Distinctly Montana Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.distinctlymontana.com/i/20776
U.S. FOREST SERVICE / GOOGLE MAPS RICK YATES A wolverine’s typical week of movements. than 500 and more likely number just 300 or fewer. To make a point about their present status, you could cram all of them into one person’s mountainside trophy home. It would be a snarlfest, but they’d fit. Part of the predicament for this hunter-scavenger is that it has proved so hard to find and follow that much of its existence remains a blank. The public scarcely knows what a wolverine actually is apart from cartoon versions and trappers’ yarns about the beast. Unfortunately, natural resource managers don’t have much more to go on when deciding how best to promote the species’ survival. For example, female wolverines den deep in the snow- pack from February into May. This is a central feature of their lives and absolutely critical to the population as a whole. The insulated shelters are where the females give birth and rear their young—the litter size varies from one to four, with an average of two—until they are strong enough to keep up with her. Wolverines don’t hibernate. DANIEL J. COX / NATURAL EXPOSURES.COM Wolverines in the Rocky Mountains BY DEBORAH MCCAULEY, WILDLIFE VETERINARIAN To study wolverines in the field is a challenge. It often requires long days and nights trekking up a mountain to 8,000 feet in the bitterly cold Montana winter in some of the most remote areas of this country. Since wolverines have a thick muscled neck, a narrow head, and a persistent will to remove collars, researchers are forced to create alterna- tive techniques for tracking them. Veterinarians join the field team to aid in immobilization and surgically implanting radio-transmitters. The procedure is quick, the anesthesia is reversed to wake them up post-op, and they are returned to the wild promptly. A two-month old wolverine kit in captivity. 22 DISTINCTLY MONTANA • WINTER 2011 To endure, wolverines are going Radio-tracking wolverines. Far from it; each mother actively hunts a large area around the den site and carries food back to the babies once they begin to eat solid food. A mother may dig several dens in succession through the late winter and spring, transfer- ring the infants from the natal, or birth, den to different maternal, or young-rearing, dens as they grow older. She is especially likely to move her babies if she detects some sort of alarming or unfamiliar activity in the area. But what sort of places do mothers pick for a den? High slopes or low ones? Steep or gentle? Open habitats or sheltered to need wildland corridors to roam from one chain of peaks to the next.