Wolverines, known for tenacity, win federal protection after 48-year fight

Merritt Clifton

Dec 2

Wolverines in the snow. — **(Beth Clifton collage)**

Stop trapping & wolverines could probably restore themselves

WASHINGTON D.C.––Usually there is little to celebrate about an animal becoming officially recognized as a threatened species, but wolverines, recognized as "threatened" by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service on November 29, 2023, present a rare exception.

Had science prevailed instead of politics, wolverines would have been listed not only as "threatened" but as "endangered" ever since the passage of Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966, forerunner to the much stronger Endangered Species Act of 1973.

"There are only about 300 wolverines in the lower 48 states," emailed Western Environmental Law Center communications director Brian Sweeney, "but it still took two WELC-led lawsuits resulting in court orders to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to use the best available science to get to the 'endangered' listing."

Wolverine tangerine. — **(Beth Clifton collage)**

Does the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service know a wolverine from a tangerine?

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service published recognition of wolverines as a threatened species just one day before a court order requiring the Service to act was to expire.

"Don't get us wrong," Sweeney added. "We're happy! The details within the Endangered Species Act [section] 4(d) rule are actually pretty good, with the exception of a provision allowing trapping in wolverine habitat if 'best practices' are followed.

"That risks killing or injuring threatened wolverines, and we're not convinced trapping can be done without that risk. We will be commenting to that effect during the comment period" that follows the listing.

Wolverine in Montana (Kalon Baughan photo) — **Wolverine in Montana.**
**(Kalon Baughan photo)**

20 years of advocacy by wildlife conservation groups isn't the half of it

"After more than 20 years of advocacy by wildlife conservation groups," Sweeney wrote in a more formal media release, "the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service found that wolverines warrant federal protections as a threatened species.

"Snow-dependent wolverines have suffered from climate change, habitat loss, trapping, and other anthropogenic [human-caused] pressures," Sweeney detailed.

Never numerous, slow to breed, and threatened by habitat loss even before the effects of global warming became starkly evident in reduced snow cover, wolverines are primarily scavengers rather than hunters, long hated and persecuted by fur trappers because they prey upon baited traps and other trapped animals.

Oregon protected wolverines in 1975

Wolverines in the 19th century were believed to sparsely inhabit every U.S. state with winter-long snow cover, as well as most of Canada.

The U.S. Geological Survey, however, targeted wolverines for extermination in 1900, as suspected livestock predators, and by 1930 had apparently killed most of the Lower 48 population.

Wolverines meanwhile had also been trapped to virtual extinction in Canada east of Hudson's Bay, and throughout the continental U.S. except in northwestern Montana.

After a male wolverine was killed in Linn County, Oregon, in 1965, and another was trapped on Steens Mountain in Harney County, Oregon, in 1973, the Oregon Game Commission made Oregon the first state to formally protect wolverines, listing them as a threatened species in 1975.

For the next 20 years, though, the only signs of wolverines in Oregon were dead specimens found in Wheeler County in 1986, Hood River County in 1990, and Grant County in 1992.

Wolverines did not reappear in Washington state, to the north, until 2006.

To the south, the first wolverine seen in California since 1922 was photographed by a trail camera in 2008, and again in 2009 and 2010. A female, the California wolverine was identified as the same one each time by distinctive markings.

Legal action for wolverines began in 1994

In the interim, the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, which later merged into the Center for Biological Diversity, in September 1994 petitioned the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to list wolverines as "endangered" throughout the U.S. except in Alaska.

"All leghold bait trapping must be eliminated in wolverine recovery areas," said Biological Diversity Legal Foundation director Jasper Carlton.

That rekindled trapper hatred of wolverines, at a time when wolverine pelts, trapped primarily in Canada, Alaska, and Montana, were fetching the highest prices of any trapped furs.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service rejected the Biodiversity Legal Foundation petition.

Colorado reintroduction struggle

Anticipating the possibility of rebuilding a wolverine population that could be trapped, and hoping to avoid an eventual "threatened" listing of wolverines, the Colorado Division of Wildlife in 1999 considered reintroducing wolverines and lynx. Lynx from Canada and Alaska were reintroduced, but the Colorado Division of Wildlife apparently lost interest in bringing back wolverines upon learning that they tend to lead solitary lives, remaining scarce except where able to scavenge kills left by wolves and grizzly bears.

Two years later, in 2001, then-U.S. Forest Service deputy undersecretary for natural resources David Tenny ordered forest managers in Colorado to undo whatever requirements they had for protecting wolverine habitat.

A wolverine was at last seen in Colorado for the first time since 1920 when in mid-2010 one wandered all the way south from northwest Wyoming––hardly an unparalleled trek for a wolverine, since scarcity dictates very long searches for mates.

U.S. FWS "did everything it could" to avoid "facing the science"

Coalitions of conservation organizations in 2000 and 2002 asked the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to at least study of whether wolverines needed Endangered Species Act protection.

After the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service responded in October 2003 that it lacked sufficient information to warrant doing a wolverine study, EarthJustice represented Defenders of Wildlife, Friends of the Clearwater, the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, and the Northwest Ecosystem
Alliance in suing the Service.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service "has done everything it can to avoid facing the science indicating that this animal is in danger," charged Mike Senatore of Defenders of Wildlife, but the fight to save the wolverine was still only beginning, 20 years after Oregon took action.

"A closer look is required"

The only good news for wolverines during the next few years was that Jeff Ford, a science teacher at Deckerville High School in Michigan, managed to document that hunters who chased a wolverine for hours southwest of Bad Axe, eventually treeing the animal, were correct in their identification.

Aware that Michigan is sometimes called "The wolverine state," despite a paucity of wolverines, and surmising correctly that the state might protect wolverines somehow, the hunters refrained from shooting the wolverine.

Ford tracked, found, and photographed the wolverine several times, the first seen in Michigan since 1855 and perhaps the first since 1805. Ford eventually established that the wolverine, a female, had come south from Canada.

U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy of Missoula, Montana, in response to the lawsuit by EarthJustice et al, in September 2006 ordered the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to begin an intensive, yearlong study of wolverine range and abundance.

"This does not mean the wolverine must be listed, but it does mean a closer look is required," wrote Molloy.

Wolverines become scarce in Alaska, too

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, after eight months of foot-dragging, finally began the study in June 2007, concluding in March 2008 that because wolverines remained allegedly abundant in Alaska and Canada, the status of wolverines in the Lower 48 states was irrelevant to the survival of the species.

But by then wolverines had also become scarce in Alaska.

The Alaska Board of Game, for instance, continued to allow wolverine trapping in Chugach State Park, despite a 1995 aerial survey that produced an estimate that only from 11 to 23 wolverines inhabited the entire region, an area the size of the state of Delaware.

An April 2008 aerial survey confirmed the 1995 estimate. Trappers continued to kill an average of from four to six wolverines per year in the Chugach region, more than the population could sustain.

Back to court Defenders of Wildlife et al went, now backed by an Endangered Species Panel finding that wolverines were among the 10 species most in need of Endangered Species Act protection.

In June 2009 the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service settled the new lawsuit by again agreeing to reconsider the status of wolverines.

Global warming

In December 2010 the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service conceded that the Lower 48 wolverine population had declined from about 500 a decade earlier to as few as 250, but argued, summarized Matt Volz of Associated Press, that while "The threat of climate change warrants classifying wolverines as threatened or endangered, other species are in more imminent danger."

Montana continued to authorize a trapping quota of five wolverines per year until a state judge stopped the winter 2012-2013 wolverine trapping season with a restraining order.

After another round of lawsuits, including a case brought by Western Environmental Law Center, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service on February 1, 2013 proposed Endangered Species Act
protection for wolverines as a threatened species in the Lower 48 states.

Wolverine poster. — **(Trap Free Montana photo)**

More delays

But the state wildlife departments of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming and the Western Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies won delays of implementing the proposal that continued to leave wolverines unprotected into mid-2014.

At that point, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service regional director Noreen Walsh cancelled the threatened species recommendation for wolverines, due to what she claimed to be uncertainties "about the degree to which we can reliably predict impacts to wolverine populations from climate
change."

Wolverines, in short, had become not only both hated and coveted by fur trappers, but also a political football in the battles over global warming and wolf reintroduction.

A ruling favoring wolverines would mean acknowledging the effects of global warming, and might also reinforce wolf protection, since wolf predation on elk, deer, moose, and pronghorn is a key food source for scavenging wolverines.

Wolverine in Montana. — **(Audrey Magoun/USFWS FPWC photo)**

More conservationists take an interest

Fearing a negative precedent for all wildlife jeopardized by climate change, more conservation groups took an interest in wolverines.

The Western Environmental Law Center, Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, Center for Biological Diversity, Helena Hunters & Anglers, Friends of the Wild Swan, and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in October 2015 led a 20-member coalition in again suing the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service on behalf of wolverines.

U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen, of Billings, Montana, on April 4, 2016 ordered the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to protect wolverines "as quickly as possible," but no more came of Christensen's ruling than had come of the previous rulings by Judge Molloy.

Donald Trump Jr. & dead bear, wolf, & wolverine — **(Beth Clifton collage)**

Targeted by the right

A month after Christensen ruled, however, rancher Jared Hatter of Alexander, North Dakota, shot the first wolverine seen in that state since 1858.

"Killed this here critter out tormenting the cows yesterday," Hatter posted to social media.

In point of fact, there is not a single case on record of a wolverine ever harming cattle.

The victim wolverine, M56, was wearing a radio transmitter implanted beneath his skin by biologists eight years earlier, just south of Yellowstone National Park.

Again in October 2020 the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service denied wolverines federal protection as a threatened species, citing the purported abundance of wolverines in Canada.

(See Wolves, grizzly bears, wolverines & right whales sacrificed to Trump re-election bid.)

Canada moose poison — **(Beth Clifton collage)**

In trouble in Canada too

This position ignored that the Canadian federal Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada had recommended since 2005 that wolverines be listed as being of "special concern" under the Species At Risk Act.

Eighteen years later, the proposed Canadian listing has yet to take effect due to sustained bitter opposition from First Nations fur trappers.

Following the November 29, 2023 agreement to list wolverines as threatened, summarized Western Environmental Law Center communications director Brian Sweeney, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is to "prepare a wolverine recovery plan and identify protected critical habitat in the future, and may prepare a plan for reintroduction into Colorado as well.

**Fox auctions trapper. (Beth Clifton collage)**

"We doubt it's possible to trap without risk of take"

"Wildlife groups do have concerns about language" in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service ruling," Sweeney said, "allowing incidental wolverine 'take' from trapping 'conducted in a manner that uses best practices to minimize the potential for capture and mortality of wolverines.'

"This coalition isn't sure this is possible for wolverines because they are scavengers and known as 'trap junkies,'" Sweeney explained.

Agreed Western Environmental Law Center attorney Matthew Bishop, who may have spent more time representing wolverines in court over the preceding 13 years than any U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologist has actually spent studying wolverines, "We doubt it's possible to trap without the risk of take."

"Roadmap for extinction"

"We appreciate that the Fish & Wildlife Service finally listed wolverines as threatened, but their rule which allows wolverines to be trapped is a road map for extinction, not recovery," added executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies executive director Mike Garrity.

"A state district court in Montana ruled in our favor in 2012 that wolverine trapping was illegal because there are so few wolverines," Garrity reminded.

Other participants in the finally successful lawsuit included WildEarth Guardians, Cascadia Wildlands, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, the Cottonwood Environmental Law Center, Footloose Montana, Friends of the Bitterroot, Friends of the Wild Swan, the Helena Hunters & Anglers Association, the Native Ecosystems Council, Oregon Wild, Wildlands Network, the Swan View Coalition, and conservation writer George Wuerthner, as a concerned individual.

"Listing wolverine has been as elusive as the animal," summed up Larry Campbell of Friends of the Bitterroot.

USDA Wildlife Services "protected" wolverines before U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service did

Ironically, USDA Wildlife Services, the federal "nuisance wildlife" extermination agency, in effect recognized wolverines as a threatened species six years before the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service finally did, having last killed a wolverine in 2017.

(See Garbled stories show why wolverines need a defense lawyer.)

Beth and Merritt — **Beth & Merritt Clifton**

A wolverine alleged to have killed 18 sheep six miles west of Randolph, Utah was trapped in response to rancher complaints on March 11, 2022, but was radio-collared and relocated.

In truth, no one actually saw the wolverine killing any sheep at all. Neither was there any reported forensic evidence to suggest that the wolverine did anything other than what wolverines usually do, scavenging the remains of other animals wherever found.