December 2016: Canadian Geographic
Wolverines are the essence of wilderness. High in the mountains, they lurk near avalanche paths and earn their Latin name, Gulo gulo (glutton), by gorging on half-buried animals and breaking bones with powerful jaws. They traverse deep snows with plate-sized feet and scale mountain summits so quickly it puts the world’s greatest human mountaineers to shame.
Although far from timid, wolverines are highly sensitive to human disturbance, says biologist Tony Clevenger, who’s been studying them in the Canadian Rockies for more than six years. “They’re big weasels with very fast metabolisms,” he says, “so they can’t just survive high up in the alpine on a rock; they also have to travel the valleys between those high passes.”
On a sunny day in March, I follow Clevenger into the backcountry northwest of Elkford, B.C. to check some bait traps he’d set up to hopefully attract, photograph (via motion-activated camera), and collect hair samples from passing wolverines.
It’s a non-invasive form of sampling; no animals are handled or harmed. By extracting DNA from the hair wolverines leave behind, Clevenger and fellow researchers hope to better understand these under-studied and elusive predators, and where they live and move throughout these mountain ecosystems.
Fraser Los 