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. 

Wolverine Sighting in the Wind River Range, Wyoming

Studying wolverines in the Rockies can be almost unbearably frustrating. Gaining a picture of what is actually happening in a meta-population that is scattered across far-flung mountain ranges in at least four states is a mind boggling challenge. One of my enduring regrets is the lack of impetus for a state-wide study of Wyoming’s wolverine population. Our knowledge remains fragmentary, mostly centered on the two National Parks. We suspect that there are relatively few wolverines in Yellowstone National Park and the mountains to the east. The Wildlife Conservation Society monitored the population in Grand Teton National Park for several years, recording the southernmost known reproduction in the Rockies in 2005, and following one of the two female kits all the way to the Wind River Range, several hundred miles to the southeast. The WCS study stopped monitoring the Teton wolverines shortly thereafter, and since then there have been no formal studies of wolverines in Wyoming. We rely on anecdotal reports and, if we’re lucky, verified sightings by backcountry travelers. For the past several years, the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative has engaged in an on-going educational blitz to try to make skiers and hikers more aware of wolverine sign and the best way to record and report sightings. One of the centerpieces of this campaign was a laminated, pocket-sized card that adventurers could carry with them (a .pdf of that card is available from this page.) We distributed hundreds of these cards, but measuring their efficacy was tricky.

In late May, Brigid Mander, a professional ski writer (and friend) from Jackson who had been deluged with wolverine chatter from the NRCC crowd, headed into the Wind River Range for a ski trip. She and her companions became the first to document a wolverine in the range since 2006 (as far as I know.) This is pretty exciting. Hopefully we can find some way of conducting a more formal study in that range soon.

Here is Brigid’s account of the sighting:

We went into the Winds for a six-day couloir skiing mission at the end of May… It was more wintery than we expected, snow on the access road and the approach was easily skinnable form the parking lot, lakes were all still frozen. We didn’t really expect to see any wildlife, because it was so frozen and snowy. 

Things were going smoothly; and on our third day in there, we headed from our camp… over to ski some lines in a nearby basin. Just after we entered the basin itself, we saw tracks running along the lake – big tracks, with claws!  I suggested they were wolverine tracks to the crew, based on the ones I saw in BC in the McGregor range – these ones seemed quite a bit larger, but clearly had the chevron shape pad and giant claws (thanks to my handy NRCC card, which I didn’t have with me but had looked at quite a bit). However, no one believed me, and the general consensus was that it was a bear.  

 

Wolverine tracks in the Wind River Range, Wyoming. Photo by Brigid Mander.

Wolverine print with ski for scale. Photo by Brigid Mander.

Next, we saw a bunch of little tracks along with it, they didn’t look quite the same, but it looked like three more small animals I thought some looked distinctly canine – but it was hard to tell. They looked similar but we just weren’t sure. The crew decided now it was a mother bear with babies. Of course, there was no vegetation showing yet in the basin (or for miles in any direction, really!), and the lakes were quite frozen, so a bear heading higher and farther into a frozen wasteland seemed unlikely (but, no one had come around to my wolverine opinion…yet!). 

 

The tracks continued along the side of the lake, for over three miles to the end of the basin.  Here, the little tracks were gone but the big ones headed from the lake, and up around the back of the basin under a pass. They were going in and out the holes in the snow, next to huge boulders, checking out the deep windrifts created in the snow. It was very busy creature, and we saw its tracks everywhere – even up at the base of the couloir we went to ski.  

 

The weather, however, which had started out questionable in the morning, had turned hellacious, very cold, and extremely windy, and we were blowing over in our skintrack. The snow in the couloirs didn’t look great anyway. So we turned around after some discussion, and three of us were ahead of the others. 

 

We were still up high on the flank under the ski lines, and then down below us near lake levels we saw this creature running at top speed, looking like a frantic black bear – I felt bad for it, as it was fleeing and looked scared. But then I noticed a big tail, and could make out the wolverine stripe around its haunches – Simon skied after it to get a picture, and it sped away over the snow and then up into the rocks, where it stopped and turned around and looked at us from a distance. By the time we got under where it had run up to, it had disappeared somewhere. We were stoked! We had to admit that the sighting kind of made up for getting shut down on the skiing for the day. 

 

Wolverine in the Wind River Range, Wyoming. The animal is just visible at the center of the picture. Photo by Simon Peterson.

The next day we were back up, and we saw some more very similar, if a little older, tracks, all up there, high in the basin under the cliffs that the couloirs come out of. We didn’t see the wolverine again, for the rest of the trip, or any other wildlife for that matter. That is the story! 

Wolverine tracks showing the gait and scale. Photo by Simon Peterson.

Doug Chadwick on Wolverines in the Lower 48

As a quick foreword, I completely failed at this live blogging experiment. I’m too meticulous (neurotic?) a writer, I suspect, to respond to circumstances unedited. The below was written in real-time, but a medical incident in the middle of the speech threw everything off and I didn’t get around to posting until today. If you never have a chance to see Doug Chadwick speak live, hopefully this will give you some idea of how entertaining he is. 

With promises to catch up on the two remaining talks that occurred earlier today, I’m going to cover Doug Chadwick’s speech, which is about to start. He and I had a great conversation earlier this afternoon, during which I promised that if he got anything wrong, I would mercilessly make fun of him on this blog. So he’s under a lot of pressure….

Beginning with a reading from his book, Doug speaks first to the desire that many of us have to be humbled by our experiences in the natural world, and then adds that you don’t know what it is to be humbled by nature until you’ve tried to follow a wolverine. He tells the story of his background with the project, how he got involved as a way to be outside in the landscape he loves, and how he eventually became so compelled by the species that he decided to write a book about them.

A pause. Then, looking towards the GYC staff, “Can I say badass? I like saying it.”

Now the humor ramps up and the slide show kicks in. We are hearing the story of the traditional view of wolverines – their awful reputation, the lack of scientific data, the adoption of gulo identity by a badass superhero with anger management issues.

“The things that are true about wolverines that seem like myths – they bring down full grown caribou…and they’ve been reported bringing down full grown moose. It’s like you open your curtain in the morning, and look out, and your housecat has got a deer. But they do that. The other thing that’s been reported by reliable people is, they will drive a grizzly off a kill. That’s scientifically known as ‘unmitigated badass behavior.’”

We are hearing the story of F5, the young female who climbed Bearhat Mountain in Glacier National Park in the dead of winter for no apparent reason. We are seeing photos of researchers in wild conditions – blizzards, blowing snow, 90 mph winds. The audience is rapt, leaning forward, some with their mouths literally open. (Though one guy, across the table, appears to be asleep; either that, or he’s closing his eyes to better envision the deprivations of wolverine research…) Doug describes the sound of a wolverine growl: “It’s like a Harley Davidson is mating with a chain saw, and you’re pretty sure that whatever is in the trap is the size of a velociraptor. Okay, I’m kidding, but these things are designed to intimidate.”

Doug goes on to describe conversations about wolverines with trappers in the region.

“So, we’d talk with these trappers, who didn’t believe that we were catching them. They’d say, ‘these creatures are so secretive and so wily, we can’t even catch ‘em once, and you’re saying that you catch them multiple times?’ And we’d say, “Well, we have a trick.” And the trappers’d say, “Yeah? What’s that?” And we’d say, “It’s easy. When we catch ‘em, we don’t kill ‘em.”"

This gets a round of applause.

“So, what is this animal?…It’s a member of the weasel family, but I don’t like that name, because unfaithful lovers and hedge fund managers are giving weasels such a bad name.” More laughs. Doug is going on to explain the physiological characteristics that make wolverines so unique – enlarged thyroid glands, enormous feet, and so on.

Now we’re on to climate change effects, not only the issue of snow denning, but the apparent preference that female wolverines show for locating den sites among whitebark pine downfall. Whitebark pine is, of course, suffering a massive die-off in the Rockies due to beetle infestations and disease, part of which can certainly be attributed to warming temperatures.

The compelling story of Jeff Copreland’s hunch that gulo dads were getting a bad rap draws exclamations, and then further exclamations, and then we realize that some of the exclamations are from a table where a woman has collapsed. 911 is called, we all take a break, and I sit with my fingers crossed that in the excitement of picturing all of the crazy activity that Doug’s been describing, wolverines haven’t actually killed someone after all. The paramedics arrive and the woman responds and we all breathe easier as the presentation resumes.

Doug picks up with the full-on climate change segment, referencing Dan Fagre’s work on climate change in Glacier National Park, monitoring of retreating glaciers and climbing tree lines. “So the wolverine is going to tell us the same thing, but maybe in a more dramatic way, as the pika and the mountain goats and the hoary marmots. Their range is going to be constricted.”

“What makes Glacier whole is the knowledge that it is animated by wolverines traveling the landscape, bears sleeping under the snow….it’s not just a list of animals, it’s the fact that they’re all interacting with each other, that there’s a full carnivore community in place.”

The story of M1 climbing Mount Cleveland, 5000 ft in 90 mins, draws the usual gasps and laughs of disbelief. And then the statistics on how few wolverines a place like Glacier, with 1500 square miles, will hold. 350 grizzlies live in Glacier; by contrast, there’s room for about 40 wolverines in the same area. The Tetons are saturated with wolverines; we think that there are maybe four residents adults. The Centennials, according to WCS biologist Bob Inman, hold two adult females. The Cascades hold eight wolverines of which we are aware. The point that Doug is making is that connectivity between these tiny population nodes is critical for the long-term survival of the species.  Isolated parks will not be enough; there must be connectivity throughout the mountain ranges of the West. “This is the scale on which [wolverines] need wildness to be preserved.”

This is the ultimate message of Doug’s speech – that we need to push conservation to a scale that is meaningful for wildlife that evolved in the vastness of the unbounded, unfenced, undeveloped North America, and that still needs that space today.

Healy Hamilton asks what we know about historical densities of wolverines, whether wolverines have always been so rare or whether their current sparsity is “an artifact of the way we’ve treated the landscape.” Doug says he’s not sure, that there’s really no way to know because, “we rolled across the continent so quickly.”

One gentleman asks what the body temperature of a wolverine is. The answer: “Around 100.”

Someone asks whether there are wolverines in the Wyoming Range. Doug turns the microphone over to me, inducing a sense of panic and a long, babbling story about the female born in the Winds who traveled to the Wyoming Range for a while but then went back to the Tetons.

Judging by the long line of people waiting to buy the book – not to mention the excited crowds of people who come to share stories of wolverine sightings with me – people are inspired by the talk and ready to learn more. Which is exactly what we were hoping for.

 

Dr. Charlie Love on Glaciers in the Wind River Range

The Wind River Range of Wyoming is one of the great unknown regions on the map of wolverines in the West. We know that there are gulos in these mountains, which extend southeast from the bulk of the Absarokas to form a high altitude peninsula pushing into the sea of sagebrush steppe, but no one has ever formally surveyed for gulos in the Winds. M56, the famous wolverine who traveled from Wyoming to Colorado, went down the Winds before jumping off into the hills and traveling down into Rocky Mountain National Park. So this region is important for wolverines.

Dr. Charlie Love has spent the past 25 years – in between hanging out with cannibals in Papua New Guinea and helping figure out how the famous Maoi statues of Easter Island were raised – studying the glaciers in the Winds. Most people know that glaciers around the world are melting back, and we can easily infer that the meltback derives from increased temperatures and/or decreased precipitation, but precisely why these things are happening involves an incredible amount of detail and variation at the local level. At one time, the major glacier in the Wind River Range was 75 miles long and 3500 ft deep; that was tens of thousands of years ago. The glaciers that currently adorn the high peaks are between 5000 and 6000 years old, and in the past several decades, these glaciers have begun to retreat at a rapid rate. The Wind River glaciers are melting by two vertical meters per year’ the Knifepoint Glacier, the focus of Dr. love’s work, has melted back by 800 ft since 1985 – a loss of 7000 acre feet of mass.. Since the 1920′s, timber line in the Winds has climbed about 100 ft, and a number of glacial lakes have drained due to weakened ice dams. The trend is clear. Why this happening is more nuanced.

Oxygen isotopes from ice cores from the Fremont glacier suggest that for most of the history of the current Wind River glaciers, the snow feeding the ice came primarily from the Gulf of Mexico. Within the glaciers themselves, distinct lines mark the summer melt; like tree rings, these demarcate annual snow accumulation. The orientation of these rings show the direction from which the snow was arriving. Sometime between 1780 and 1840, the direction from which the snow was coming shifted, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Northwest. These storms, says Dr. Love, bore less moisture than the storms from the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in less annual accumulation. And the loss of annual accumulation began to ‘starve’ the glaciers, resulting in the meltback that we are currently observing. Essentially, in the Winds, Dr. Love asserts, we are reacting to climate change already accomplished, rather than dealing with current climate change.

Does this mean anthropogenic climate change isn’t happening? Dr. Love deftly avoided addressing this question, sticking like a limpet to his own data, which suggest that whatever is happening in the Winds has to do with changes in prevailing weather patterns about two centuries ago.

Whatever is going on, the loss of ice at high elevations in the Winds will probably have consequences for wolverines, although before we can figure out what these will be, we need to do some formal surveys in the range.

Most striking to me, however, were the potential effects of the loss of Wind River glaciers on the Wind and Upper Green rivers. The Wind River is already at the center of a clash over water rights between the Shoshone and Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation, and surrounding non-native agricultural communities. This argument, on a very technical level, focuses on in-stream flow, which, Dr. Love says, is already far below the estimates. This means that the Wind River Reservation is fighting a battle over a resource that is even sparser than they thought. This stands to exacerbate existing social conflict, which is a very local example of how the loss of ice stands to effect human communities in real and alarming ways.

(Author Gretel Ehrlich is now speaking about the effects of climate change on the Arctic, emphasizing that the changes that are occurring in the climate are far wider-reaching than a single range, and that these effects will have a profound impact on human and wildlife communities at the most remote corners of the globe.)

Meltdown

Okay. Now I understand why live blogging about scientific presentations is a little more challenging than commenting on political or entertainment events. While it may be easy to come to a snap judgement on Angelina Jolie’s latest dress or Rick Perry’s lack of implementable policy ideas, it’s a bit harder to summarize 45,000 years of glacial history, or delve into the meaning of two standard deviations from average minimum climate variation in the Yellowstone region over the past century. Dr. Charlie Love and Dr. Healy Hamilton have given their presentations, of which a more detailed analysis will follow later today. Dr. Greswell is currently speaking about the way in which climate change is amplifying threats to native cutthroat trout. More on that in a while, too.

Just chatted with Jodi Hilty, WCS North America director, about WCS’ plans to look at how to move from science to planning for climate adaptation, with John Kerr about another wolverine sighting in the Lamar Valley this past summer, and with Doug Chadwick about his recent trip to Mongolia. I did promise to tell my audience what people were wearing, but that was before I recalled that I actually have zero ability to recognize design (except for Patagonia….) So let’s just say that everyone is dressed, mostly in jeans and button-down shirts, with a fair number of Western accessories (fancy embroidered cowboy jackets, silver-and-turquoise jewelry, etc….) and plenty of puffy jackets and vests. It’s definitely Wyoming. I love it.

Back to the trout. More to follow shortly.

 

The Den

Last week, a small crew on skis set out into the high mountains of the Montana wilderness. They were headed into wolverine country, their objective a series of scattered points close to treeline. The points had been obtained during telemetry flights in April, and they indicated that F3, a five year old female wolverine, was restricting her movements to a small portion of her usual range. Under normal conditions, F3 might be found anywhere within an approximate 300 km² sweep of rugged country. Over the past several weeks, however, she had limited herself to a few drainages in close proximity to each other. Her behavior unleashed a wave of excitement among the wolverine crew who had been tracking her since 2007; restricted movement is the classic indication that a female wolverine is in a den with kits.

Determining F3′s reproductive status has become an annual springtime ritual at the Absaroka-Beartooth project, fraught with trepidation, surges of hope, and, inevitably, disappointed resignation to the fact that, once again, the project’s sole instrumented female wolverine has failed to produce kits. We’ve been engaging in this ritual since F3 was first captured in 2007. For the first two years, she was young, and, as far as we knew, there was no male in her territory, so the absence of a den in 2008 and 2009 wasn’t such a surprise.

F3 in 2008, captured by an automatic camera at one of the project's live traps.

Then, in spring of 2009, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s wolverine project took charge of a young male that had been accidentally caught in a bobcat trap in Idaho. WCS released the wolverine, M57, in Montana, and he promptly headed for F3′s territory. We knew that F3 and this male – notable for his white paws and his unprecedentedly relaxed attitude when captured by the project’s live traps – were traveling together throughout 2009, and the tension over F3′s status in spring of 2010 was palpable. For the first time, we had real grounds to hope for babies.

The question was especially urgent for the project because the work done so far had provided no evidence of reproduction in Yellowstone or the ranges immediately to the north, south, and east. In fact, those ranges seemed strangely vacant; the habitat appeared good, but the wolverine population was sparse even for a rare carnivore. Over the course of five years, the project had documented two immigrants to the study area – M57 and a female, F133, who was born in the Gallatins and who traveled across Yellowstone to take up residence south of the park. But there had been no births. This suggests that, at least in Yellowstone and its immediate surroundings, the wolverine population currently depends on dispersing wolverines from further to the north and west. With only a single den documented in Wyoming – in the Tetons – the data also suggest that Wyoming’s population might rely on input from populations in Montana. And with talk of reintroduction following M56′s trip from Wyoming to Colorado, the need for a healthy region-wide meta-population, with as many interconnected nodes of reproducing wolverines as possible, became even more urgent. Any further understanding of reproductive dynamics and denning characteristics – not to mention the sheer and simple fact of more wolverines on the landscape – would be invaluable.

In 2010, a series of telemetry flights eventually indicated that F3 wasn’t denning. We caught her in March of 2010 and were finally able to determine that she was not nursing, although she and M57 were still traveling together. Disappointed, we held out hopes for 2011, but by now the project was officially over and finding resources to keep it going was becoming more and more challenging.

This season, F3 went into the trap early, in January, and the crew noted that her teats were enlarged –  a real reason for hope. The weather remained ferocious throughout the spring, making flights difficult, but when a series of telemetry points finally came in after flights in April, F3′s apparent localization added further evidence to the argument for kits. Finding proof, however, was necessary, and the mission was urgent: wolverine kits leave the den in early May, and the dens themselves, dug in the snow, are ephemeral and nearly impossible to identify once the snow is gone. From the time the points came in, the crew had approximately two weeks to get to the area and figure out what was going on.

The trip in took three hours of skiing, over a steep pass and through heavy snow. At the outset Jason Wilmot, who was leading the trip, listened for F3 and M57 and picked up M57′s signal to the south. There was no indication that F3 was anywhere nearby, and the first point that the crew reached yielded nothing. Jason and the crew pressed on to the next point.

Here, at the pass, they picked up tracks, and then more tracks, and then an explosion of tracks. This, too, was strong indication of a den, and sure enough, backtracking the prints, they found a hole. And then another one. And another. Altogether, the crew discovered six holes in the snow, some apparently linked beneath the surface. The tracks were melted out and the crew were unable to determine whether they came from multiple animals, let alone animals of different sizes. But the evidence for a den and kits was strong.

The crew had already made the decision not to instrument the kits – without the funds for flights to monitor them, it would have placed unnecessary stress on the animals – so they didn’t dig to see if the babies were underground. Instead, they collected DNA samples from the tracks and the entrances to the holes. They listened for F3, but she was still absent. If there were indeed kits, the family might have already left the den permanently, but F3 might just as easily have been out on a foraging run, and the kits could have been curled up in a chamber in the snow beneath the crew’s feet, pondering the strange vibrations of skis and human voices.

Before they left the site, Jason listened again for M57. The signal came in, and it was loud – M57 was somewhere nearby. Employing a trick that wildlife biologists use to determine exactly how close an instrumented animal is, Jason removed the antenna from the receiver and held out the cord with its metal end. If an animal’s signal still comes in without the antenna, the animal is really close. M57′s signal continued to boom in. He was right on top of the crew, probably watching them from somewhere in the trees. As Jason and the remainder of the crew skied out, they crossed M57′s tracks coming into the basin; the wolverine tracks were overlaid on the ski tracks of crew members who had already skied out. From his position far to the south earlier in the day, M57 had traveled directly to the den site. This was further circumstantial evidence that this was indeed a reproductive den, and that M57 was coming to check in on his mate and offspring – a pattern detected on numerous occasions by the Glacier Park and WCS projects.

Without having seen the kits, we can’t confirm that F3 and M57 reproduced. But the evidence is good. From here, we’ll use genetic analysis to try to determine if there are kits and if so, how many. We’ll return to the den site in the summer to gather more DNA samples. If there are kits and if they survive the summer, they are likely to remain within their parents’ territories for the next year, and F3 and M57 are likely to show them all the good foraging spots – including the project’s live traps. We may have the opportunity to capture and examine the kits this winter, to at least determine sex. If we find the funds, we may be able to instrument them and monitor them as they approach dispersal age. This could provide crucial information about connectivity among the different populations, and the extent to which southern populations really are dependent on dispersers from Montana. Overall, it’s exciting and hopeful news for the project and for wolverines at the edge of their range.

The Absaroka Beartooth Project: Captures

The Absaroka-Beartooth Project report was published two weeks ago, the culmination of a five year project to investigate the status of wolverines in and around Yellowstone National Park. The report could be summarized in a straightforward  way, but as I read it, I realized that a laundry list of statistics wouldn’t do justice to the project’s many facets. I’ve been involved with this project, off and on, since 2006, and I thought it would be more interesting to provide a narrative for each segment of the project. I’m starting with the very basic story of the wolverines that were captured over the course of five years, and what those captures tell us about the status of wolverines in Yellowstone.

Yellowstone National Park is the wellspring of the idea of sacred wilderness in modern American consciousness. Our first national park, correctly or incorrectly, is perceived as a pristine stronghold of our most spectacular and intriguing species, which are supposedly free to function in the absence of human interference, and there to teach us what unfettered nature looks like. So it made sense, following the success of the Glacier National Park wolverine study, that the  investigation of wolverine status in Yellowstone was the next priority for a creature emblematic of the wild.  No one knew anything about wolverines in  Yellowstone; aside from sporadic sighting reports, data on the species was non-existent. The park and its surrounding ranges – hypothetically ideal habitat – were expected to provide one more piece in the puzzle of wolverine status in the US Rockies.

In 2003, the wolverine had been turned down for listing, for the second time, due to lack of data. The Glacier project began that same year,  aiming to fill some of the gaps that prevented the US Fish and Wildlife Service from determining  the wolverine’s situation. By 2005, the Glacier Project was yielding solid information and environmental groups were suing the government to reconsider the 2003 decision. The Absaroka-Beartooth Project began that winter with an initial season of live-trapping. The park was the core of the investigation, but the project extended beyond the park boundaries to encompass the Absaroka mountains and the Beartooth plateau to the east, northeast, and southeast. Complimenting on-going work by the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Montana ranges west of Yellowstone, the project established live-traps for wolverines in locations across the park and its eastern borders.

The Absaroka-Beartooth Wolverine Project encompassed ranges in and to the east, northeast, and southeast of Yellowstone.

In March of 2006, I arrived in Sunlight Basin, a spectacular valley in the eastern Absarokas, to meet with Jason Wilmot and his wife Kate, who were stationed there to monitor traps through the winter and spring.  I’d come to discuss my upcoming summer research on wolves in Wyoming, but the conversation quickly turned to wolverines. Within 12 hours of meeting the Wilmots, I was traipsing up a steep slope, knee-deep in snow, carrying a duffel bag containing a skinned frozen beaver, and listening to Jason as he talked about all the things that made wolverines the most awesome animals on earth. Key among its attributes, for me, was the coincidental information that there was an unstudied population in Mongolia, where – it so happened – I had spent two years as a Peace Corps environmental volunteer. We reached a log-box trap buried in snow, and while I examined a small plaque that stated that the trap and its contents were part of a research project and should be respectfully left in peace, Jason attached the beaver carcass to the back of the trap in hopes that a wolverine would soon remove it.

He and Kate waited through the entire spring, but the beavers in all of the Sunlight traps remained untouched by gulo-kind. While the thought of Mongolian wolverines lodged at the back of my mind and began to germinate into what would become, three years later, a full-fledged project of its own, the Absaroka-Beartooth Project captured wolverines north of the park, and south of the park, but the rugged mountains within the park boundaries and just to the east seemed strangely devoid of the West’s most notorious mountaineer.

By summer of 2006, when I returned to Wyoming to begin my summer research on wolves, the Absaroka Beartooth Project was monitoring two male wolverines, M1 and M2. M1 made his home north of the park; he’d been captured twice over the course of the winter. M2 was captured, once,  in the southern part of the park. Researchers refer to ‘trap nights’ as the number of nights a single trap is open and baited.  The three captures of M1 and M2 represented the fruit of 1831 trap nights in 2006, for an average of one capture every 610 trap nights. In contrast, the Glacier project in its first year captured six wolverines – three males and three females – with an average of one capture every 12 trap nights.

If these numbers fazed him, Jason didn’t give any indication of concern over the course of my wolf research in summer 2006; he continued to talk about wolverines with so much enthusiasm that I became more and more intrigued. In August of 2006, tired of the squabbling over wolves and hoping for a chance to appreciate a species free of the weight of centuries of symbolic feuding, I joined an Absaroka Beartooth project expedition to investigate a cluster of GPS points from M2′s collar. By now, M2 was hanging out south of the park, in some of the most inaccessible territory in the lower 48, and it took two days to reach the site. At dusk on the first night out, a wolverine came into our camp. It wasn’t an instrumented animal, which meant that it was an entirely new wolverine. We were able to extract a viable hair from a snowfield, which later matched DNA from male M4, captured by the project months later in March of 2007. The project instrumented him and located him once in a flight following the capture, but he subsequently disappeared. We still don’t know if his transmitter failed, if he took off for Colorado or Utah, or if he died.

A month before M4 was captured, M1, the project’s first male, was legally killed by a Montana trapper. Then, the week before M4 was captured, the project caught a small juvenile female in the Absarokas north of the park, within M1′s territory. This wolverine was tagged F3, and she is probably M1′s daughter. A female wolverine was legally killed in the same region at the same time; this was possibly F3′s mother, and her death meant that F3 could take over the now-vacant territory. F3 became the center of the project’s hope and attention, a young female just coming into her reproductive years. These four wolverines – three males, one dead and one vanished, and one young female who, despite our hopes, remained stubbornly single and kit-less – were the entire captured population of the project’s five years. Over the course of the project, they were caught seven times – M1 was caught twice, F3 three times. All told, the average capture rate was one wolverine every 750 trap nights.

The enormous effort required to document such a scant population suggested something unexpected: Yellowstone National Park and its eastern borders – huge, rugged country that should have been ideal habitat – lacked a substantial population of wolverines. They simply weren’t there. Yellowstone, the great emblem of all things wild, was apparently missing the wildest creature of all.

Absaroka Beartooth Report

The Absaroka Beartooth Wolverine Project report is now available, documenting the methods and results for the 2005-2009 project in and around Yellowstone National Park. This is the project that initially captured and instrumented F3 and M57, and our on-going work is an outgrowth of those captures.

I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (I am enough of a dork that I will indeed sit down and read 68 pages about a project with which I was involved on a daily basis, and I am even more of a dork in that I will enjoy doing so…) but I wanted to let the wolverine-interested public know.

I’ll write up a synopsis and analysis sometime in the next week or so, for those of you who are not dorks and have other things to do with your time. But to end on a dorky note, please note the beautiful three-by tracks captured in the cover photo, and the clear transition between a walking and a loping gait as the wolverine dipped down into the hollow between slopes. Fantastic!

The Wolverine Week in Review

A small avalanche of articles on wolverines has appeared over the past two weeks. From an enthusiastic write-up of Doug Chadwick’s Canadian tour promoting The Wolverine Way, to two pleas (here, a piece in New West, and here, in National Parks Traveler) for wider protection of the species in the US, to a synopsis in High Country News of new climate change research that suggests that wolverines are facing harder times ahead, to a recap of the adventures of the lone Sierra male, wolverines are becoming more newsworthy day-by-day. Average daily visits to this blog are about twice what they were six months ago, and attendance at wolverine talks in Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming has been standing-room-only for the past ten months. All of this indicates an increased interest, which is gratifying to those of us who have long hoped that the wolverine would gain a more prominent place in our collective awareness.

Sometimes, wider attention can be two-edged, however. Over the past few years, as we’ve prepared to induct the wolverine into the ranks of conservation darlings, I’ve had a few moments of panic over the way in which good intentions could go awry. There’s a thin line between reasoned advocacy and blind enthusiasm, and it’s easy for the former to tip over into the latter. The wolverine needs a constituency, but it needs a constituency that advocates for smart things, in a smart way.

Immediately following the listing decision in December,  the environmentalist reaction to the “warranted but precluded” designation was primarily one of disappointment and reproach. I was particularly taken aback by an editorial that lambasted the decision as “political” and called for immediate listing. I’ve struggled to articulate reasons for my reaction to this piece, because I too would have preferred to see the wolverine listed and offered endangered species protections, even while realizing that the ‘warranted but precluded’ status represents a huge step forward. But, after some reflection, after a lesser resurgence of frustration while reading some of last week’s articles, and partially in reaction to some recent discussions about Montana’s trapping season (about which more to come in later posts), I think it comes down to this:

The environmental movement gained its foothold in the midst of the crises of the 1960′s and 1970′s, and its narrative – its essential script – is always of crisis. Environmental advocates are caught in a perpetual reactive cycle that is fundamentally defensive, combative, and angry. And in order to be defensive and combative, one requires, of course, someone against whom to direct one’s anger – an enemy.

In reacting to the listing decision in December, some people chose to cast the federal government in the role of enemy. There have been murmurs within the environmental advocacy community and the growing wolverine fan base, seeking to assign that role to other groups – to snowmobilers, to trappers, to ranchers. It is to the credit of environmental advocates that none of these narratives of threat have blown up and taken off, but the risk is always there. And it is a risk, for two reasons. First, using any of these potent narratives against a specific identity-based group has the potential to evoke an anti-wolverine reaction from politically powerful people. Take a ten-second glance at the state of wolf conservation, and you will understand why this would be a disaster. Second,  re-enacting the ritual battles of cultural identity that characterize environmental disputes in the West distracts us  from the real issues surrounding wolverine conservation, which are climate change and habitat fragmentation.

This, then, is why calls for listing as a conservation solution for wolverines make my stomach flip. Listing has worked fantastically for a number of species, but it’s as if people have come to believe that putting an animal on the list is the equivalent of having conserved it. That’s not the case. The wolverine could be listed, and it would make little difference to its long-term prospects, because we lack the political and social will to tackle those big, looming issues, and the ESA, which doesn’t allow us to regulate for climate change, gives us no grounds to do so.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t list the wolverine, but that we need to stay focused on substantive as well as symbolic actions. We’ve become so accustomed to fighting for listing as the apotheosis of endangered species conservation that, in some ways, we’re floundering in confusion, and clinging to the comfort of those old successes, as we try to deal with the fact that wolverines – and polar bears, and other species threatened by climate change – call for something above and beyond the predictable strategies that have worked well in the past. We don’t yet know what those solutions will look like, but we know that they will have to be bigger and just as systemic as the problems that necessitate them.

And this brings me back to narratives of combat, crisis, and enemies. If we’re going to tackle these bigger issues, we need alliances, not battle lines. We need to use reasonable federal decisions as a jumping-off point instead of entrenching and employing limited resources to fight the government. We need better data on critical questions about reproduction,  dispersal, and genetic exchange so that we know how to take effective action – which means that we need to fund research and monitoring. We need to guarantee every single wolverine a fighting chance to successfully disperse and reproduce, with as few potential sources of direct mortality as possible. We need instantaneous action on climate change, although – as Synte Peacock’s recent paper on climate modeling in wolverine habitat in the Rockies points out – it may be too late for that already. We need a push for a new conservation narrative, more complex, more sophisticated, and ultimately more successful, that can build alliances for action on those larger issues.

So keep the interest in wolverines high, and keep calling for listing, but let’s make sure that we’re also talking about what we’re going to do beyond that to ensure that the wolverine stays on the ground in the Rockies. There is a crisis, but it’s not a simple crisis with a single solution – it’s worldwide and culturally embedded, and its implications extend far beyond wolverines.

That was something of a rant, and I apologize for any sense of negativity. I deeply appreciate the increasing interest in wolverines and the sincerity behind people’s desire to see it protected. But I hope we can direct energy and resources in the most effective fashion, without getting distracted by protracted legal or media battles unless they are necessary.

To bring things down a notch, I’ll leave off with a series of camera-trap photos from Banff National Park in Canada, which includes some photos of a wolverine gnawing on a moose carcass, and a great action shot of a wolverine in mid-air, chasing a raven. Enjoy.

Upcoming Wolverine Events in Wyoming, Idaho, and British Columbia

Jason Wilmot will be giving three wolverine talks in Idaho and Wyoming to finish off a month of wolverine awareness-raising. The first is this Friday, with two more to follow in the last week of February.

February 18, Friday, Lander, Wyoming, the Noble Hotel, 12:00pm, talk sponsored by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS.)

February 23, Wednesday, Boulder, Wyoming, 6:45 pm. This is a talk primarily for NOLS students, but it may be possible for others to attend. Check with NOLS.

February 25th, Friday, Ketchum, ID, the Community Library, 6:00 pm.

Also, Doug Chadwick will be touring through British Columbia this week and next to talk about his book, The Wolverine Way.

February 15, Creston, the Rotacrest Hall, 7 pm.

February 16, Nelson, the Nelson United Church, 7pm.

February 17, Revelstoke, the Revelstoke Community Centre, 7 pm.

February 18, Golden, at the Kicking Horse Lodge, 7pm.

February 19, Invermere, the Pynelogs Cultural Centre, 7:30 pm.

February 20, Kimberly, at Centre 64, 7 pm.

February 21, Cranbrook, the Heritage Inn, 7:30pm.

February 22, Fernie, the Fernie Arts Station, 7pm.

If you are lucky enough to be in the area for any of these events, be sure to stop by and check them out. They are both great speakers.