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.

To the Field

Some of our luggage – gear and food resupply bags.

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

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

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

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

 

 

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.

 

Story Paralysis

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

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

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

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

Wolverine Birthday 2013

It’s February 14th once again, which, as everyone knows – or should know – is a very important day: Wolverine Birthday. This is the approximate date of birth for wolverines all over the world. Mid-February marks the descent of pregnant female wolverines into their snow dens, there to give birth and attempt to raise their kits, moving them uphill through a series of maternal dens until they are big enough to emerge. This happens sometime in late spring, usually mid-May, after which the kits hang out in their parents’ territories, sometimes alone, sometimes following their mother, sometimes their father, until they set out to find a territory of their own, about a year after they’re born.

A photoshop sketch of a wolverine mom and kits in their snow den, made several years ago and scrapped because it was way too cute, and the kits look weird (also, these guys are a few weeks old, not newborns.) But whatever. Happy Wolverine Birthday.

At least, this is the basic outline of the first year of a kit’s life. Bob Inman and Audrey Magoun published a paper in 2012 reviewing all recorded wolverine births, as well as information obtained from trapped carcasses of pregnant or lactating females, and the birth dates generally ranged from late January through mid-March, with reports from the 1950′s of wolverines giving birth as late as April. So the February 14th date is a handy mnemonic device that doesn’t necessarily reflect an absolute reality. The lack of an absolute reality is interesting, as are the reports of much later births earlier in the century and further to the north. Wolverines mate in the summer, but the fertilized embryos don’t implant until later. The exact triggers for implantation (the technical term is nidation) remain unclear, but probably have to do with the female’s body condition – without a certain level of fitness on the part of the female, the embryos will simply dissolve without ever implanting. The range of birth dates means that there is also a range of nidation dates, which could be solely dictated by the percent body fat of the female – or could also be triggered in part by environmental factors. Maybe, then, there’s some range of potential adaptation to changing climate conditions? This is speculative, of course, but if it turns out to be true, it’ll make my valentine’s day every year for the rest of my life.

All of this just complicates my agenda to turn an otherwise annoying holiday into something with real meaning, however. So for now, let’s just stick with February 14th, and I hope everyone out there is having a great Wolverine Birthday. More posts soon!

 

Quick Summary of Listing Rule, and Press Rundown

In (very) brief, and with promises of more detailed discussion to come: the 127-page proposed rule for listing wolverines as threatened under the ESA warrants an attentive reading by anyone interested in the species. The introduction summarizes the state of the science and discusses how and why weight is given to certain studies, and in and of itself, this is valuable to consider. For those who are just looking for the major points, though – wolverines are threatened due to climate change. Reduction in suitable denning habitat, which is projected to contract by up to 63% in the coming decades, is of major concern, but the synergistic effects of climate change and other threats – notably, trapping in Montana – are also referenced. While acknowledging that trapping has not provided a serious threat in the past and probably wouldn’t in the future in the absence of climate change, the rule states that ongoing trapping in Montana is not viable for wolverines, especially when inadvertent take and by-catch are taken into consideration. Recreation, including snowmobile use, is not deemed to be of concern. A reintroduced population in Colorado could substantially bolster the Rocky Mountain population and increase genetic viability over the long term, but this population would be given 10(j) status as an ‘experimental, nonessential population,’ to reduce management conflicts. The comment period on the proposed rule is open through May, and the USFWS seeks input from people with scientific knowledge and meaningful contributions to an understanding of management challenges. In a single paragraph, that’s the gist of the rule.

The circulation of the proposed rules for wolverine listing have generated a flurry of press – this is just a rundown for people who are interested in keeping up with what’s being written. At 10:00 this morning, there were three news articles on wolverines listed on Google; at 8:30 this evening, there are 233. That’s probably more press than wolverines have gotten in a single day, ever.

The official US Fish and Wildlife Service press release summarizes the rule and its implications. A summary at OnEarth Magazine of wolverine conservation is a good overview of the situation, with some quotes from Jeff Copeland, although the article is in serious need of some copyediting (punctuation issues lead the piece to suggest that sheep are carnivores, and that wolverine populations are greater at the southern edge of their range, and – most entertainingly – Gulo gulo is stated to mean “glutinous glutton,” which leads to images of wolverine-shaped loaves of bread.) The Huffington Post and Fox News (You can search it on your own; I refuse to provide a link to this outlet, even if they are covering this story), published an AP article detailing the rule and featuring commentary from various wolverine and legislative authorities, discussing both the potential reintroduction to Colorado, and the fact that the decision cannot be used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions despite the fact that climate change is the primary threat. This piece has appeared in papers in Canada, across the US, in the Guardian in the UK, and as far abroad as New Zealand.

The announcement earned an article in the New York Times, and a mention on the New York Times energy blog, a full piece on Reuters (and also on Reuters’ UK site), and an article in the Los Angeles Times. In wolverine territory, the AP piece appeared in regional newspapers through Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The Jackson Hole News and Guide put together a good piece that touches on the issue of the poorly-known wolverine population in Wyoming, the status of gulos in the Tetons, and possible avenues by which the Colorado reintroduction would proceed. The Great Falls Tribune has an article that highlights statements from Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks regarding trapping – tentatively, and reading between the lines, it suggests that they are going to take their stand around wolf trapping, defending it against concerns about incidental take of wolverines, rather than around wolverine trapping itself, but we’ll see what happens. The Yellowstone Gate, featuring news from Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, has a piece that details the times, dates, and locations for a series of public hearings on wolverine listing that are part of the process of finalizing the rule. In Idaho, the Spokesman Review has a blog post on the decision.

In Colorado, several pieces of press have appeared recently in the Summit County Voice, including a piece last week that highlighted the interconnected concerns of wolverines and the ski industry, and a piece today featuring commentary on the rule and the proposed reintroduction. Another short piece appeared at Aspen public radio, focusing primarily on the reintroduction prospects. The Durango Herald has an article about the proposed reintroduction too.

Washington state has cultivated its enthusiasm for wolverines with several pieces over the past few weeks, including this one, in the Seattle Times, discussing the rebounding wolverine population in the Cascades. This article features another video of a growling wolverine in a trap. The foamy drool in the video is pretty typical of wolverines in traps, so don’t worry that the animal is rabid.

Finally, from several weeks ago and not at all related to today’s decision, there’s a great Alaska Dispatch piece on wolverines in Chugatch State Park. If only we all lived in places where our state parks were big enough and cold enough to host a population of wolverines.

I’m sure that the press coverage will continue to snowball, and I will try to keep up. Let me know of any other pieces that I’ve failed to post. I’m out in the field for the next few days but will try to post a few thoughts here soon.

Proposed Listing and Reintroduction Rules Available

Although it won’t officially be entered into the Federal Register until Monday, the proposed rule to list wolverines as threatened under the ESA is now available in .pdf format on the Federal Register website. Accompanying this proposed rule is a second proposed rule regarding experimental-nonessential status (10j, in short form) for reintroduced populations in Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico.

I’m currently reading through these documents so my analysis is not yet available – I’m initially confused by the inclusion of Wyoming in the 10j rule, since there are breeding populations there, but I’ll wait to say anything until I’ve actually read the full rules. Stay tuned, and in the meantime enjoy reading them yourselves.

 

 

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.

The End of the World As We Know It

Since the Mayan apocalypse is due to hit on Thursday (or is it Friday?), I figure I should get at least one more post out before we are all (possibly) wiped out. Just in case we aren’t, and you are interested in volunteering on a post-apocalypse wolverine project, the Friends of Scotchman Peaks Wilderness in Idaho are looking for people to help them run live traps and cameras this winter. Information can be found here.

The first recorded case of rabies in a wolverine has been documented in Alaska, and an article on the Alaska Fish and Game website provides a thorough explanation of the circumstances. The female wolverine was carrying a strain of Arctic fox rabies and apparently fought with and infected a wolf shortly before she died (she also had a goose egg in her stomach, proving once again that wolverines are indeed versatile in their eating habits.) The incident is notable because it represents a first instance of recorded infection in a species, but the article is worth reading for its deeper exploration of rabies epidemiology in Alaskan fox species, the relationship between rabies outbreaks and ecological processes, and the possible connection between climate change, displacement of Arctic foxes by red foxes, and a potential related change in rabies prevalence.

Several interesting reports and papers have come out over the past few weeks – the 2012 report for the North Cascades Project was released, as well as the most recent update to the Idaho Recreation study. Both are available at the Wolverine Foundation website. And a new paper from Sweden looks at habitat selection in areas where lynx and wolverine overlap. I have not yet had a chance to read through all of these in detail but will report back once I do – provided, of course, that we have not met with fiery doom in the meantime.

 

 

 

 

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.