Snow Beasts

I first went to the mountains of Hovsgol, Mongolia, in 2001, as a volunteer on snow leopard track surveys sponsored by the Mongolian government and the International Snow Leopard Trust. With two fellow Peace Corps volunteers and a Hovsgol National Park ranger, I spent nine days in the Horidol Sardag, the range that arcs along the southeastern curve of the Darhad, searching for snow leopard sign and for evidence of the snow leopard’s primary prey species, ibex and argali. At that time, American-style wildlife research in Mongolia was still in its infancy, and although the local community had reported snow leopard presence in the mountains around the Darhad, the international scientific community hadn’t been able to confirm these reports. They were still searching, throughout the country, for population nodes of the big cats and their prey.

The Horidol Sardag left me in awe. It was the first time I had traveled across an expanse of country for nine days without encountering anyone outside my own party. The place felt vast, and empty of human influence, and therefore whole and connected in a way that I’d never experienced before. It wasn’t that the country was unpopulated – it was the awareness of the fact that people had lived here for thousands of years without wrecking the place. The landscape had presence, a kind of quiet awareness that seemed nearly conscious in its intensity. We never found the snow leopards, nor any sign of argali; the only evidence of ibex was a worn old skull lying in the middle of a dry drainage up high. But we heard wolves at night, and saw elk and ptarmigan and deer. And the sense of awareness and watchfulness I attributed in part to the presence of snow leopards, somewhere beyond our sight, because predators lend electricity to a landscape, even when you can’t see them. By the time the survey was over, I’d developed a fascination with the species, because they lived in the mountains and were solitary and wide-ranging and tied to the snow and cold. These were all characteristics that I admired.

At the time, I was unaware that there was another unseen mountain beast running around in the Horidol Sardag. When I started talking with wolverine biologists in 2006 about a potential project in Mongolia, I was struck by the similarities between wolverines and snow leopards. These similarities made it easy to expand a fascination with snow leopards to encompass wolverines as well. One of my initial questions – still a topic of interest – involved possible interactions and competition among snow leopards, wolverines, and wolves. Another, of course, has to do with the vulnerability of snow leopards to climate change, and whether that vulnerability is as acute as that of wolverines. There are other hypotheses as well. Much as I love wolverine work in the US, the prospect of being back in mountains that contained snow leopards and wolverines fueled a large part of my drive to start working in Mongolia.

In 2009, I began interviewing herders and hunters throughout Mongolia, searching for information on wolverines, which had never been formally documented in the country. I took a packet of animal photographs everywhere I went, because I didn’t want interviewees to know exactly which species I was interested in. I would pull out the cards and ask people to sort the pictures into piles, representing animals that lived in the area, and animals that did not. Pooled over several interviews in a single region, trends began to emerge. One particularly interesting trend came from the interview data in the Darhad: people persistently reported snow leopard presence. The scientific community still hadn’t verified presence since the surveys in 2001, but hunters insisted that snow leopards were around. So did Tumursukh, the director of the Darhad’s three protected areas, when I spoke to him last September about the prospect of a wolverine camera project in the region. He was enthusiastic, not only because of wolverines, but because he was sure that the cameras would turn up evidence of snow leopards, too. The IUCN depicts the area as containing a “probably extant” resident population, so the perception that there were as-yet-scientifically-undetected snow leopards in these mountains was widespread.

IUCN range map of snow leopards showing a probable resident population in northern Mongolia.

The data trends regarding wolverines were interesting as well. Interviewees sometimes used the word hovor (“rare”) to describe the species, but many of them referred to wolverines as  elbeg (“abundant”), especially during the winter months. All of them told me that if I came back when there was snow on the ground, I would definitely find tracks. They described the tracks as being all over the place, and easily found.

This didn’t entirely make sense. Wolverines are never abundant; they’re naturally rare, even when the landscape is saturated. But part of the impetus for doing wolverine work in Mongolia stemmed from initial, relatively vague reports that Mongolian wolverines might be doing things differently from their kin in the rest of the world. I didn’t want to dismiss anything, no matter how odd, so I added several hypotheses to the running list, and discussed, with the project’s scientific advisor Jason Wilmot and with Mongolian colleagues, the option of doing a series of transects while snow was on the ground, to see if we could get some kind of bearing on whether wolverines in the Darhad were elbeg, hovor, or somewhere in between. We saw this as a prelude to a more in-depth study.

That was the inception. Now I’m going to skip to the end, with promises to fill in the middle soon.

We ended up doing the track survey with a team of five Americans, sponsored by National Geographic. I would have preferred to have at least one Mongolian on the team, but the logistical realities, and the difficulty of finding someone with adequate ski experience, precluded this. We set out in late March, and skied until late April, covering approximately 230 miles, with resupplies managed by the multi-talented Mishig and the rest of the equally talented team at Boojum Expeditions. This was my first long expedition, so there was plenty of learning for me. But they were, in a way, my mountains; I’d traveled around in them in bits and pieces over the course of twelve years, and they felt comfortable.
Living in the cold, camping in the snow, and bundled into layers of warm winter clothing, we became snow beasts of the Darhad too.

And our experiences matched those of my Mongolian interviewees – there were wolverine tracks everywhere. I remain stunned by how many tracks we detected. Even though I have high confidence in the accuracy of the information I obtained from the interviews, I did not anticipate finding tracks every day – but we did. I’m not going to mention any conclusions here, but my mind is spinning, in a good way. It’s been spinning too fast to write anything for the past few weeks, but the pieces are finally starting to fall into place. It’s an exciting feeling.

Our experience also aligned with those of my Mongolian friends in another way. Twelve years after my first trip through the Horidol Sardag, I finally saw snow leopard tracks in the mountains of Hovsgol. Skiing over the high, barren, and beautiful country at a place called Utrag Pass, I suddenly felt that electricity again, the sense of presence. A few minutes later, I paused at a set of strange tracks that moved across the crusted snow in a way that said “cat.” Jason and two other expedition members ended up documenting them as I skied on ahead, the victim of a heavy pack that necessitated continuing so that I could make adequate time. The tracks were fresh, and they were definitely not lynx, the only other big cat in the region.

Forrest McCarthy, the expedition’s official adventure-geographer, skis across the high country of Utrag Pass.

When we got back to Ulaanbaatar, I sent the track photos to friends who work on snow leopard projects elsewhere in the world. Fellow expedition members did the same, and the photos went out to a variety of experts. They all verified the ID. Panthera, the renowned big cat conservation organization, generously arranged the loan of some cameras to deploy this summer, in conjunction with a camera-trap training for Tumursukh and the park rangers.

I am excited about this snow leopard mini-project, but there’s a peculiar tension between the two disciplines in which I work. As an anthropologist, I trust the accuracy of the information that I receive from Mongolian herders and hunters, and I know that no matter what kind of background I bring to my work here, I will never know as much about the environment and wildlife of the region as they do. Full credit goes to the community of people who have kept these wildlife populations on the landscape and who understand them far better than I ever will. I have no aspirations to participate in an outmoded colonialist narrative of heroic European “discovery” of things that local populations consider common knowledge. It would be deeply unethical for me, or anyone else living in the 21st century, to generate such absurd and self-aggrandizing stories. My role is as a facilitator, and I see myself as a perpetual student of the people with whom I work, requesting that they teach me what they know, and bringing that knowledge into dialogue with the scientific community.

I’m also a scientist, though, and that makes it difficult to ignore the standards of science when it comes to research. To the global wildlife community, snow leopard presence remains unconfirmed in the mountains around the Darhad. Science operates on the model of visible material evidence, and this is what will be required to finally prove that snow leopards are up there. And as exciting as a single track is, it doesn’t meet scientific evidentiary standards even for distribution, let alone residency. Just as a single wolverine track sighting in Nebraska would not confirm the presence of a breeding population in the state, the detection of this track tells us nothing except that a single animal was there, once. It may have come from Russia, it may have come up from the Khangai in Central Mongolia, it could be a lone dispersing male. It’s hard to keep from giddy excitement, and from making sweeping but scientifically inaccurate claims about ‘proof’ of an unknown population, but such claims would be premature and amateurish. It’s time for steps that will offer verification. I will be heading back up to the Darhad this summer to try to get photos, and to try to determine the prospects for figuring out whether there is a resident population.

If we do confirm presence, I will also be thinking carefully about how to make sure that we tell the story as a narrative of continuity and reinforcement between the vast knowledge of the Mongolians with whom I work, and the precision and material evidence required by the scientific community. This is not about western scientists coming in and generating new knowledge, because the knowledge is old. It’s about bringing this old knowledge into a new light, focused through a slightly different lens. This is important not only from an abstract ethical point of view, but also because the fate of the Darhad’s wildlife will be in the hands of the people who live there, and they must have ownership over the process of protecting it. This means inclusion in and credit for the process of knowledge explication and scientific dialogue, rather than dispossession from that process by outsiders. This line is difficult to walk, but scientists have to find their footing within this territory, even if it’s a challenge.

Of course, wolverines remain the focus of my work, and the same standards of community engagement apply there. I also have cameras from the Wolverine Foundation; combined with the snow leopard cameras, we’ll be able to cover a substantial region. Cameras placed in the high country have as much of a chance of picking up gulos as they do of picking up snow leopards, and I will be working as closely as possible with rangers and other community members to make sure that they are engaged in the entire process. Most of all, though, I am excited to be headed back up into those mountains for another round of trying to track down the Darhad’s snow beasts.

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.

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.

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.

 

 

New Study on Food Storage and Reproduction

Wolverine kits, at least several weeks old. Borrowed without permission from care2.com. Too cute not to repost.

For years now, we’ve known that wolverines are found in regions of deep spring snowpack and low summer temperatures – Copeland et al’s 2010 paper elucidated this elegant model of wolverine distribution by mapping known wolverine locations from all over the globe and placing these locations onto a map of global snowpack on May 15th, and maximum August temperatures of less than 22 degrees Celsius. The paper showed that wolverines are tied to the cold regions of the northern hemisphere, and linked this dependence on cold to the fact that wolverines give birth in snow dens. The paper was groundbreaking and its publication eagerly anticipated, because it provided enough evidence of climate change threat to support the USFWS’ 2010 decision that wolverines are warranted for listing.

A new paper in the Journal of Mammalogy by Bob Inman, Audrey Magoun, Jens Persson, and Jenny Mattisson expands our understanding of the links between wolverines and the cold, exploring the complex reasons for the evolution of wolverine reproductive timing and behavior.  If the Copeland paper told us that wolverines are indeed climate sensitive due to denning requirements and a cold-adapted physiology, this paper asks why those denning requirements and physiological limits are so strict – in other words, what adaptive advantage does cold-climate specialization offer to the species?

Inman and his co-authors suggest that the wolverine’s strategy is driven by the nutritional needs of the species, and of reproductive females in particular. Pregnancy and nursing are the most nutritionally demanding activities that any wolverine – any mammal, in fact – undertakes, and the successful rearing of young requires a secure source of food. The timing of wolverine births early in the year, according to the paper, allows females to take advantage of a flux of winter-killed ungulates that they have cached, and the nursing and weaning periods encompass the spring surge in baby ungulates and the brief summer explosion of small mammal populations. Persistently cold climates allow wolverines to cache food in an environment where it won’t go bad, allowing them to store sparse nutritional sources and “be efficient in channeling available food resources towards reproduction.” And, suggest the researchers, by living at the outer – or upper, in the case of the Rockies – margins of the ranges of other predators such as wolves and bears, wolverines avoid direct competition with much larger and better equipped rivals. Put all of this together, and wolverines obtain a neat set of advantages by living in a harsh and desolate landscape.

The paper relies on synthesis of existing research, and contains a great section reviewing all the data on reproduction. Wolverines mate in summer, but implantation of the fertilized embryos is delayed until winter. We generally say that wolverines give birth around February 14th (Valentine’s Day) and that the kits are weaned by May 15th (Mother’s Day), because these dates are easy to remember and are, on average, accurate. But in the details of known wolverine birth dates, we see a much wider range, with some wolverines giving birth as early as January, others as late as April. This means that implantation – nidation, in scientific parlance – also occurs over a range of dates, from November through January, with a 45-day gestation. Most of the births do occur mid-February to early March, but the range offers the possibility that female wolverines are responding to environmental factors on a year-by-year basis (several of the females were monitored over several years and had different chronologies in different years.) Does this mean that wolverines might possess some latitude in timing births to correspond to changing snow and nutrition availability over the longer term? Like almost everything else about wolverines, we have no definite answer, but it’s interesting to think about.

The paper also summarizes reports in some studies of very high levels of wolverine pregnancy (implanted embryos). This, too, is interesting, since female wolverines seem to raise very few litters. The data suggest that many females who give birth lose their litters early. Nutritionally, this is more adaptive than struggling to keep a litter alive and then losing it later, since it represents a much smaller investment of resources. Losing a litter early during a year when conditions are sub-optimal gives females a chance to maintain better body condition for next year’s litter, when conditions might be better. All of the attention to this question of reproduction is critical, since we absolutely must understand these dynamics in order to determine effective conservation strategies.

This paper received a fair amount of attention in the press, most of it focusing on food storage: here at the Examiner, at the Huffington Post, at LiveScience, at USA Today (there is, perhaps, a wolverine fan on staff there, because this makes two articles on gulos in two months), at National Geographic, and at MSNBC. I’m sure that there are others out there, too. Most of these articles quote lead author Bob Inman, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, sounding very respectable and scientific – but his secret identity is revealed in an article discussing whether or not the ubiquitous presence of Wolverine the X-Men superhero may also be an adaptation to climate change, in which Wolverine uses his extensive social connections as a food storage strategy: “Understanding why and how Wolverine exists where he does and the various adaptations he has evolved to eke out a living will better inform population management strategies and conservation of the comic industry,” said researcher Robert Inman. I’d heard that Bob was away in Sweden for several months, but now we know the truth.

My own summary of this paper is delayed; I usually like to talk to the scientists to make sure I have all of the implications correct, but the paper came out just as I left for Mongolia, and I haven’t had the chance to talk to anyone. So this is just a basic summary. More later.

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.

 

Wolverines in the NYTimes

A few weeks ago, I found myself standing outside a Bozeman bar at dusk, a file of topo maps tucked under one arm. I’m not the kind of person who hangs around bars (the file of maps should be a clue; I’ve discerned that these are not a usual drinking accessory) but I was waiting to meet Gregg Treinish, the founder and director of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation (ASC), an NGO whose name alone intrigued me enough to venture out into the introvert-unfriendly universe of college-town drinking establishments. Gregg’s credential as a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year was intimidating, but when he showed up and spent the first fifteen minutes of our conversation talking about how inspiring he finds wolverines, I figured we were on equal footing in at least one respect. This was fortunate, since a mutual friend had contacted me in January to talk about putting together an exciting, wolverine-related adventure with Gregg and a few other people, and I wasn’t really prepared to spend time in the remote backcountry with someone who intimidated me with his athleticism. An athletic individual committed to wolverines, however – I could deal with that.

Earlier this week, an article about ASC appeared in the New York Times, putting the organization – and wolverines! – in headline news at America’s newspaper of record. The article and attached video feature gulos, and the narration and the interviews in the film segment contain solid information about the species (I’ve been told that it’s better to collect hair samples with tweezers rather than bare hands, since this minimizes the risk of cross-contamination of the DNA, but that’s the only very minor issue that I would raise), but the larger arc of the article is about the as-yet-untapped potential of citizen science among the outdoor set.

In his phenomenal book Annals of the Former World, John McPhee relates the story of geologist Jean de Charpentier, whose work influenced Louis Agassiz, the geologist renowned for pioneering the field of glaciology. In McPhee’s telling, Charpentier was climbing in the Alps one day in 1815 when he met a mountaineer and hunter who had spent most of his life tracking chamois and climbing peaks. This mountaineer pointed out to Charpentier that the boulders in the lower pastures had been placed there by ice that had melted off many years before, suggesting that at one time ice had covered much more of the mountains than it did in 1815. Although Charpentier didn’t believe the mountaineer, he reported the comments, other geologists picked up on the idea that mountain glaciers moved rocks around and shaped the peaks, and Charpentier himself eventually accepted the theory and published work on it. Agassiz expanded this notion one step further to realize that glaciers had once existed at far larger scales, and that much of the topography of the mountainous north had been shaped by glacial ice. He had the technical expertise to understand the implication of the mountaineer’s notion, but he hadn’t spent adequate time in the mountains to have reached this conclusion on his own. The scientific community needed someone who had been out in that environment over the long term to put the pieces together.

This story has stuck with me for years, as an illustration of the importance of being out in the world you’re studying, and of listening to people who spend even more time out there than you do. Scientists these days spend more time than we would like stuck at a computer, and Americans have reached a level of socio-economic development in which adventure has become its own endeavor, separate from either science or survival. Citizen science in general, and organizations like ASC, illustrate that the separation isn’t strictly necessary. The outdoor adventure community consists of smart, generous people who care about the environments in which they’re skiing, climbing, kayaking, rafting, and hiking, and most of them want to contribute to protecting those environments and are eager to share observations that they’ve made. Creating a vehicle to organize connections between these two groups is a great idea. I have some qualms about data-quality issues and the need for rigor, but perhaps the existence of such an organization will prompt adventurers to gain those skills, and perhaps it will also prompt scientists to figure out how to summarize what they do to a lay public.

Wolverines are especially emblematic of the potential for citizen science among adventurers, and adventurous climbers may be particularly important to scientific research in mountainous regions where wolverines and other climate sensitive species live. Like the mountaineer of the Alps – his name was Perraudin, to give him equal credit with his more celebrated contemporaries – hikers and climbers spend far more time than scientists do in high altitude environments, and their observations can be important. So it’s really great to see that more and more projects are working to tap this potential.