Tracking the elusive wolverine

OLYMPIA

It’s a dream of many boys to stalk carnivores through dense, remote forests, isolated from the trappings of daily life.

U.S. Forest Service scientist Keith Aubry was lucky enough to make a career of it. Better yet, he sometimes makes history in addition to getting paid.

Aubry, considered an expert on some of the Northwest region’s most elusive woodland carnivores including lynx, Cascade red fox, fishers and — most recently — wolverines.

“I’ve always been a carnivore person,” said Aubry, who was to give a presentation on wolverines, Jan. 18, at the Northwest Stream Center in Mill Creek. “I was never suited to study deer or plants. The behavior of carnivores — mammals and predatory birds — always interested me, but it was the habitat — deep, dark alpine forests — that I fell in love with.”

He began his career studying Cascade red fox, a species that — at the time — was a mystery to wildlife experts. His research on the animals’ habitat distribution and relationship with the environment helped implement conservation and management programs in the Northwest.

But, Aubry says, his research over the last three years on North American wolverines has been perhaps the most gratifying of his career.

“They are such a charismatic and interesting species,” he said. “There were so many unknowns when we started. Tackling these kinds of mysteries is always very rewarding.”

Petitions in 1994 and 2003 to list the wolverine as an endangered species helped secure funding for the Forest Service study, led by a team of scientists including Aubry and Jefferey Copeland. Their work began tracing wolverines’ history in the contiguous United States — a task that sent Aubry back East to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the National Biological Survey for historical records of sightings and animals being trapped and killed.

Aubry and his team extracted genetic material from museum specimens linking old world wolverines from Europe and Eurasia to Sierra Nevada wolverines, which have likely been extinct since before the mid 1900s. The history and adaptation of wolverines in Washington, Idaho, Montana and other Rocky Mountain states remains somewhat of a mystery, as the animals occupy remote alpine wilderness areas and are rarely encountered by people.

A field group was sent to the North Cascades in late 2005 to set up traps and hopefully capture an animal that would be fitted with a satellite collar for monitoring purposes.

Aubry got the phone call one February morning in 2006.

They’d captured a young female wolverine near Winthrop, Wash.

Aubry and his partners knew it would take a full day to reach the site, and they feared the animal would chew her way to freedom before they got there.

As luck would have it, the wolverine — named Melanie after Copeland’s granddaughter — did not escape.

It was the first time in history scientists collared a North American wolverine. The fact that Melanie was pregnant was the icing on the cake.

The data scientists gathered from Melanie and other animals that were subsequently collared revealed the existence of healthy wolverine populations in several areas near the Winthrop site. Information is still being gathered on wolverine behavior, social structure and their interaction with the environment.

“I didn’t even know wolverines existed here until I met Keith,” Northwest Stream Center Director Tom Murdoch said. “These animals are shrouded in mystery, which makes this research just fascinating to me.”

Explorers in the North Cascades would be less surprised by a run in with Big Foot than an encounter with a wolverine. And like Big Foot, wolverines have garnered a somewhat mythic reputation — depicted as forboding beasts, with appetites that rival the Tasmanian Devil.

“Who knows where these stories come from,” Aubry said. “While wolverines are capable of hunting they are typically scavengers. This reputation they’ve been given as monsters is a complete myth.”

People’s assumptions about the animals may explain recorded killings in areas throughout the world where human settlement approached wolverine habitat.

Aubry said there are a number of factors affecting the wolverine’s viability as a species.

For one thing, they seem to exist only in areas that accommodate snowpack through late spring.

Global warming has been suggested as a possible threat to their survival, but Aubry said research on the issue is incomplete. There also are questions about threats posed by recreation activities — how snow mobiles and back country skiing fit into the equation.

Add to those potential threats a low reproductive rate, and the future of the species is unclear.

It will fall upon the Department of Fish and Wildlife to determine whether or not wolverines are in danger of extinction, and that decision could come by the end of the month.

“I’d say that humans pose the greatest risk to wolverines,” he said. “But how they are protected and to what extent is out of my realm. My job is to conduct the research and offer the most accurate scientific analysis to aid in development of habitat conservation and management. Wolverines seem to have always existed on the fringe of viability. Once humans enter the picture you see their numbers decrease.”