Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Fine snow streaked the air, riding sideways on the gale. In early March 2006, biologist Rick Yates led the way, breaking trail on skis through the powder. Great cliffs, striped with avalanche tracks, rose on all sides. Somewhere higher up among the clouds stretched the ice fields that gave this valley mini glacier its name.
We crossed two frozen lakes and finally passed into an old growth spruce forest that took the edge off the storm.
Beneath the branches, half buried in snow, stood a large box made of logs six to eight inches thick. It looked a little like a scaled down cabin, but it was a trap, and there was a wolverine inside.
The animal had entered during the night. We knew from its radio frequency that this was m one, m for male number one because he had been the first wolverine caught and radio attacked during a groundbreaking study of the species underway here in Glacier National Park, Montana.
Sometimes the researchers called him piegan instead, after a 9220 foot mountain at the head of the valley. To me, he was big Daddy, constantly patrolling a huge territory that straddled the continental divide near the heart of the park. His domain overlapped those of several females, and he had bred with at least three of them over the years while successfully keeping rivals at bay.
We paused a short distance from the trap to listen. M one was silent. Predictably, he began to give off warning growls as we drew nearer. They rumbled 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 lifted the box's lid an inch or two to peer inside. The inside of the front wall. Underneath was freshly gouged and splintered, its logs growing thin under big Daddy's assault. Raising the lid another notch, I could finally make him out as a dense shadow toward the rear of the trap. Wolverines have dark brownish eyes, but in the light from my flashlight, those orbs reflected an eerie blue green collar that glowed like plutonium, surrounded by the rising steam from his breath. The next things I saw were white claws and teeth and stringers of spit, all flying at me with a roar before I dropped the lid shut and sprang back.
That was an excerpt from the WolverinE Way by Douglas Chadwick, aUthor, wildlife biologist, and todaY's guest welcome to Rewadology, the nature podcast that delves into the human human side of conservation, travel, and rerouting the planet. I am your host, Brooke Mitchell, conservation biologist and adventure traveler.
Maybe you have, or maybe you haven't heard about wolverines. And if you have, chances are you've heard myths, skewed facts, or outright Tall Tales about the species. Wolverines are overgrown weasels with the title of the largest land trotting member of the muscular family. Wolverines are found in boreal forests, subarctic tundra and western north american mountains across the northern hemisphere. On average, wolverines weigh between 20 to 40 pounds, with males being slightly larger than females. But dont let their weight fool you. What wolverines lack in size, they make up for in tenacity, confidence and a lack of fear. Rarely seen in the animal kingdom, these lightweights arent afraid to go toe to toe with grizzly bears, wolves and cougars, predators remarkably bigger than themselves and either steal their kill or take Kyrian left behind from the local heavyweight.
This underdog has been left out of the spotlight for most of his existence, but conservationists are slowly getting the message out about wolverines. These dog sized weasels are under threat and need our help. Todays guest, Douglas Chadwick, is one of those conservationists raising his voice for wolverines. And you will walk away from this conversation with a new appreciation for wolverines and our northern ecosystems.
Throughout this episode, youll hear me pop in at various moments to share excerpts from the Wolverine Way and provide additional information about these incredible creatures.
Alright, lets lace up our snow boots and go on a backcountry adventure to study wolverines with. Doug.
How in the world did you become involved with wolverines of all species? That there is the iconic wolverine. Tell me that story. How did this happen?
[00:04:50] Speaker B: They're iconic in the sense that everyone has heard about Wolverines, if only from credit Marvel comics and Hugh Jackman or, you know, all the, all the wild tales of this fabulous beast out there. This kind of like a, oh, I call it a Tasmanian devil on crack or something. You know, just crazy, wild, ferocious.
That's perfect.
I had seen them when I was, I used to study mountain goats. I was that guy living up on the hill like a hermit in a tent. I winter and summer And watching mountain goats through a telescope and you know, the next question from people is, why didn't you go out and have a life? But I mean, I was loving being up in the mountains. It was as wild as could be. I had grizzly bears for neighbors and elk and name it a wild creature that belongs in the rockies.
And I heard about wolverines and I didn't know much about them. And I would leave on long ski trips to go to another area where the goats were to learn more about them because very little was known about them too, really, especially in the winter, because there aren't enough crazy people that go out and live with them through the winter. And what I knew about Wolverines was they were the animal that had visited my tent while I was gone.
And being curious and HungRY, they tore into it. They tore up the sleeping bag. I was looking forward to spending a cold winter's night in, and they left a nice big pile of poop in the middle of all this stuff. That was my homecoming. And so I knew about wolverines. They were kind of living up to some of their reputation as a holy terror, but I really didn't know anything about their lives. And I saw a couple at a distance, saw some more when I worked in Glacier park studying mountain goats. But all I knew about them is they're this funny creature halfway in size between, oh, I don't know, a mink and a grizzly bear. And they go ACross the mountainside, they never stop. They go up over a ridge and they disappear.
They move so much that nobody had been able to really observe them. So when some friends told me they were starting a study of wolverines in Glacier park, it was kind of like mountain, because I went down, grabbed the literature I could find, and there was almost none, no reports about wolverines. So I said, this is great. This is what im best AT. Im not a real smart, sophisticated scientist. Im really good at going out in kind of tough country and being patient and waiting and watching and learning about something. And especially if it's an animal that on any given day, just being that guy who's there, you may see something entirely new and gain a complete new insight into a really fascinating species. So anyway, I tagged along with these guys thinking, I don't know anything about wolverines. I'm going to. I'm bound to learn a little bit more. And then QUICKLY GOt the idea that these animals were moving miles and miles across some of the MoSt gorgeous, but also most rugged country on Earth. And, like, moving like no other animal I'd ever seen, except maybe Snow leopards. But wolverines are climbers, I think. And we were also finding out that almost everything people had said about WolVerines Washington, what people like to think about BIg toothy critters with long claws. And we'd made Stuff up and now we were finding the real animal. And that, for whatever reasons, that's always worked for me, the sense of discovery, the, and, you know, the wonder of it, I would, we would get radios on Wolverines with that. I won't even go into that. That's, that's a lot of effort, is finding them, catching them, putting a radio on them. But once we got these gps collars on them, we'd see the locations, even if we couldn't see the animal itself. And say this thing just went up a sheer mountain face a mile steep, you know, almost 5000 vertical feet. And it did it in an hour and a half would take Human climbers, I don't know. Well, some people tried to. This. This became a famous Wolverine. I wrote about it a little for Patagonia, and it was a wolverine. I. I called Mister Badass because he was just always on the move. He was beating up older wolverines and TakInG it up over their territories. And ANyWAy, he people went to climb the M three route. That was his name, M for male number three. And they all bailed. They said, we can't do this. It's just too icy, it's too steep, there's water undercutting the snow. So anyway, this is a superb mountaineer, and it's also a hunter scavenger. It is covering 20 to 40 miles a dAy, 24, 7365, under the toughest conditions imaginable, subzero temperatures, you know, in most rugged terrain. And so anyway, I don't want to make too much of it. It's just a fascinating part of the Living World out there. And people, like, talk about Elk and they know a bit about walls and they know a bit about Grizzly Bears, maybe, but there's an attachment to these animals because they know them.
Nobody knew Wolverine, so nobody care. You can't care about something you don't know about, and you can't, you know, fix any problems with it and make sure it has a right to survive into the future along with us, unless you care about it. So get the InfoRmatIon out there.
There are fewer than 300. This is why it was so hard to study them. There are fewer than 300 left south of Canada, and that's a lot of country with very few wolverines in it and widely scatteRed. They're very territorial. They keep themselves spread out through aggression. And so just finding one and let's say learning about it was a wonder. And once we started to find enough, I said, I'm going to write a book about these animals, because if we're going to keep them, more people have to know about them. And it turned out they are so fascinating. They are capable of. This is a 40 pound animal that will run off a 500 pound grizzly in a competition over a carcass. That's badass, right?
That's true. Attitude plus, and then go scale a shear cliff and do all this, you know, magnificently wild stuff, except who's not going to be interested in these animals? And others said, nobody cares. Nobody knows. What are you writing a book about Wolverines for?
SO. Well, I guess I have to. I owe it to them. I had a lot of good days out there and so ANYwaY, it did some good and a lot more people have paid attention.
They were listed recently as a threatened species, so they finally got the protection they need from trapping from a lot of disturbance in the high country as the human footprints always spreading out. And so anyway, that's why Wolverines and the other joy is working. The kind of people attracted who are as nutty as myself, who would say, gee, that sounds like a good idea, let's go out and 40 below across avalanche slopes and beat ourselves to death trying to find out about a surly, crazy carnivore.
They were wonderful company, some of them really great people. And the scientists working with them, once they find out you're interested, they would download all the information, hard won information that they had gathered. So it was rewarding in a lot of ways. And I know I'm. I think I might have warned you once not to get me started on.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Wolverines, but that's literally the topic of today. So the question number one, we're getting far.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: All right. I thought you might try a few other things first before you wound me up. But the important Thing is it's a bit like grizzly bears, em wolves and other wide ranging carnivores. If you're saving room and habitat for them to survive, then it's big enough and it's wild enough and free enough for all these other animals that belong there.
And so if you have Kind of a charismatic, a sexy animal that people will pay attention to and you love to come back, brag that. I saw Wolverine today, you know, and it was incredible sliding down the snowbank and playing with another one.
But you're saving a whole wildlife community and of course you're saving experiences for all the rest of us, for the future, that we really get to know nature and our, our own wildness and our origins and all that in a different way.
The other thing is they're very tied to, if you go up north, you'll find wolverines in the tundra. So it's pretty flat country, but it's got year round cold temperatures and a lot of ice and snow.
They need that. They have this amped up metabolism. They're like, you know, they're Running a lot more rpms than most animals. And that's one reason they can do these incredible physical feats and they need ten to 12ft of lingering snow, that because they burrow down into it. And that's where they have their dens. They don't hibernate, it's their birthing den. The female goes down, gives birth to the young, and they're protected under that snow from passing predators. That might take a young one and they're insulated from sub zero cold. It might kill Them. And so as the climate changes, wolverine range shrinks. And so you've got an animal that's kind of a, what, a symbol for paying attention to climate change and for the need for large, connected landscapes.
If you really want to save nature, you have to do it on a big, connective scale. That's the message. And I love working with creatures that send that message out and say, if you're putting wildlife into little reserves here and there, they're like islanders. And islands are where the highest rates of extinction are, because for obvious reasons, they got all their eggs in one basket. Whatever happens, flood, wildfire, disease outbreaks, epidemics, insect infestations, changes the habitat.
They got to sit there and take it. But if they're connected to other wildlife strongholds, they can adjust, they can adapt over time and same with temperatures. So it leads you into large landscape ecology, which is, I think, the story of our era. As the human footprint keeps expanding and we keep claiming more resources, we can make more little reserves here and there, fit them in somehow, but they're not going to hold up over time. So where can we? We don't need huge mega parks, but we need corridors at least linking the remaining wildlands that support these creatures. And then we can pat ourselves on the back and say, you know what? I think we might have saved nature.
So that's. Yes, that's one thing wolverines are all about.
[00:17:50] Speaker A: I skied in behind Yates to help with m three and finally had my first look at Mister badass himself. Rattling off warning growls he was as big and fearsome as promised. Hassan made sure I was standing directly in front of the trap when he moved behind it and levered the lid up a crack so I could begin instantly and massively, m three flew at me, roaring and snapping. I couldnt help jumping back with a shout, hasten, let the lid fall. Just wanted to see your reaction. He said, hes something, isnt he? Yes, all kinds of things. And yet, as he faced this down in his glossy, rich brown winter coat with russet streaks, he was, above all, beautifully, indomitably wild. He was perfect.
True to his reputation, m three withstood two normal doses of drugs before a third finally made him still, the drugs we used lowered the body temperature of other wolverines. By contrast, the thermometer readings from m three stayed near normal while we downloaded his color, cleared it, and replaced the battery, hoping he give us one more round of data before the seasons end. When I carried him back to the big box from the tarp on which he'd been laying, his body warmed mine through layers of clothing. He started coming around in my arms. Two minutes later, as yates opened the trap lid to check on the patient, Mister Badass tried to lunge at him, having regained most of his faculties in a quarter of the time most other wolverines required after being given an antidote to the immobilizer.
But I think to lay the foundation for this conversation, I want to go back to this project that you just mentioned in Glacier National park. And it seems to me after reading your book and just you discussing this right now, that it really laid the foundation for your personal understanding of Wolverines. And then also the bigger picture, the science behind them, especially in the lower 48 below, Canada and Alaska, and the other part in Europe and northern Asia. So could you tell me a little bit more about this project? Like, who were the scientists that were leading it? Why did it come to be? And then what were the major outcomes from it?
[00:20:08] Speaker B: Well, the reason it worked, it was a collaborative venture, and it came from national park system. They like to know more about the animals they are charged with protecting because they are the safest, most secure strongholds with the least chance of being overwhelmed by human development.
And they realized, well, there aren't very many wolverines left. We hear enough reports that seems like we may have a fair share of what there is. And then the US Forest Service, which is also in charge of a lot of public lands and a lot of wildlife habitat, were also concerned that wolverines might be becoming too few to survive. And, of course, that's going to put them into some status where there's going to be big battles over protecting them, or they're going to have to live with the fact they weren't living up to their task, which is to protect our natural resources. So it was a combination of the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Research station here in Montana, and they coordinated with Glacier National park and a carnivore biologist there, John Waller, the guy from the Forest Service station, had done research earlier on wolverines in Idaho. He knew how to catch and trap, you know, trap and collar them. And then he found some field people, I'll just mention. One in particular is Rick Yates, who had worked in Glacier park and worked with the Forest Service as well, but he was the field boss.
So when I stayed out somewhere for, you know, three weeks alone in a remote cabin, patrol cabin in Glacier park, monitoring several traps, keeping, you know, looking for sign, making sure if a wolverine got caught somewhere there, and I finally caught a Wolverine, he'd come and say, you know, Chadwick, you've.
It's a great job, man. I am doubling your wages. I said, well, you're not anything.
That's right. And now I'm going to double on that. So. But anyway, that was. Those were the key players. And there were other Not Too Smart volunteers like myself that Just Love being out there. We have the park to ourselves in the winter. Hardly see Anybody. And we had all the WIlDlife in the World. Down in the valley bottoms, close to the patrol cabins, we were walking goats and bighorn sheep.
We're following the tracks of cougars and wolves as we, as we hike or ski along. But anyway, that's all it took and we had to go raise. We had funds for three years. And working with Glacier park has the largest, most dense population of wolverines in the lower 48 states. How many wolverines do you think that might be?
Yes.
[00:23:17] Speaker A: Not that much.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Three dozen.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: That's crazy.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So anyway, information doesn't come in that quickly. There's a lot of man hours and a lot of skiing miles and ANYWAY, we. That money ran out and then we had to go out and, oh, boy, just raise funds so we can go back out and do more to follow up because there hadn't been long term research on Wolverine 48 like that, especially with known animals. And we did it LONG enough for six years to follow three generations of wolverines.
You know, we had grandpa, dad and the young ones and learned about their. They were supposed to be so nasty and surly and, you know, downright vicious, perpetually pissed off of the world. Some, some, you know, old trapper stories that they only socialize long enough to mate and if a male came on his own offspring later in the season, he'd kill them. That's wolverines for you. And of course, we're finding out that's not true. They actually form bonds and have some nice social relationships, which only makes sense. I mean, that other stuff doesn't sound like a very good survival technique for a species, does it? So anyway, it changed the way people look at Wolverines. It's like, yeah, they're still badass. They'll still take down something the size of a moose if it's mired in the snow.
But they also are out eating, um, you know, small rodents and snowshoe hares and whatever they can get. They go fishing, but anyway, they are. I don't know. It's great to have a place like, I think you're really. Your question was about how does all this kind of stuff come together? And it was just fortuitous. Forest SerVice NatIonAl park and working in a national park, WhiCh is kind of a natural laboratory if you want to see how nature works. Yes, there's a lot of tourists on the trails for a couple months in the summer every year, but there's no wholesale disturbance of their habitat or their lifestyle. So you have a natural laboratory.
You have all the things that wolverines either compete with or prey on, from moose, elk, deer and smaller mammals to competitors like grizzlies, wolves, cougars.
We found wolverines that have been killed by, you know, they'll occasionally chase a grizzly off a carcass, but we found one that had been killed. It didn't work out so well. Got the wrong bear, and there have been other instances of that and so. But you get to see the forces that shape a hunter scavenger like a wolverine. Where is this niche in the wildlife community?
And you've got goats and sheep and all these other things. It turns out they prey on mountain goats.
Well, they prey on everything.
They're mostly scavengers. And now you can go back out into the world and say, okay, if we're going to conserve wolverines, here's what we know about their lifestyle. So here's what we can do to help them increase so that.
Anyways, I might have mentioned you. I don't do this kind of stuff for noble purposes. You know, truth, justice in the american way. I do it because it's a lot of fun.
And I love the adventure, I love the discovery, the sense of wonder. And then in my niche, I can go out and bridge the gap between science and the public by being a communicator like you are.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. And so what were the top findings then, from the study that you were a part of? And then after that, what happened afterwards? After, like, these are our findings.
Then what?
[00:27:43] Speaker B: Then what? Well, the findings I mentioned was they're sociable, they have immense home ranges. They have a male may cover a home range of 350 to 500 sq. Mi.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: That's nuts for an animal that size.
[00:28:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And there were other studies, small studies, kind of like ours, taking place in Idaho and over in the north Cascades. But they had wolverines with home ranges of 700 plus square miles. One male in central Idaho wilderness and the mountain area there had one of, he was covering about 900 sq. Mi. So that's almost the size of Glacier park with room for one territorial male wolverine.
So again, that leads you to say, in terms of planning, we're not going to be able to make a park preserve anywhere big enough to keep a genetically diverse population and won't become inbred over time. So it needs connections. Again, it's an argument for these corridors like the Yellowstone to Yukon Vision from connecting wild country, Rockies through, you know, whatever is left of the wild places that we can conserve. So that was a really important finding, is how, because of these huge territories, you're never going to find very many wolverines in one place. You can't pack a bunch in and say, always saved them, you've got to connect them to others. So simultaneously, there were studies starting to go on in British Columbia and Alberta.
And that's really important because there are more wolverines to the north. And if we're going to make these connections, we need to be ignoring the international boundaries as well as state boundaries and jurisdictional boundaries like, oh, this is National Forest, this is national park, this is BureAu of Land Management, this is state land. No, this all got to be part of have some connections between those habitats for wildlife. So that was a major finding.
The other thing was their intolerance of, I don't know if that's the right word, but their dependence upon deep, lingering snowpacks. And I cool year round temperatures.
And in an area where we're all paying more attention to climate, this has a lot of management implications for what country would you preserve and what would be maybe ten years from now, 15 years from now, too hot for them or have insufficient snow. Snow runs off too early, gets warm, you know, too early in the spring. Beyond that, it was a matter of drawing more attention, giving that information out to biologists all over the place who can then go in and start talking to the resource agencies like forest service and like state parks and state fish and game departments about how do we at least ensure the survival of the ones we have left, and then how do we increase that population until it's not so vulnerable? And so that was the other major impact of the study, was starting this discussion. I'd never seen wolverines mention in a newspaper or articles. And I went, I hardly saw him in a scientific paper and I went through wildlife biology courses. You know, and level.
And all of a sudden there's news about Wolverinese, you know, showing up in another place unexpected, or about new protective measures. Montana was the last state to allow trapping of wolverines in the lower 48, and it was more a political, ideological battle based on no information, and finally sparked some other studies that determined, yes, there are that few, and yes, they are vulnerable, and we have to give them every break we can. So that Happened. And British Columbia, they have a strong, like, Alaska, strong tradition of trapping and rugged outdoor stuff, and they're really. It's a cultural ethic, and it's really hard to change. And I think a lot of people feel like if. If we restrict some of this, then who knows where it's going to stop, you know, and we'll be out of business or we'll lose that lifestyle. Yeah, I sure can appreciate it. But it wasn't working to just do nothing. And so even in Canada, where trapping is even stronger tradition than here, they have started some serious enough restrictions that the wolverines have a chance of bouncing back. So.
But again, it isn't just like, well, this, you know, Chadwick seems to be pretty fanatic about Wolverines, so he can see that scene in the world through that lens, but it's more like this is doing a whole lot of other animals a lot of good to be protecting those landscapes.
And I am fanatic about wolverines. I'm fanatic about blue whales, and I'm fanatic of rhinoceros, Indian one horned rhinoceros, and so on and so forth.
[00:33:29] Speaker A: I still don't really understand what makes wolverines tick, but I learned that they tick at a higher metabolic rate than other animals their size. If you were to picture them as organic cruising machines with a souped up carburetor, you wouldn't be far off the mark to hold in the heat of this internal engine. Wolverines, like many northern mammals, wear a double coat, a dense inner layer of air trapping wool beneath a cover of stout guard hairs, which add extra insulation.
Textured to resist absorbing moisture. The long guard hairs that drape from wolverines are not only close to waterproof, but also excel at shedding frost.
A gulos crampon clawed feet are enormous relative to its body, spreading its weight like snowshoes, a major advantage over most competitors and prey during the cold months. By contrast, long, harsh winters drain the energy reserves of hooved animals post holing through the snow, leaving some dead to be scavenged and others weaker by the day, more easily overcome for dinner in steep terrain like glacier heavy snowfalls also mean more avalanches, which claim their own share of mountainside grazers. If buried deeply, the carrion keeps like meat in an ice chest until it melts out for gulos to gorge on. Through spring and early summer, many of the avalanches replace forests with vertical stripes and fans that start life over as meadows filled with wolverine summer snacks such as ground squirrels and voles.
In addition, wolverines cache food in snowbanks and in boulder fields, with icy water running underneath. Bob Inman, who leads a long running study of the species and greater yellowstone ecosystem, told me that supplies in such larders may keep not just for months, but even from one year to the next.
Im beginning to think we might have to consider tiny lifeforms like insects, bacteria and fungi, the decay organisms, as some of the wolverines main competitors for food, he said.
In any case, the list of adaptations that allowed wolverines to make an ally of winter is impressive. Yet until scientists started to focus on climate change, no one gave much thought to how creatures with built in snowshoes, a super cozy fur coat, smoldering metabolism and food cached in nature's refrigerators are supposed to handle swimsuit weather in our ever toastier age of industrial exhaust.
So just so that I understand the threats better, it seems to me, and please expand on this further, that the top threats so far to wolverines, these freaking badass, burly, like, not scared of anything little. I mean, is there anything like a wolverine? I don't think there is. They're just so unique and incredible. But so the top threats are, seem to be climate change and trapping. What, are there anything else that you would include in that? Probably habitat loss. And Then what has that done to their population over time? Do we even, do we even know what their base population was to begin with?
[00:36:35] Speaker B: No. No. Yeah, because they, I mean, they used to be wolverines in Colorado and California and, you know, much farther south and they used to be much farther east across Canada. They all got hit so hard during the fur trapping era that we don't even know their distribution, much less what numbers are were. Look, it's a bigger issue. LiKe I say, it's not just wolverines.
They are an icon of a lot of conservation needs. I went from studying mountain goats to doing a lot of work with grizzly bears, and in much the same fashion, people were saying, well, we're catching. In case the wolverines were catching a lot, the grizzlies were killing a lot, so There must be a lot out there.
I said, others said, are you accounting for the 10,000 new miles of roads into the backcountry and formerly remote areas that the forest service has allowed or the state lands have allowed. There are a lot more people out there using a lot more transportation corridors, having access to more and more of the backcountry just always shrinking. And that, I think, is the most important common thread. And that's really the story is we I just meeting with a guy named Ben Goldfarb, who did a wonderful book called eager about beavers. And then he wrote a. Yeah, good title. But he has a new book out called crossings. And it's about how road ecology affects all the life, the natural species in the area. And there are more than a million big animal vertebrates and small ones, toads and salamanders and so on. But of the, you know, deer are the kind of middle of the road ones, but wolverines and grizzlies and moose and so on, getting more than a million die from car collisions in the US every day.
[00:38:55] Speaker A: Nuts.
[00:38:56] Speaker B: Yeah, more than a million. So there's that. There's the impact of those roads. Wherever you put a road, new development seems to follow. More logging, more mining or recreation.
Those of us who like to get out and roam the backcountry aren't. We're not guilt free on this. You know, you can crowd enough recreationists into an area and you're going to have an impact on wildlife if you're not shooting them. They seem to be able to adjust to human presence a lot better, but it's still an impact.
And so the big story in America is how many, you know, miles of road do we have?
And we've got enough miles of barbed wire fencing in North America to go to the moon and back and part way back to the moon.
[00:39:46] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh, that's crazy.
[00:39:49] Speaker B: Well, we just don't think about it because it's such a common part of our lives and there's a lot of positive aspects to it for people.
But, you know, I'm. Because I'm a wildlife, I keep thinking, what is it like to get from point a to point b for any creature out there?
And then you've got, as long as there's hunting seasons. And I don't want to talk at all in terms of anti hunting. Pro hunting. It's not the issue that just how many people can, how easily access all these formerly, well, animal country, you know, where they had it more or less to themselves.
And we're not tracking that very well, so we get side, you know, drawn off to the side by arguments over, do you want to save the purple tongue vole, or do you want to save, you know, another creature nobody's heard about? But it's symptomatic because that's the same thing that's happening to wolves and grizzlies and elk and deer and animals we pay a lot more attention to. And so that's, I think the big issue of our times is we've got 340 million Americans now and we've got 8 billion in the world that's tripled since I started learning about biology, you know, when I was in college.
What does constipation take? And it was kind of, you know, more simple. We make refuges here and there and we limit, you know, the take of these animals by hunting or trapping or just disturbance or changing their habitat. But it was pretty straightforward. And then the population doubled, and then it doubled again and almost. And we've never been in a world of 8 billion before. We've never been in an America of 340 million before.
We formed our ideas about conservation a century ago. It's when it started and they're not up to speed. And because we've got 8 billion people and a lot of other things going on, we're, you know, our technology isn't proved even at a more rapid acceleration. So here we are trying to do conservation, but we don't have any models to look to before we're in uncharted Territory. So look for the creatures that are TElling us the storY.
And the whales will tell it to you, the great whales Will.
Insects will tell it to you if you pay attention to them at all. We've got like a 75% decline of insects, which are base of the food chain.
And so, yeah, I've been talking about wolverines and grizzlies, but I've been out with researchers on stories for National Geographic about, like, weaver ants in Australia and beetles in Panama, and they're all subject to the same kind of human influences now on a scale that's never existed before.
So what can we learn and then what can we do without turning it into a philosophical or ideological battle? You know, of what you believe or what you like and dislike, but just say to me, these are facts and we can address them, we can do anything we put our minds to. If we just are paying attention and decide to do some practical things that will help those animals survive over time, it's just not a big issue.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: Let's bring this up to the present, then. So one of the big conversations in your book was essentially calling out the federal government for the lack of protection and a lot of controversy for a long time about wolverines. Like there was all of this evidence that they needed more protection, but over and over again they didn't get it. So why was that? And then could you also then maybe bring that up to today, how they actually did just get listed ten years later after you were talking about this in the book, like, why, why did it take so long for them to get on the ESA endangered Species act?
[00:44:34] Speaker B: Oh, boy, 30 years plus. Yeah. From the time the first petition to list them went in. Look, you've got the usual forces on both sides and they've spent a lot of time trying to undercut each other and, you know, sort of demolish their arguments instead of seeing what they agree on, which is too bad. But you, you have livestock interests that just say, look, I don't want any carnivore anywhere near my herds. And I don't care if it's a little swift fox the size of a cow or a grizzly bear or something in between, like a wolverine, that could financially hurt me. And wolverines are not known as stock predators. They tend to stay far apart up in the mountains from where livestock are. But you always in opposition to protecting an animal. You almost always, if that animal has teeth and claws, you're going to get opposition from the livestock industry, you're going to get it from the logging industry, the mining industry, four wheel drive, you know, four wheeler, what do you call off road vehicle enthusiasts who all, they may like wolverines for that matter, but they, if they pay attention to them at all, but they fear that some of their activities are going to be cut down. So you got logging companies with their economic interests, you've got the recreation industry, including the people who sell it as well as use the machines, are going to oppose this stuff. And then you've got now this PoliTical divide we all know only too well.
You got the greenies over here, the weepy bed wedding, environmentalists, as people call the liberals, and then you've got the, you know, freedom. And we want to do whatever we want to do and get rid of regulations crowd over on the other side. So a lot of these battles over perfectly wonderful animals, we end up not protecting them as soon as we should, just because people see that as some big government and regulatory stuff. And out in the west, that doesn't sell very well because we all think we're the last of the frontiers and we don't like to be told what to do. Well, who does. But again, it's fine. If we had 100 million people in the US, maybe there'd be room for a lot more compromise, but yeah.
[00:47:24] Speaker A: So what did you think then when you heard that Wolverine Scott federal protection?
[00:47:29] Speaker B: Well, I worked with some of the groups that were, they had to file lawsuits to force it because in the end, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has to make a decision based on science.
And they could always. The reason they. You asked me how, how could they put it off for so long is because so little is known about Wolverines that who, whoever came up with an estimate of how many there were left, it didn't have a lot of clout because it was an estimate. It was just, here's kind of what we think, or look, we see Wolverine tracks in a lot of places. There must be plenty out there. And then when we got this radio tracking data, we came and said, yes, there are tracks in a lot of places that are all from one Wolverine in that, you know, 500 sq. MI. So eventually the lawsuits forced the fish and game or Fish and Wildlife Service, which is federal agency under Department of Interior, to re examine all the information and what it said about the needs of wolverines and what it said about, like, what's their reproductive rate? How fast can they replace themselves?
Well, not quickly at all. They don't breed till they're, you know, produced young, until they're three or four. They, only about half the ones that are born survive to a year of age. This is very slow. I mean, if you're talking about rabbits or something, is a whole different creature, but. Or even deer, but wolverine is in the likes of those. And grizzly bears have often a gap of years between when they reproduce. And so taking all that into account, they finally had to say, yes, if we don't do something now, we're going to lose these guys.
And that's the whole point of the Endangered Species act, is they are obliged to do something to help recover that species.
They keep coming up with some pretty fancy excuses in between for political reasons. And we live in a country where, depending on what kind of administration is in power, one day there's a lot of movement towards protection, and the next election it's like, let's undo all that protection and regulation. And so we're just bouncing around these poor animals out there in the midst of, of it all, or ping ponging in between people's politics, I think folks understand.
[00:50:16] Speaker A: So fast forwarding to the present, what is the status of wolverines across its massive multi continental home range in 2022 Fisher et al. Published a fantastic paper CAlled wolverines and a changing landscape and warming climate. A decadal synthesis of global conservation ecology research. The questions they asked are the same questions I wanted answered, which were, what are the known drivers of Wolverine populations and distribution? Is there consensus on mechanisms for population dynamics? And how can this knowledge inform wolverine conservation?
Fisher and colleagues research reveals a complex, complex picture of wolverine conservation across the range. In North America, wolverines face challenges from climate change, landscape development, and human activity. Mountain populations are particularly vulnerable due to fragmented habitats and reducing snowpack. In the contiguous United States, wolverines have only recently recolonized after being extirpated in the early 20th century.
In Europe, the situation varies. Fenus canadian wolverines span about 247,500 km² in two populations. Sweden has seen some recovery due to conservation programs, but this is complicated by exploitation in neighboring Norway, creating a source sink dynamic. Finland hosts a separate isolated population.
Asian wolverine populations are less studied, but the outlook appears grim. In China, wolverines are endangered with only an estimated 200 individuals. In the greek kingguang, I hope I pronounced that correctly. Mountains. They've disappeared entirely from some areas in the Altai mountains.
The research highlights several key habitat loss of fragmentation, climate change, reducing spring snow cover, industrial disturbance, and in some areas, overexploitation. Transportation barriers are a particular concern as they genetically isolate populations.
Conservation efforts have had mixed results. Swedens predator compensation program has aided recovery, but similar success hasn't been seen elsewhere. Captive breeding programs have had limited success, while translocations show more promise but require viable source populations. The researchers emphasize that wolverines face different challenges in mountain, boreal and arctic populations, and they stress the need for more research, particularly in understudied regions like Russia and Mongolia, to inform effective conservation strategies.
So what about some exciting news happening in the US? Doug and I discussed one recent announcement that gave us both hope.
Even more recent news, Colorado announced a reintroduction plan of Wolverines, which. What did you. Yeah, yeah, that just answered my question. I was gonna ask you, like, what did you think of that? Did you have friends on the inside of like Colorado government or anything? I would love to hear your thoughts when this was announced. And if you have any more, if you have like, read any of the reinstruction plan or the headlines or anything. Yeah, just tell me about that from your perspective about the college. Write a reintroduction plan of Wolverines.
[00:53:43] Speaker B: Well, way back when the Wolverine book came out, been more than a decade. If you really believe in something, you got to take it all the way so you don't get to say, well, I wrote a book. It's out in the shelves. I can go off.
[00:53:57] Speaker A: I'm done. Move on.
[00:53:58] Speaker B: Snorkeling. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can. But didn't feel right. So I did a LOT of TRaVElINg To GIVE TALKs about WOLvErINES becauSe TO MY GREAT SUrprISE, ReaLly, I thOuGht, you know, I gET Two FRiends aNd My MOm Would come to a tALK on WOLvErines, mAyBE. But a lot of people is what we started talking about at the beginning of this, you know, chat with you is everybody has heard about Wolverines, and they all were kind of wondering, what are they really like? And so a lot of people showed up, and so I would give talks for groups, for example, in Colorado, that were already trying to get Wolverines back into Colorado, but they were also working on trying to get Wolverines protected in the places they still remained, which was only Idaho, Montana, a little bit of Wyoming. And by the late 1990s, they started to get a handful in the north cascades. That was it.
But they were already working on this. And SO. And I kept in contact with them. I went down different years and gave talks in Colorado, kept up on the movement to bring them back there. And one reason Colorado in particular is so important is that they.
They have just about the biggest pile of snow in the Rockies. They get deep, deep snowfall and in a warming scenario of climate, where are they still going to be able to find that year round cool temperature and deep snow for dending and that sort of thing? Colorado may become the future strike stronghold. So that's a Sort of Added thing. Colorado has already reintroduced lynx, which are a threatened species, and that went over pretty well.
And the PublIC was certainly for it. And so the PublIC was Also for reintroducing wolves and reintroducing wolverines. They. People go to COLORAdo because they love the mountains and they love being outdoors and they love the life that they encounter in the outdoors. So it wasn't all that surprising, but it's kind of amazing in this current political climate that it did go through.
[00:56:34] Speaker A: Yeah, really, really exciting. When I saw that, just like you said, how out of nowhere, the Wolverine just started creeping up in the news, like, seeing the super, like, I mean, with the excitement, like, you know, oh, a Wolverine is spotted in Oregon for the first time in blah, blah, blah years, or all of these things were like, slowly but surely, you're just like, wow, you're actually hearing that this critter is not just a mascot for the team up north. You know, I'm in Ohio now, so I can't even call it by its name. It's just the team up north.
Yeah, it's like, it's so. I find it very exciting because they, as you talk a lot about in your book, they fill such an important ecological niche. Not only are they badasses and there's pretty much nothing like them in the world, but we need them in our mountain landscapes. They play such an important role. So to hear that they're coming back, to hear that they are going to be like purposefully brought back into Colorado, I was just, I was ecstatic when I saw that. And that wasn't that long ago. That was only a few months ago.
[00:57:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's some great news. That took, initially it took lawsuits, but then it just took a lot of political debate. You know, when you're, when you work with wildlife and recovery of species, some America really deserves to pat itself on the back. I can complain about a lot, like a lot of environmentalists, but, you know, the grizzly was on the ropes in the, it got listed in 1975 as a threatened species and there were probably 600 left in the lower 48, probably 30 if that. Breeding females in Yellowstone park, which is famous for s grizzly bears.
It was really a tough time.
And now we've probably got a couple thousand grizzlies in the lower 48. And this is remarkable. This is a big, powerful, potentially dangerous carnivore. They also got a lot of good things going for them. Everybody likes teddy bears and bears.
They make good icons for you than your advertisement. I live in a place where you can go to grizzly auto muffler. Um, you know, um, it's got, it's got that magic and, and Wolverine's got a bit of that, you know, and, and, um, anyway, we, we brought, we brought this animal back. We're now fighting over how far it gets to come back, but this is still a remarkable thing. And, and I, I think the Colorado reintroduction and they're talking about it in California, California too, because it was native to the Sierras. Yosemite park used to be full of them. So, you know, I don't want to ignore the really good things that are happening. And it's hard to keep a balance sometimes when you in, in our modern era when species are disappearing at a rate they figure several hundred to a thousand times faster than in history. Except for the cataclysmic, you know, the asteroid strike stuff.
[00:59:54] Speaker A: Right.
[00:59:55] Speaker B: It is really scary. And I have worked around the world with different species and anything big.
Elephants, gorillas, the big cats big wild cats, great whale sharks. It's just having a tough time competing with our massive use of resources. But there's any number of good stories to tell that go with it. And I think the main trick to this is what you do and what I do, which is get people to pay attention, just catch their attention. And people love to watch wildlife spend. They like to wear t shirts with bears and wolves on them. They like to name their subdivisions after a wolf or, you know, but they're not paying attention in daily life and they don't understand a lot about what, what is needed and some fairly simple steps to keep populations going over the long term. But I think a lot of people be willing to. To support if they knew more ABout it.
[01:01:10] Speaker A: Well, then what might those be for those of us that might live in Wolverine country, potential Wolverine country, and then what? And us that don't?
[01:01:21] Speaker B: Like.
[01:01:21] Speaker A: I'm in Ohio now, but I would like to contribute to. So what can we all do, depending on where we're located, to help this awesome species?
[01:01:34] Speaker B: Well, to get from Ohio to Wolverines, I'm working on that one.
I think fix some of the conservation groups that work nationally and some just, or maybe everyone, everyone could say, I'm not made of money, got other priorities. But pick one.
It could be a local conservation group. I MEAN, I want to help save things in OHIO, you know, and it may be a rare butterfly left in some, you know, native part of the prairie.
It might be a fish species that needs help, or salamander in the appalachian part. And so, you know, I could ask you the same question. What can I do to help out in southern Ohio? And you'd say, well, there's this local group that does this and I work with a.
I'm not gonna. I'm not trying to pitch this, but I work with a group called Vital ground and it is a conservation land trust and we work with private land owners, so there's no politics and no contention or anything involved with polarized beliefs. A lot of people say, I want to keep my land as it is, to hand down to the next generation, and I want to keep it available to animals, and I want to keep logging or farming or ranching, whatever. And we go out and say, well, if I.
You don't log it all at once and you do selective cutting or you fence off the area along the stream, that's really important to certain species from cattle overuse. Yeah, keep doing what you're doing and we will pay you to put a conservation easement on your land. Which means no massive commercial development, no subdivision is most important thing. Keep that land intact and keep it at least if it's not critically important to some animals, it's at least an area they can move through safely. That's how you build corridors. And there are land trusts in Ohio. There are land trusts all over the place where this is one way kind of free of lobbying and all the, all you usually lawsuits and all the stuff you usually have to go through to protect areas. And we've got over a million acres. It's taken three decades. Wow.
[01:04:14] Speaker A: Amazing.
[01:04:15] Speaker B: Yeah. And working with a lot of conservation partners, but it's a win win thing. You know, we don't do anything the landowner doesn't want to do. He just gets compensated for it. And for some guys struggling to make a living off cows or timber or something, it's a real boon. And for wildlife, it's a real boom. So that's one way to get at it. Another is to look at groups like the National Wildlife Federation or.
I have worked directly with some of the international groups. The Wildlife Conservation Society is one World Wildlife Fund.
And if you're concerned about jaguars and elephants or manatees, whatever it might be, they have programs in a lot of these areas, and the more support they can get, and they do have the large landscape vision.
There is a group called the center for large landscape conservation, and they are looking at the big picture, long term survival of wildlife communities and big and connected.
So I think once you start in on that or go ask Google that particular, you know, the particular question you have about wildlife groups that, or conservation groups that deal with large landscape protection or. Yeah, with wolverine, sort of.
I'm going to name one more. And this is, this is kind of unfair because I'm doing it off the top of my head and there's so many worthy outfits. But there's the Western Environmental Law center, and I think they have a base in Arizona as well as Portland. But you mentioned Portland earlier. I think it's Portland anyway, in Oregon. And they take on issues from oil and gas leasing in the west to wolf protection to water quality conservation of wild rivers.
And they are a cracker jack bunch of lawyers, and they know how to file, how and when to file lawsuits and. And really follow it up. And they're science based. So I have a lot of respect for them.
[01:06:49] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah.
[01:06:51] Speaker B: They proved very effective.
[01:06:55] Speaker A: I've never seen a gulo sit fully upright as f four did. And I have no idea what caused her to perform such a move. Despite that, despite the fact that I talked to Wolverines and cared deeply for them and was especially fond of f four. I never had the slightest feeling that I was more to her or to any of the others than a threat or potential competitor. At best I was a tall, rather slow, odd smelling annoyance. The only thing they would ever want or need from me personally was to be left the hell alone. I admired them all the more for that. They're wolverines. They're indomitably wild. They want nothing to do with either our romantic tableau of charming wild beasts that want to be our friends or our screwy fantasies where gulows play the role of diabolical enemies. They have no truck with illusions. Its 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. Im from the species that struggles daily to distinguish the truth from its own half truths and lies. When you load nature up with human opinions, dreams and nightmares, the results might make for more dynamic 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 weve ever cooked up. That is what I learned from being on these animals trails.
Gulus dont need a few secure areas to survive. They need lots of secure areas, big ones, and healthy corridors of protected land in between to link populations and the genes they carry. They need to be a part of a robust community of predators, and they need an overflow of varied prey, as the wolverine becomes better known at last, it adds a fierce emphasis to the message that every bear, Wolf, Lynx and other major carnivore keeps giving. If the living systems we choose to protect aren't large and strong and interconnected, then we aren't really conserving them. Not for the long term, not with some real teeth in the scenery. We're just talking about saving nature while we settle for something less wild.
Thank you for joining me on this wild adventure today. I hope you've been inspired by the incredible stories, insights and knowledge shared in this episode. To learn more about what you heard, be sure to check out the show noteseworks rewildology.com if you enjoyed today's conversation and want to stay connected with the rewalled ology community, hit that subscribe button and rate and review the show on your favorite podcast app. I read every comment left across the show's platforms and your feedback truly does mean the world to me.
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