The Wolverine -- Badass of the Animal Kingdom

For those who love wildlife (particularly wildlife that is rarely seen), you must read “The Wolverine Way” by Doug Chadwick. To sum up Doug's feelings about the wolverine: “If Wolverines have a strategy, it's this: Go hard, and high, and steep, and never back down, not even from the biggest grizzly, and least of all from a mountain. Climb everything: trees, cliffs, avalanche chutes, summits. Eat everyone: alive, dead, long-dead, moose, mouse, fox, frog, it's still warm heart or frozen bones.” Now who wouldn't want to learn more about an animal like this!!!!

As a new volunteer in Glacier National Park, I had the opportunity to hear Doug address the new rangers of the park, and talk about his favorite subject – the Wolverine. The animal is amazing, the stories are amazing, and Doug weaves a tale about the Wolverine Project, which intersperses stories and wit. I bought Doug's book (and got his autograph), and absolutely loved it.

Doug volunteered with the Glacier Wolverine Project – a 5 year study in Glacier National Park. The study uncovered key missing information about the wolverine's habitat, social structure and reproduction habits. Biologists Rick Yates and Jeff Copeland headed up this unprecedented study of the most important population of wolverines left in the lower 48 states – in Glacier Park. Assisted by volunteers like Doug, they gathered incredible information about what had been a very elusive animal about which little was known.

(The information in this blog comes from Doug's book. Some are stories pulled from the book – some is paraphrased from the material in his book. I don't want to take credit for Doug's great writing style – much better than my own. But I wanted to give anyone who reads this blog a feel for the wolverine, the plight of the wolverines, and Doug's wonderful book.)

Only 40 or 50 wolverines make their home in the 1,000,000 acres in Glacier (vs. 350 grizzlies – one for every 5 square miles in the park). The individual territory of a wolverine is a large as the home range of grizzlies, but unlike the bears, wolverines don't overlap. Although the territory of a wolverine male typically does encompass the territory of one or more females, it excludes all other adult males, just as each female excludes other adult females from her domain.

The Glacier Wolverine Project caught and tagged wolverines, tracking their movements in the park. This was important to understanding how the animals distributed themselves over the landscape and how in that in turn influenced the dynamics of the population – breeding success, survival rates, dispersal to new habitats, and so forth. They also found out much about their family habits and relationships, how they reared their young and how long the young stayed with the parents, as well as the social habits among wolverines. They also tracked the deaths of many of the wolverines, as they lead a dangerous life from the environment, climbing in avalanche chutes, and sometimes other predators. When reading the book, you come to know the males, females, and “kits” and when Doug reports some of the demises of the wolverines, it will bring a tear to your eye.

While the study took place all over Glacier, it seemed a major concentration was in Many Glacier (my personal favorite location in the park). The study also takes place in the dead of winter, when volunteers like Doug would spend weeks living in the icefields of Many Glacier. As Doug says, “it's no place for human settlement.”. But this area of Glacier has an abundance of wildlife – from mountain goats and bighorn sheep, along with grizzlies and black bears, wolves and coyotes, lions and lynx, an elk herd, scattered mule deer, and moose.

This is the Wolverine.....otherwise known as Gulo gulo, they belong to the carnivore family known as the Mustelidae, more commonly called the weasel family. Among the wolverine's kin in North America are pine martens, long-tailed weasels, short-tailed weasels or ermines, and minks, black-footed ferrets, badgers, fishers, and river otters.

Here are some facts about Wolverines:

• First and foremost, they are carnivores. They are scavengers....the northern equivalent of hyenas or jackals, and have been competing for carcasses with larger carnivores for many thousands of years.

• They tick at a higher metabolic rate than other animals their size. “Picture them as organic cruising machines with a souped-up carburetor, and you wouldn't be far off the mark.”

• Wolverines are not large animals – about the size of a medium dog – and weigh between 20-30 lbs. Their feet are enormous relative to their body, which spreads their weight like snowshoes – a major advantage over most competitors and prey during the cold months.

• Wolverines live in the COLD...at the tops of mountains. To hold in the heat of this engine, wolverines wear a double coat – a dense inner layer of air-trapping wool beneath a cover of stout guard hairs to add extra insulation.

• Wolverines come preloaded with what looks to us like an insane amount of attitude. But to back it up, they have powerful limbs that go with their weapons – well developed claws, sharp front teeth (the incisors), long fangs (canines), and check teeth (premolars and molars ) specialized for cutting rather than grinding. The combination makes them considerably bigger and more dangerous in deed than in stature. And this gives them the reputation of being the “bad ass” of the animal kingdom.

A story from the book which is a good example of a wolverines' “attitude”:

“A ranger on the trail that leads to Hidden Lake Overlook was watching through her spotting lens a grizzly standing on a path near the water. Then she noticed an agitated wolverine close by on a pile of sticks. This might have been a beaver lodge, but the sticks may have covered a carcass. Bears often heap dirt, snow, ir branches atop leftover food to hide it. Wolverines have been known to do the same with a bounty, though they more often carry chunks off and hid them. As for whose cache this was not, negotiations were in progress. The bear pressed closer. Rather than give ground, the wolverine scrambled forward and made jerking motions as if preparing to hunge, and the bear backed down. This sequence was repeated several times. In the end, the grizzly turned away and went around the lakeshore by a longer path.”

“Several different accounts from biologists describe cases of a wolverine coming upon a grizzly that was feeding on a carcass and driving the bear off of it. This, we can all agree, is a badass thing to do when you weigh maybe 30 lbs.”

• Thought to be very solitary, it was found that wolverines do have family units, socialize, and actually play at times. The young start as “kits” in the den with the female, and stay with the family unit until about 2 years old. At times the youngsters were found hunting with “mom” and at other times they hung around with “dad”. And they do have a playful side. The project veterinarian, Dan Savage, saw 3 wolverines playing, taking turns hiding under a melting snow bank, running out to climb up onto a rock, then jumping off to go sliding down the snow. Amazing for an animal thought to be so vicious.

• Wolverines don't unnecessarily complicate their lives. They don't equivocate or trade in partial truths. Doug calls this “the wolverine pledge”.

• “Wolverines roam the peaks at will, scale them, summit them, scavenge in their snowslides, shelter in the crannies of their boulder fields, hunt their cliffs, and intimidate their largest inhabitants. They may be the toughest animals in the world, and come as close to any I know to truly mastering the mountains. The hallmark of the wolverine is an insatiable need to keep moving. But in the end, nobody masters mountains, not every time. You don't overcome country like this. You try not to let it overcome you. You win by keeping even.” It is an incredible achievement for a wolverine to grow old.

M1, “Big Daddy” – first Wolverine caught and radio-tagged in the project in 2003. M1 was exactly what a wolverine was suppose to be: fearless. Traps, looking like mini-log cabins, were used to capture the wolverines and then the radio tag was attached. With the claws, teeth, and jaws of a wolverine, they can literally chew their way out of the box within a few hours. “They rumble deep and long with a force that made you think a much larger predator lay waiting inside, something more on the order of a Siberian tiger – or possibly a velociraptor.” I can only imagine the fear with which one looks upon their first Wolverine in captivity.

Doug identified with “Big Daddy” – not an up-and-coming contender but a veteran, fraying a little at the edges, working to hold on to what he had.

When M1 departed Glacier for another area, he would often chose a route that led several miles straight toward a headwall marking the east edge of the Great Divide. There, he would scale a nearly vertical, 1,500 foot chute in about 20 minutes and cross through Iceberg Notch to the Pacific side of North America.

Once released from a trap, no wolverine handled by the project every attacked the researchers or attempted to bluff them into leaving by making threatening rushes. In fact, wolverines are not known to attack man – although they have been seen to single-handedly take down a moose or drive off a full grown grizzly from his food.

M3, “Mr. Badass” – Few visitors ever saw M3, a burly young male sired by M1. M3 developed a reputation among the team as the “King of Attitude” compared with other wolverines in a trap, which is really saying something. In true imperial style, His Majesty also appeared bent on expanding his influence, conquering an ever-larger territory north of his father's realm. M3's name kept coming up as an icon for audacious behavior.

And one of the characteristic's of the wolverines (“go hard, and high, and steep....”) was exemplified by M3 – his climb of Mt. Cleveland (the park's highest peak at 10,466 feet). Here is some text from Doug's book which tells a great story:

“Holy Shit! He summitted Cleveland!”

“And he did the last 4,900 ft straight up in 90 minutes.”

“Yuh. In frickin' January!”

“After climbing Cleveland, he goes way up into Waterton Lakes (Canadian side of Glacier). First, he crosses into Columbia, then into Alberta. No wonder we couldn't find him. His territory's several hundred square miles.”

“Mr. Badass has gone international.”

“Yates climbed Cleveland once. Hanson had, too. Mountain goats went up to the crest as well in the warm months; in fact, Yates had taken a goat trail part of the way. He was one of the first to report an abundance of grizzly dung on Cleveland's upper reaches. While the presence of bulky bears on or near Cleveland's summit tells you there are ways up the mountain that don't involve scaling sheer cliffs, even some of the safest paths include a section or two where a slip could be fatal.”

“M3 didn't choose any of the routes that human, goats, or bears have followed. Passing near Whitecrow Glacier, he blasted right up the mountain's soaring south face, a cliffy exposure with the shape of a logarithmic curve, becoming ever closer to pure vertical near the top. The walls would make for a dangerous technical climb in the best of summer conditions. M3 bagged the summit by this route in midwinter when the face was a solid, icy white barricade – a solo first ascent so impressive that it won M3 a bit of fame as word of his accomplishment got out.”

“Inspired, a group of experienced human mountaineers set out to duplicate his route in June, but discovered the face still largely cloaked in compacted snow. The challenge it presented seemed less like rock climbing than like working your way up an Olympic ski jump thousands of feet tall with few obvious break points and some of the snow undercut by running meltwater. Wisely, the climbers abandoned the effort before going very far, leaving M3's route up Cleveland unrepeated.”

“The only conclusion I can think of is the phrase heard time and again in wolverine camp: We don't know why they do that yet, but it's very cool.”

THE FUTURE FOR WOLVERINES

As amazing as I find this, wolverines are NOT on the endangered species list. And not for lack of trying. The information from this study was used to file several petitions to list the wolverine as imperiled. In December of 2008, “Washington Watchdogs” found that that Julie A. MacDonald, a senior Bush political appointee, had tampered with scientific evidence, improperly removed species and habitats from the endangered species list. One of the petitions tampered with was the petition to list wolverines. Therefore, wolverines are not endangered.

Wolverines killed outside protected lands: What this means is that wolverines run a fairly high risk of being killed by people outside strictly protected lands such as national parks (wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, state and provincial parks, and other types of reserves permit trapping and hunting).

In British Columbia, studies revealed that wherever wolverines were declining, the primary cause was mortality from trapping. In the lower 48 states, only Montana allows wolverines to be trapped. The state has reduced the legal quota allowed to a handful, but the problem still exists that traps put out for other midsize carnivores are capable of catching a wolverine – or other protected species. With several thousand registered trappers in Montana (and many more in neighboring western states), this means there are hundreds of thousands of traps lacing the front and back country. No one has had information about “nontarget” captures because many are never reported. The value of a ban on trapping midsize and large animals deserves more thought. A truly barbaric form of killing an animal in a time when the only reason for trapping is that trapper's “pleasure”.

Demise of Other Predators: We don't often think of how the activities of one carnivore might encourage the survival of another, because we're not used to viewing ferocious predators as a complex, finely balanced community. What wolverines can't take away in a contest with another carnivore, they can later come back and munch down to bones, then munch up the bones. The better the hunting for other carnivores, the more wolverine feed gets left lying around. Winter carcasses of elk can be found with tracks from wolf, cougar, grizzly, wolverine, coyote, and marten all around. One kill can feed many species.

Thriving predators require thriving prey. Our game management system is nicely geared to produce hoofed animals in good numbers – mostly to be killed by paying hunters. The underlying belief is that game animals with a surplus will starve and suffer during the winter. “It's amazingly convenient and morally satisfying to hunters that they are actually helping animals by killing them.”

Nature has provided predators and scavengers. Prey species (elk, deer) don't produce a surplus – that's a human value judgment. Prey species have high rates of reproduction with large numbers of young. Carnivores sort out the prey by leaving the fittest to join the reproductive population – natural selection. Human hunting will never bear the same results until sportsmen go out to bag the lease impressive specimens they can find.

And because hunters continue to think they don't have enough prey, they are trying to decimate one of the predator species – wolves. They hate wolves because they kill the animals the hunter wants to kill. The State of Montana has decided to cut the wolf population by 220 (out of 560). A full belly isn't easy for wolverines to come by, and it's sometimes filled only with old bones. There is no better way to help a wolverine (and other animals such as bear, lynx, mountain lions, etc.) than to keep the predator/carnivore population strong.

Wolverines are a group of relatively slow-reproducing mammals. And each one that is lost to trappers, avalanches, other predators, or lack of food has big repercussions in the wolverine population as a whole. As a rule, large to midsize carnivores will be among the first to drop out of confined wildlife communities. No surprise, in light of their huge ranges, high energy requirements, slow rates of reproduction, small effective populations, and the fear, intolerance, and human hunger for furs and trophies awaiting them outside of protected areas....should they make a break for it.

The disappearance of a top carnivore ripples all the way down the steps of the food pyramid. Each loss skews the balance between other meat eaters, causing the community to become less stable.

ONE FINAL WORD FROM DOUG ABOUT WOLVERINES:

“They are wolverines. They're indomitably wild. They want nothing to do with either our romantic tableaux of charming wild beasts that want to be our friends or our screwy fantasies where gulos play the role of diabolical enemies. They have no truck with illusions. It's part of what I think of as the wolverine pledge to never equivocate or deal in half-truths, which of course is really not their pledge but mine. When you load nature up with human opinions, dreams, and nightmares, the results might make for more dramatic stories, but nature is always diminished in the end. Taken straight, the wolverine way, nature offers more real excitement, adventure, meaning, freedom, and hope than any version we've ever cooked up.”