To the Field

Some of our luggage – gear and food resupply bags.

It’s six in the morning and still pitch dark here in Ulaanbaatar as we stumble around doing a final count on bags and gear, packing stray items into bags to be left in storage here, testing the weight of our backpacks one last time. The van that will take us north to Murun will arrive in an hour. Due to the need to register our border permit, we are not yet sure whether we will set out from Ulaan Uul, in the Darhad itself, or from Hatgal, which is across the mountains on the edge of the Lake Hovsgol.

I will attempt to post our locations and send messages to my project’s facebook page and also to the tracking page attached to my Spot device, although both of these depend on finding a way to get in touch with the company, which has apparently locked my account because I tried to access it from Mongolia (this is the second time this has happened. For a global rescue service, this is a major flaw) so no one panic if messages and locations don’t show up. We should also be updating via satellite phone at the Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation page, rotating among the five of us over the course of the expedition. Through ASC, if you’re an educator, you can also find a curriculum that will help students follow the expedition and learn about wildlife in Mongolia. We’ll be back in Ulaanbaatar around May 1st, and I look forward to telling the story then.

I am nervous, but also really excited, and very grateful for the contributions of everyone who helped make this happen: to National Geographic for funding this expedition, to Gregg Treinish and Forrest McCarthy for the hard work of organizing, route-finding, and figuring out what it takes to get five people on skis across 400 miles of mountains; to the numerous sponsors who have donated gear and food; to Jim Harris, our photographer, for being willing to come with us on short notice, carrying additional weight in camera equipment; to my many Mongolian friends, who have taught me the language and helped me to understand what wildlife means to people here; to everyone who reads this blog and has been supportive of my work in the US and in Mongolia over the past six years, particularly the Mongolia-Bozeman community, and the wolverine research community (because without the background they provided and the support for my previous trips around Mongolia, we wouldn’t even know where to survey intensively for wolverines in Mongolia, let alone have a context in which to make what we find meaningful); and especially to Jason Wilmot, who first told me back in 2006 that there was an unstudied wolverine population in a country that I knew and loved, and thereby sparked a seven-year effort (and counting….) to bring knowledge of that population to light – and who has come back here for a second trip despite the manifold quirks and discomforts of the first.

See you all in May, hopefully with some great wolverine stories, or, failing that, at least some great ski stories.

 

 

Snow in Ulaanbaatar

Winter in Mongolia is a creature that crawls from some cold hell to wrap the world in its coils each year. The temperature drops so far that the air dries out and becomes too frigid even for snow. In the two winters that I spent in central Mongolia as a Peace Corps volunteer, it snowed sparsely in the lowlands, and the snow blew away or simply shriveled into the atmosphere after a few days. On the northern slopes of the mountains, where the larch forests grow thick, the snow would stick through March and, in patches, it would last until April – hard, icy, windblown encrustations immune to sun or heat. I had a copy of Herotodus which I read several times during those winters, when the wind was too intense to venture out, and there is a section somewhere in the book in which he reports tales of a northern land where white feathers drift down from the sky. I used to toy with the idea that those reports had come from Mongolia, even though I knew that they were likely from northern Europe. The snow in Mongolia is seldom feathery; more often, it’s sharp, needle-like, without the soft comfort of snowfall in more gentle climates.

Snow is at the heart of wolverine research and conservation, here in Mongolia and everywhere else. Jeff Copeland’s 2010 snow model shows wolverine habitat in the high mountains of Mongolia, but reports – anecdotal but widespread – suggest that wolverines in Mongolia are found outside of the snow model with some consistency. I’ve spent hours staring at the snow model maps, trying to remember my experiences, now more than a decade old, with winter snow in Mongolia. If the reports of wolverines outside of the snow model in Mongolia turn out to be true, what is it that makes the difference here, when wolverines adhere with such rigor to this model everywhere else in the world? Is it the wolverines? Is it the snow? Is it the landscape? Is it the way that people occupy the landscape? The possibilities are numerous, and this is one of the things that we are trying to figure out over the longer term.

Snow is also essential to the expedition that we are about to undertake, since we will be traveling on skis. So it seemed auspicious when, yesterday afternoon, the sky came down towards the earth, deep and grey, and soft feathers of snow began to fall across the city. I’ve been snowed on more frequently in the summer in Mongolia than in the winter, but even then the snow tends to be bitter. This is the first time I recall a quiet, gentle snowstorm here.

It was snowing across central and northern Mongolia at the same time that we were turning our faces up to blink in the snow in UB. We found this out today when we met with our logistics coordinator, Anya of Boojum Expeditions, who told us that the snow would likely make travel north to Murun, our rendezvous point with our resupply team, difficult. It would also make our resupply team’s journey south to Murun from the Darhad challenging. It’s good to think that we’ll have the opportunity to observe the behavior of snow firsthand, but hopefully not in a way that thwarts or significantly delays our trip. Still, the snowfall over the city felt like a kind welcome and a quiet reminder, amidst the bustle of sorting through gear and buying supplies, of our reasons for being here: figuring out what makes wolverines occupy the landscape in the way that they do, and what we might be able to do to keep them there, even in the places where their snow is disappearing.

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.

 

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.

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.

 

 

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.

The Mountains Are Always Walking

Two weeks ago, I went up into the mountains with a telemetry receiver to see if I could find F3 and M57. The trip was, in the tradition of mountain travels the world over, a pilgrimage, a small, quiet return to a source. So far 2012 has been a rough year, and also a wonderful one, and the disruptions have meant that my interactions with the wolverines who inspired this blog have been minimal. I visited F3′s den site last September, and skied into her territory in March, but between September of 2011 and April of 2012, I was only intermittently in the GYE. I had made a purportedly sensible decision to try to secure a better (read: more conventional) future for myself, despite the fact that heart, gut, and intellect warned  against the decision. Events proved instinct correct, and I had to extricate myself from a situation – in a flat, uninspiring landscape to boot – that I should have known better than to get into in the first place. At the same time, I’d put together two long-shot grant applications for dream expeditions, the kind of Indiana-Jones-inspired epic adventures that I thought only happen in movies or novels. One involved walking across the Khangai Mountains this summer. The other, in affiliation with the organization Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, proposed a 200-mile ski trip through the Sayan Range in spring of 2013.The latter was the idea of fellow wolverine-enthusiast and professional adventurer Forrest McCarthy, who called me one dark day in January and shook me out of torpor and semi-depression with his enthusiasm for the idea of a ski expedition across Mongolia in search of tracks and hair samples. I would barely have dreamed of doing something like this on my own, but with Forrest and ASC director Gregg Treinish on board, and with NRCC’s Jason Wilmot as the third partner, it suddenly seemed feasible – although still, secretly, I thought funding it seemed as impossible as funding my walk across the Khangai.

In early April, I left the relative security (and undeniable frustration) of the flat occupation in the flat place, and plunged off the edge of a cliff into a salary-less, health-insurance-less, uncertain future. In May, like a giant net thrown out by the universe, the freefall was broken by word that both of these expeditions had been funded, one by the American Alpine Club and the other by National Geographic. For several weeks, I was so giddy with excitement and disbelief that I felt like I was floating around Bozeman with my hair standing on end. I come from a New England Puritan background, long secularized but still deeply self-effacing; we are all raised to expect perfection of ourselves, without any hope of ever achieving our goals because we are, ultimately, undeserving. I had no idea what I’d done right but it seemed as if dreams I’d cherished since I was a child were being handed to me. Suddenly I was extremely busy with discussions about equipment, how many reindeer it might take to resupply a ski expedition in northern Mongolia, and whether or not we could find any Mongolians, short of the Olympic ski team, who might be able to join us. If I’d felt unmoored by my misadventures in flatland, I was unmoored in a different way by this enticing new image of myself as adventurer extraordinaire.

After a few weeks of this, however, reality reasserted itself. I am athletic by genetic default, but I am not really that badass. I do extreme things only by accident, in pursuit of wildlife. Wolverines are the point. Mountains are the point.

So I gathered a receiver and an antenna, packed minimal supplies, and set off towards one of F3′s haunts. In my quick trips to the GYE over the winter and spring, I’d heard rumors: that she might have been pregnant again this year; that she had been wearing a collar that she’d subsequently dropped; that she hadn’t in fact dropped the collar; that M57, her purported mate, had gone missing; that she might have been carrying on an affair with an interloping male. Things I’d taken for granted about F3′s life suddenly seemed as obscure and sketchy as things I’d taken for granted about my own. I wanted to find her, I wanted to find M57, and I wanted to recenter myself.

Going into the mountains is always as much a mental adventure as a physical one, a constant adjustment of one’s relationship with time and motion. First there is the speed of the highway, and then the slower speed of a winding dirt road, and then the stop and the sudden stillness at the trailhead, the bustle of securing gear, the shrug of shoulders and the motion of the pack settling across the back. And then there is the walking, seemingly so slow at first because the mind is still going so fast, and then just right, and then completely unconscious as one’s own mind seeps into the environment and dissolves.

On this particular day, my objective was thwarted by a still-raging creek, not yet spent from the first of the great summer snowmelt up high. I contemplated for a few moments, and then followed a path that led further to the east, but still in the same general direction, which was up. As far as I knew, matters stood like this: F3 was still wearing her most recent collar. Her reproductive status this year remained unknown, as did the fate of any of the kits she might have had last year. M57 hadn’t been heard from on the last flight. The genetic results of samples taken at F3′s den site last year were floating in the intellectual ether, as-yet unexamined. The likelihood of finding any of the wolverines, even via telemetry, was razor thin. The country is rough, all crags and cliffs and soaring glacial bowls that block radio signals, sometimes even from a plane, let alone on foot. To hear a wolverine, the animal has to be in the drainage with you, or else you have to be high enough that the signals aren’t suppressed by an intervening ridge or peak.

At about 8000 feet, I ran into snow deep enough to ensure an inhospitable campsite if I went any higher, so I stopped short of another goal, frustrated. I was in a narrow valley, surrounded on all sides by massive cirques, still snow-laden, brilliant in the early evening sun, and incontrovertibly solid barriers to any radio signal. I set up camp near a small lake and glassed the cirques; far up among the crags on the face opposite, a set of tracks, too far away to identify, led across a snow field and then upwards in a way that made my breath catch. I told myself not to be ridiculous, that I was seeing what I wanted to see. One does go out into the mountains looking for wolverines and then stumble across fresh tracks in a potentially 500 square mile territory.

To prove myself wrong, I pulled out the telemetry equipment and tuned it to F3′s frequency. The buzz of blank static hummed across the gathering evening. A bald eagle dove for a fish in the lake as I switched to M57′s frequency. The eagle struck water and veered upward, and as it rose, the ticking of a radio signal boomed over the receiver, so loud, so clear, that M57 had to be in the drainage with me. No signal so definite could make it through the rock walls around me.

Early the next morning, I bushwhacked up the only snow-free ridge in sight, a thousand feet in less than a mile, an ongoing struggle between the weight of my pack and the will of my legs. At the top of the ridge, perched on a narrow band of rock between two snowbound amphitheaters, I listened again. This time I heard F3 as well; both the signals were more distant, and they were coming from the same direction. The tracks that I’d seen last night looked, from this closer vantage, like a set of two-bys.

The mountains are addictive, and last Friday I went back, aiming for higher country now that a spell of hot weather had melted some of the snow. I was leaving for Mongolia in four days. I wanted one last trip into F3 and M57′s country before I left. I wanted, too, that dissolution of mind that comes in the high country.

In Mongolia a decade ago, a friend of mine had a book about Buddhist environmental ethics, and I picked it up once and flipped it open to a page where a single phrase caught my eye: “The mountains are always walking.” The sentence was some kind of Zen koan and although I usually seek out analysis and intellectual elaboration in my studies of Buddhism, I didn’t want to know anything else about this particular sentence. It was too intriguing and perfect. I closed the book and gave it back to my friend. I thought about that sentence a lot over the years, turning it over, toying with it, letting my feet guide my thoughts about it as I rambled, hiked, skied. On Friday, I let the phrase set the rhythm as I climbed up a much steeper course than I had traveled two weeks ago, through a burn and then mature forest and then out into another, much higher bowl, this one so vividly green that I felt the color on my skin. The cliffs still wore capes of snow and I skittered across these fields, occasionally in the fresh tracks of a black bear that had recently gone in the opposite direction. Fat golden marmots squealed from their burrows. Streams trickled from the snowfields and gathered force as they met, until they formed cascades down the rock faces, and then a roaring stream through the green meadow. Across the bowl, three elk lay in the summer sun, red-gold against the green, sparing an occasional glance in my direction as I made my way up towards the pass. I heard nothing from either wolverine that night, but the next morning, up above 10,000 feet, the two of them were audible again, very faint, pulsing across the landscape from miles away.

I had a series of conversations a few weeks ago about the nature of this wolverine work: whether it was a legitimate occupation, whether I would ever be able to make a living at it, or whether the quest for wolverines was a mere idea, an attempt to impose meaning on the blank space of chaos that we all sense lurking underneath our lives, the ultimate impersonal pitilessness of nature. In the Buddhist mode, it is perhaps better not to be too attached to anything, let alone a single species, the argument went. And yet there is such a tiny margin between detachment and nihilism. A long time ago now, I worked with torture victims and refugees in several post-genocide countries, very shortly after the wars had ended. I was young, naive, and unprepared. Detached compassion unraveled into a fierce encounter with meaninglessness, because meaninglessness, the absolute unpicking of all presuppositions and assumptions about the purpose and workings of the world, was the only thing that prevailed over and erased the force of having witnessed the depths of human depravity. Perhaps there is such a thing as being too attached to a quest for a species, and perhaps that quest is indeed a simple mental construction. But then again, everything we seek is a mental construction: wealth, renown, relationships, successful children – all of these, as measures of our worth in the world, are predicated on cultural constructions as finally flimsy as the worth we ascribe to getting to the top of a mountain or finding an elusive animal. I would rather have something bounded, something to which I can be attached in an impersonal and unimposing way, than fall down that black hole again. Attachment might make me a failure as a Buddhist, but it makes me a little more successful as a human being.

A decade ago, walking in the mountains restored a tenuous sense of self after the worst of that face-to-face encounter with the terrible things that people do to each other, but a few weeks ago I discovered that I still can’t discuss any of it without choking up, even though I thought that I had put these things to rest a long time ago. So I keep walking in the mountains. The mountains and the things that they contain walk too. We are in this together. And once in a while, knowing for sure that a wolverine is out there, somewhere, is enough to bring you back to yourself.

When I got back from the hike on Saturday, I looked up the phrase “the mountains are always walking.” It is from a text, the Mountains and Rivers Sutra, by the Japanese Zen poet Dogen.

It’s now 6:30 a.m. and I am in the airport, ready to leave Bozeman for Ulaanbaatar, for a much longer walk with the mountains.

Wolverine Event in Bozeman, and California Sighting

On Tuesday, June 12th, at the Emerson Cultural Center in Bozeman, Montana, Steve Gehman of Wild Things Unlimited will give a presentation on his wildlife research in the Gallatin Range. Gaimen has worked in the Gallatins for many years, tracking wolverine and lynx and conducting citizen science educational and research programs; the presentation will cover several decades worth of wolverine work. The presentation is at 7:30, and is free and open to the public.

A lucky hiker in California caught a wolverine on film in May. The wolverine was near Lake Spaulding, close to the place where a male wolverine was caught on a marten camera-trap back in 2008, and re-sighted every year since. It’s probably the same wolverine, although we can always hope that a female found her way out there and that they are even now conspiring to repopulate the Sierras.

Certainly this is better Californian wolverine news than another recent item, which detailed the confiscation of a stuffed gulo from a bar. The officers went to the bar on a report that two stuffed roosters on the wall were California condors; perhaps the sense of aggravation with people’s wildlife-identification skills led to a determination that their time shouldn’t be entirely wasted. They spotted the wolverine, which had been there for 50 years, and took it, along with a red-tailed hawk. If it’s a Sierra wolverine, it might be a useful addition to the DNA database; the wolverines that originally inhabited California appear to have been genetically distinct from the rest of the Western US population. Sierra wolverines were apparently extirpated in the 1930′s. The wolverine sighted there in 2008 has genetics similar to the Idaho population, suggesting that he is not a descendant of the Sierra population, but a disperser from the Rockies.

Gulo Monitoring Through Citizen Science

In a follow-up to a New York Times article about citizen science among the outdoor adventure community, the Times‘ “Green“ blog published a great interview with Wild Things Unlimited’s director Steve Gehman, who has been tracking wolverines and lynx and organizing citizen science workshops in Montana for 15 years. I appreciated the first article and thought it was well-written, interesting, and accurate, but I was really pleased to see the interview because it focuses on some scientific particulars that the article was unable to address in detail.

I’ve never met Steve Gehman but his approach to research provides an interesting counterpoint to more technology-heavy work. Collaring studies are vital to learning more about wolverines, but for many reasons, they aren’t always feasible. When I began thinking about how to gather data on Mongolian wolverines, I knew that anything requiring a wildlife vet, a big budget, and lots of technology was out – in other words, for logistical and financial reasons, the kind of project I’d been involved with in the Yellowstone region would be impossible to duplicate in Mongolia. Mongolians, however, have a resource that we don’t: a human population that lives in wolverine habitat and knows wildlife in extraordinary detail. I needed a way to leverage low-tech human power and sophisticated local environmental knowledge, and mix it with a few targeted, high-tech, non-invasive tools like DNA analysis, camera traps, and GIS. Reading this interview, it’s clear that I should have gotten in touch with Steve Gehman, whose goals are similar and who has been working to create the critical element that America lacks in this scenario: a corps of individuals with reliable local knowledge of wildlife. I particularly respect his interest in creating a program that minimizes the stress on the animals he’s studying, while also building support and knowledge for conservation.

The objective of creating an inexpensive, scientifically robust monitoring project based on wildlife-smart laypeople and non-invasive technology shines on the horizon of wolverine research, but we’re still moving towards that horizon. We haven’t arrived yet, and despite growing attention to citizen science, we have a few more mountains to cross before we get there. Audrey Magoun’s meticulous work with camera traps and DNA has broken ground on the use of non-invasive methods, but aside from presence-absence data, we haven’t yet quantified what we can learn from general tracking surveys and collection of DNA samples by citizen scientists, let alone how to apply that knowledge to management. Finding wolverine tracks in a mountain range suggests presence, for example, but does the presence mean that the range is occupied, or that a wolverine is simply passing through? Are wolverines reproducing in that range, and if so, how many are there and how are they making a living there? And even if they are present and DNA suggests that there are several animals of both sexes, how do we translate that knowledge into something useful for conservation, for example a suggestion about reproductive rates or recruitment? On one level, knowing that a rare or elusive species is around is enough to suggest that something’s going right, but for those of us with a fixation on what that ‘something’ is, citizen science still isn’t quite enough. I have hopes for the future, though.

The ambiguity and uncertainty are part of the intrigue; I don’t think any of us would be involved with this work if we weren’t stimulated by intellectual puzzles and the challenge of figuring out stuff like how to translate track observations into concrete data. I’m not going to get into occupancy modelling right now, but if you really want to shock your brain with some wild statistical methods (or, alternatively, depending on how you feel about statistics, cure a long-running case of insomnia), go look it up.

In the meantime, here’s a basic but very useful piece of information that has come out of Gehman’s years of tracking. He mentions that he and his crew are finding wolverine tracks at much lower-elevations than we might have expected. Combine this data with anecdotal observations from Mongolia, the recent trapping of two wolverines in southern Ontario, and our suspicion that wolverines in the Rockies are still expanding their range and don’t represent a fully interconnected population or a fully occupied landscape, and we have an intriguing intimation that we still have a lot to learn about the species at the southern edges of its range. That might be good news for wolverines if it means that they can survive at lower elevations, and it’s definitely good news for those of us who love the idea of spending as much time as possible out in the wolverine’s habitat. I hope we never learn so much that we sit back and say that it’s not worth encouraging people to get out into the backcountry and help us learn more.

 

How to Help Wolverines

Whenever PBS airs its wolverine documentary, visits to this site surge, many of them involving inquiries about how to help wolverines. I don’t know if something similar will happen in the wake of the NatGeo Wild episode, but in anticipation – because I’ll be offline for the next few days, down in M56′s territory in Colorado – I’m going to revisit an original post that I wrote to address the question, “How can I help wolverines?”

First of all, keep learning about the species. The more you know, the better for wolverines. The best source of wolverine information remains The Wolverine Foundation, which is run by a coalition of wolverine researchers, representing many projects in the US and beyond. Some past and on-going projects worth looking into include the Glacier National Park study (.pdf), the Absaroka-Beartooth Project, the SE Alaska Project, the Central Idaho Wolverine and Winter Recreation Research Study (.pdf), the Wallowa-Whitman survey in Oregon, the Greater Yellowstone wolverine project of the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Swedish wolverine study. The PBS documentary Wolverine: Chasing the Phantom provides a great introduction to wolverine research and conservation in the US. Doug Chadwick’s book The Wolverine Way is an engaging, in-depth look at the Glacier Park project. For the truly committed, Jeff Copeland’s snow model paper offers the scientific basis for climate change threats to wolverines, and a good entry-point to the scientific literature.

Second, do not try to raise a wolverine as a pet. Wildlife rehabilitation and ambassador animals play an important role in conservation, but wolverines are not domestic animals and most people don’t have the resources to give one the kind of life it deserves and needs. If you want to adopt a wolverine, consider doing so by making a donation to a research project that monitors wolverines in the wild. Wolverine research projects are able to keep close track of each instrumented animal, and even via GPS collar, the unique personality of individual wolverines shines through. We also do a great job of keeping our donors informed about what “their” wolverines are up to, so it’s a nice way to have all the fun and adventure of having a wolverine in your life, without chewed-up furniture and potential puncture wounds.

Third, the biggest long-term needs for wolverine conservation are better data and a well-informed constituency. As of December 2010, the wolverine was listed as “warranted but precluded” under the Endangered Species Act. This means that government recognizes that wolverines face substantial threats, but doesn’t currently have the resources to list the species. In its decision, the US Fish and Wildlife Service names climate change as the biggest threat facing wolverines in the Lower 48. Unfortunately,  understanding how wolverines are responding – let alone what the best conservation options are – is difficult.  Thanks to the dedicated efforts of researchers involved with the studies listed above, we know a lot more now than we did a decade ago. Some of the most basic questions, however, remain unanswered. Among them: How do female wolverines select den sites? How do wolverines travel across landscapes between mountain ranges? Despite strong evidence that female wolverines den in deep spring snow, is it possible for some wolverines to reproduce in areas with less snow? What are the physiological mechanisms that make wolverines so dependent on cold conditions, not to mention such incredible athletes? And the list goes on. All of these questions are relevant to figuring out how we might  protect wolverines over the long term.

Wolverine research is expensive, time-consuming, and not for the faint of heart. The stories I’ve heard from wolverine researchers – told quietly, humbly, without fanfare – put the most dramatic television renderings of encounters with (captive) wild animals to shame. These men and women are superheroes, physically and intellectually, and they’ve been working for years in the most extreme conditions, under the radar, out of commitment to wolverines and science. As we move into an era when wolverines are becoming more visible, and perhaps even a symbol of a new era of conservation in the West, the need for an educated constituency is critical. I emphasize the word “educated,” out of respect for the hard work that these scientists have done to help us understand the species and its needs. If you want to support wolverine conservation, do it right. Understand that this isn’t a simple story of immediate crisis which can be fixed by listing wolverines and getting a single group of people to stop doing something destructive. Wolverines face systemic issues that are going to require a new vision extending far beyond just the species. Protect wolverines and their ecosystem by riding your bike instead of driving your car, by supporting open-space initiatives that keep development at a minimum, by moderating your own desires for things that increase your environmental footprint. Support civil political discourse and inclusive decision-making, and support that civility and inclusivity in wider society as well, so that we have a process that protects wolverines without creating societal strife. In election years, vote the environment and let your politicians know that’s what you’re doing. If you belong to a faith group, encourage them to understand that whatever was created by the Divine is a work of holy art and should be protected as such – even a scrappy critter like a wolverine. Perhaps more than any of the charismatic species that have come into the conservation spotlight before, wolverines represent a need to think about the global ecosystem and the entire system of human thought and action that surround environmental decision making. Embrace the complexity and get creative.

If you’re really inspired by wolverines and wolverine research, support research financially by making a donation to one of the research projects. A quick breakdown of costs: $25 buys supplies for non-invasive DNA sampling. $60 analyzes a DNA sample. $150 buys immobilization drugs. $250 covers a flight to determine whether a female is denning. $3000 buys a GPS collar. Any amount – whether it’s $5 or $5000 – shows an interest in and commitment to the species, and we appreciate it. You can channel a donation to wolverine conservation in general, or to a specific project of interest, through the Wolverine Foundation.

If you can’t make a financial contribution (and trust me, I understand if you can’t….wolverine research pays big in amazing experiences, minimally in dollars, so I’m in the same boat) help out by becoming a citizen scientist if you live in wolverine territory. If you’re a backcountry skier, a snowmobiler, a hunter, a backpacker, a climber, or anyone else who spends time in the high country, let us know if you see a wolverine or tracks. You can find a pocket-sized card to download and take on your next trip here. Wild Things Unlimited, an NGO in Montana, trains volunteers to track wolverines and lynx, and several projects around the West look for winter-spring volunteers for field crews. Get in touch with me if you want more information about current opportunities, or if you have any questions about wolverines in general.

Thanks to everyone for your support of an amazing species!