authority and the clearest voice have been the scientists, who have worked directly with the species, held the animals in their hands, understood the ecological relationships, and built the models that describe those relationships. As far as I know, only three people have chronicled this wolverine research in systematic narratives  – Doug Chadwick, who wrote The Wolverine Way, Gianna Savoie, who wrote and directed Wolverine: Chasing the Phantom, and me, in keeping this blog. For someone with an enduring infatuation with knowledge and the processes involved in obtaining it, and a natural wariness of propaganda and conflict, wolverines have been a heady escape from the ritualistic bickering over carnivore conservation in the Western US, precisely because they have been the purview of a limited number of individuals.

Now the story is bigger, and in becoming bigger, it becomes less manageable, with new elements, new concerns, new people, and new agendas. In the face of these new elements, my writing instincts have been temporarily paralyzed, and I decided to take a few weeks off to let these new narratives sink in. I’m back now, and will post updates between now and my departure on March 19th for Mongolia. More soon!

A Question of Scale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wolverines to be Listed as Threatened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Art of Wolverine War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Pointless Petition

Yesterday, this petition was circulated to a number of people involved in wolverine conservation:

The email that accompanied the petition ran as follows:

Dear…..

Wolverines have been on the U.S. Endangered Species List for almost two years. But apparently that doesn’t matter in Montana — the only state where it’s still legal to trap them.

Tell the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission to not open wolverine trapping season!

There are no more than 300 wolverines left in the West, and warming temperatures in future years will only reduce the population further. Of those, up to two-thirds live in Montana. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that wolverines if aren’t protected in Montana, it”s almost as if they aren’t protected at all.

Trapping season starts Dec. 1. That gives us just over a month to get through to state wildlife officials.

Urge wildlife officials to protect endangered species and shut down this year’s wolverine trapping season.

This petition contains a couple of glaring errors, as well as some questionable statements. First of all, wolverines have never been on the endangered list, and the implication that Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks would continue to trap an endangered species does a disservice to the attention that this agency pays to maintaining Montana’s wildlife. Second, we don’t know how many wolverines actually live in the Rockies, and making appeals based on numbers is not the way to discuss wolverines – or, I would contend, any wildlife species. These things should be discussed in terms of population trends, demographics, and ecological process, not numbers. (And the cut-and-paste of the earlier inaccurate statement that wolverines were once “prolific across the West” is also aggravating, if strictly on vocabulary grounds, but the misuse of vocabulary has implications for what is being said about past and current population trends.)

I’m asking people NOT to sign this petition. I am fully in favor of individuals expressing their opinions, but non-experts make appeals based purely on emotion, and when those appeals are inaccurate to the greatest degree, they do more harm than good. These acontextual animal-rights based pleas tend not to register with decision-makers, and when they are as full of errors as this one is, they make all of us who are contextually and scientifically working on this issue look bad. And they make the originators and signers of such petitions into laughingstocks, further discrediting the idea that people who attach themselves to such efforts have even the remotest clue what is going on.

If you want Montana to shut its trapping season prior to a listing decision – I’m strongly doubtful that they will, but there’s always a chance, and again, I’m fully in favor of freedom of expression – please write them a respectful letter that discusses the science. Do not accuse them of incompetence (this does nothing to endear you to the people you’re trying to influence); this includes subtle accusations such as use of the phrases “get through to” and “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist…” And do not get into your moral position on trapping. These things are counterproductive. (If you’ve already signed….I don’t mean to make you feel badly. Just read things carefully next time.)

I’m going to write more about this soon – I’ve been promising a series on the science/ advocacy interface for awhile, but it will be posted over the next week. I am sure that people who are inured to the usual script for “action” have trouble understanding my objections to these tactics, and I want to explain in a more thorough way why the script needs to be rewritten in the case of wolverine conservation. For now, though, take my word for it, and please don’t engage with these efforts.

(While I’m ranting about other people’s inaccuracies, I should acknowledge that this petition did make me realize a mistake of my own; I previously stated that Montana’s trapping season begins on December 15th. It does in fact begin on the 1st. I’m mildly numerically dyslexic, and the season ends February 15th, so that was the number that stuck in my head. I don’t want people to think I’m hypocritical in throwing a fit about other people’s errors in precision while not acknowledging my own.)

Monks in Bozeman, and Environmentalists in Court

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

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

Montana Judge Upholds Wolverine Listing Lawsuit

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

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