Rainier’s Rare Wolverines
Jocelyn Akins and her team at Cascades Carnivore Project venture into the mountains to track down one of the region’s most elusive animals: the wolverine.
Story and Photos by Duncan Mullen
December 11, 2020
Sparsely-forested subalpine ridges like this one south of Mount Rainier are frequented by the national park’s wolverines.
Jocelyn Akins, a biologist with the Cascade Carnivore Project, constructs a runpole three meters up the trunk of a tree.
Perched precariously three meters up the rippled trunk of a silver fir in the shadow of Mount Rainier, a power drill in hand and a mess of lumber supported on one knee, Jocelyn Akins directs a small team of researchers below her. As she begins screwing wooden planks into the tree, her team pulls a once-frozen, but quickly thawing elk head from a black trash bag. Akins and her team are building a runpole, the main tool for wolverine monitoring in Washington state’s South Cascade Mountains.
Bait, in this case an deer head and a femur, is used to attract wolverines to the monitoring stations.
Wolverines are small, bushy-haired carnivorous mammals in the same family as weasels and badgers. Weighing 8 to 18 kilograms, about as much as an adult border collie, these stocky creatures appear part bear, part weasel. Wolverines once roamed the alpine tundra and subalpine forests of western North America, but by the early 1900s over-trapping and collateral damage from predator control programs had wiped out many of the animals.
The male wolverine nicknamed Van by researchers is caught on a remote camera near Mount Rainier. // Photo Credit: Cascades Carnivore Project.
On October 8, 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the agency would not list wolverines under the Endangered Species Act. This decision came despite uncertainty over the species’ true population size and the possible impact of climate change on the late-spring snowpack the animals are thought to depend on to den and raise their young. The announcement cites evidence of the movement of wolverines into historically occupied areas as justification for the decision.
Tracks laid in fresh snow allows researchers to trace wolverines’ movement around the park.
“We are watching the front end of the recolonization of an area, what that looks like and when are we going to get to a stable number of wolverines,” said Akins.
Akins, wolverine researcher and founder of the nonprofit Cascades Carnivore Project, began monitoring wolverines in the South Cascades in 2008. However, her team’s experience over the last five years does not mirror the federal government’s findings of successful recolonization.
Researchers activate a remote camera before attaching it to a tree trunk.
“At this stage, what looks like occurrence in the South Cascades could blink out next year,” said Akins.
Akins and her team of researchers monitor wolverine populations in places where wolverines once thrived, including Mount Rainier National Park, using remote camera traps and specialized structures called runpoles.
Akins points out the location on a distant ridge where a runpole needs to be relocated.
Located high up the trunk of a tree, a runpole consists of a wood beam extending perpendicular from the tree. Attached is a half-meter tall lumber scaffold that wolverines can rest their front paws on, like the top rung of a ladder. It is built to force wolverines to climb off the forest floor and stretch upwards to reach for bait hung above. The posture exposes the unique markings on the animals’ chests and throats to remote cameras mounted on trees opposite the runpole.
Researchers hoist bait by rope into position, suspended above a runpole.
Although Akins’ team collects hair and scat for genetic analysis, visual identification from these markings is so reliable that researchers can often quickly tell individuals apart by photos alone. Akins’ team has named two of the wolverines in the Mount Rainier area — the adult male and female, Van and Joni.
Gathered at night in a trailhead parking lot after hiking out from a remote runpole, Akins’ team discusses their plans for the next day.
After a long day of hiking and setting up runpoles, Akins and her team regroup in the trailhead parking lot to look over maps and discuss the next day’s plans. Headlamps cut through the evening darkness. After a grueling 12-hour workday, Akins and her team still seem enthusiastic about the next day’s station. Even so, they decide to start at 7:30 the next morning, an hour later than normal.
“One of the big pushes for research on wolverines in the past decade is that there is just so little known about them,” Akins said. “It’s so easy for a wildlife managing agency to say ‘there’s not enough information, we can’t make a call on whether the species should be protected or not.’” Akins sees monitoring projects like hers as important to enable managing agencies to make informed decisions about protection of the species.
Duncan Mullen in a senior environmental studies student using photography to document and start conversations about humanity’s relationship to mountain ecosystems.