A Question of Scale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wolverines to be Listed as Threatened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Art of Wolverine War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Montana’s Trapping Season Suspended

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

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

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

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

Pointless Petition

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

The email that accompanied the petition ran as follows:

Dear…..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Montana Judge Upholds Wolverine Listing Lawsuit

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

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

Petition to End Trapping in Montana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few additional resources:

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

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

Happy Wolverines’ Birthday

I wanted to quickly post two thoughts: first, belatedly, Happy Valentine’s Day. This is actually an important day for wolverines all over the world, since it marks the approximate date of birth for every wild wolverine on the planet. As I write, female wolverines from the US to Canada to Russia to Mongolia to Scandinavia are burrowing into their snow dens and giving birth. If our female wolverine F3 is pregnant this year, that’s what she is most likely doing too.

At some point soon we will try to determine whether or not she’s localized by sending a telemetry flight on three successive days.  If the flight locates her in the same area over those three days, she is most likely in a den with kits. I’m also curious as to what M57, her mate, is up to, and whether he is also in proximity to the den (if there is one…), since father wolverines play some role in protecting and raising their offspring. The precise parameters of this role are still up for debate, so if F3 is denning, it will be interesting to follow M57 as well. (Several days after we caught F3 last month, M57 also went into the trap; we didn’t have a collar ready and had to let him go, but he and F3 were at least relatively close to each other as of a few weeks ago.)

I waited to post this until today, since February 15th marks the close of Montana’s wolverine trapping season. Three wolverines in total were killed in the state this year, at least one of them a female. No wolverines were reported killed in region 3, where F3 and M57 live. I’ve had several comments over the past few weeks about trapping, and this is something I intend to write about soon, in connection with the broader issue of how we manage social conflicts around wildlife conservation. For now, I’m incredibly relieved that F3 and M57 made it through another year, and, although I am not opposed to the idea of hunting, and have a lot of respect for ethical hunters both here in the US and in Mongolia, I am also sorry for the loss of those three animals, for the sake of the overall wolverine population. I wish that Montana was crawling with so many wolverines that every trapper could take one and it wouldn’t even make a difference to the population at all. Unfortunately the scientific evidence points increasingly towards the fact that this is not the case.

Wolverine Events in Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho

Here is the official schedule of January, 2011 wolverine talks in Colorado; note that Vail has been added on January 26th. Many thanks to the Center for Native Ecosystems and all the co-sponsors who have contributed time and resources to making these events happen!

January 26th – Edwards, New Battle Mountain High School, 6-8 pm

January 27th – Golden, American Mountaineering Center, 6-8 pm

January 28th – Denver, Denver Zoo, 7-9 pm

January 29th – Boulder, REI, 6-8 pm

In February, Jason will be speaking in Wyoming and Idaho at the following locations:

February 18th: Lander, Wyoming.

February 23rd: Boulder, Wyoming.

February 25: Sun Valley, Idaho.

Details on time and venue will follow.

Also, Gianna Savoie and Nature’s Wolverine: Chasing the Phantom won a Cine Golden Eagle Award in Environment and Science! Congratulations to everyone involved in that amazing film. The documentary was also selected for the Wild and Scenic Film Festival, and will be shown on Sunday, Jan. 16th at 9:45am at Oddfellows, 212 Spring Street, Nevada City, CA. Gianna herself will not be able to make it to this showing, but it’s a great chance to see wolverines on the big screen.

Finally, Montana’s wolverine trapping season is closed in region one, with two wolverines killed. The quota in this region is three wolverines, with a female sub-quota of one, which means that a female was killed this year. I’m not posting this news to rile people up, but to raise again the question of whether we know for sure that removing female wolverines – especially reproductive females, although I don’t know whether this particular female was reproductive – from population nodes is safe for the overall population. We also need more information on the extent to which Montana’s wolverines serve as genetic boosters to populations further south, and a source population for recolonization of unoccupied regions. All of these questions bear further careful consideration. I hope we find funding and motivation to get some monitoring and research underway in the near future.

The Capture, Part 1

The day might start off in any of several normal ways: you drive to work and, because your coworkers aren’t in yet, check for a new episode of The Daily Show online while making a cup of hot chocolate against the chill morning air, mentally composing checklists of grant applications to be completed, emails to be written, monstrous books on statistics to be struggled with.

Or you get a call from the day care center telling you that you need to come pick up your three year old son because he is sick, necessitating a change in the day’s schedule, a day of work from home.

It’s all routine, and then the phone rings, a Montana number, from the head of the field crew that runs the wolverine research traps. A call at 9:00 a.m. almost inevitably means one thing: a wolverine in one of the traps.

Jason was on his way out the office door on Tuesday morning, files and computer tucked under his arm, en route back home to attend to his sick son (I was surreptitiously hiding my web browser, sound on mute, so that he wouldn’t realize I’d been watching Jon Stewart before he arrived) when the call came. The shift from routine to excitement was instantaneous, as if a shot of electricity had been injected into the office and its inhabitants. The discussion  was quick – which animal was in the trap? M57! Was he still wearing a collar? They couldn’t tell, it was too dark in the trap and the field crew didn’t have a flashlight. But everyone would be surprised if M57 was still carrying a collar nearly a year after his original capture; wolverines are notorious for shrugging out of collars within days – weeks, at most – of being instrumented. And even if he was still wearing a collar, we’d need to take off the old one and put on a new one. As he talked, Jason was already pulling the wolverine capture kit, two big tupperware containers, out of its corner and into the center of the floor.

By noon, Jason’s wife Kate had made it back from a bison survey to take care of their son, and we were en route to Montana. The drive was a six-hour review of how to calculate drug dosages, what would happen once the animal was down, and speculation about M57 himself. He’s a mystery wolverine, caught in a bobcat trap just outside of Menan, Idaho, in February of 2009, 40 miles from the Sawtooths, 50 miles from the Tetons. Which way was he headed, where was he coming from, and what was he doing in a potato field in the first place?  Checking his trap that day, the trapper must have been shocked to find the animal; I imagine him pushing aside sagebrush, expecting maybe a bobcat, maybe nothing, and seeing a pile of dark fur, and then that pile of fur coming alive, rounding on him with that thundery wolverine growl, and the trapper shaken out of a sense of what was within the realm of expectation and possibility. I have no idea if it happened that way, it’s simply what I imagine. But the trapper irrefutably did the right thing; he got in touch with state wildlife biologists, who called the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) wolverine project, which took the young wolverine to a veterinary clinic in Driggs, Idaho, to check him over and to make sure he hadn’t suffered from his experience in the trap. The wolverine had been caught by his right front foot, a toe was dislocated, but he seemed fine otherwise.  He had a distinctive white sock on his left forefoot, and a crescent white marking on his right forefoot, uncommon but not unheard of, particularly in Sawtooth wolverines. M57 was instrumented at the clinic and then taken to Montana to be released.

Ten minutes outside of Jackson, Jason realized he’d forgotten to grab the antibiotic out of the fridge for the drug kit, and we stopped at the same veterinary clinic where M57 had had his check up to see if we could buy some. All they had was a 250 ml bottle, which was large but would have to do. The woman who helped us was professional and pleasant, but despite my giddy excitement and less-than-subtle attempts to get her to tell us about the several wolverines that had been through the clinic, she seemed blandly unimpressed at the fact that we were off to collar an emblem of the untamed wilderness. I experienced an uncomfortable moment of recognition that not everyone shares the conviction that wolverines are a reason for getting out of bed in the morning and continuing to be amazed at life. Under the circumstances, it was a moment of recognition that I chose to ignore.

We followed M57′s route north to the Centennials, where he had been released just over a year ago. He’d spent a few weeks in those mountains before heading east, crossing Yellowstone National Park, and eventually settling in the Absarokas. By the time the Absaroka peaks loomed into our view through the windshield of Jason’s truck, it was already dusk, and it was pitch dark when we finally got on snowmobiles to head up to the trap. There were ten of us altogether; five field crew members, who had spent the day watching the trap and making sure that M57 was okay; a visiting intern from the Netherlands; the Wildlife Conservation Society’s lead wolverine biologist, Bob Inman, and their field director, Mark Packila; and Jason and me.

The collection of participants jolting through the night by way of snowmobile emphasized the way in which  jurisdiction loses meaning when you deal with an animal like a wolverine. M57 had been caught in Idaho, instrumented by WCS, a non-profit research outfit, and released into the territory that WCS monitors, but he had then moved into the territory of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wolverine Project (ABWP), which was a cooperative effort that involved Yellowstone Park, the Gallatin National Forest, and a second research non-profit, NRCC. The ABWP officially ended at the end of 2009, but NRCC and the Gallatin are cooperating to maintain the research operation. Technically, this was a Gallatin-NRCC capture because it involved our trap, our crew, and a new GPS collar that we were supplying, but WCS had a claim to M57 and was a vital part of the effort as well. And the state of Montana also had an interest, since M57 is now a Montana wolverine, although at the last minute the state’s representative was unable to make it to the capture.  The presence of so many people from so many different agencies illustrates one of the unique challenges of wolverine conservation: there is no way to study or manage these animals without cooperation across boundaries. The scales at which wolverines live and move will require us to rethink what it means to maintain effective connectivity, how we define the boundaries of an ecosystem, and how we manage populations that are integrated across massive scales. (Although, happily, the Dutch intern was simply a coincidence;  international relations are not a component of wolverine population management. Yet.)

The night was warm for a wolverine capture, hovering around 30° F, with fat snowflakes drifting through the forest. Halfway up the trail we drew even with the distinctive three-by tracks of a wolverine moving uphill, and these continued for some time, occasionally shifting into a two-by gait in deeper snow. The snowmobiles roared to a stop and we clambered off into the now-quiet darkness. There was something evocative of ancient religious ritual as we moved in procession through the snow-covered trees, with our headlamps for light, bearing boxes of equipment like offerings. Then we were at the trap.

(part 2 will follow later this week)