Wolverine In Wyoming

In August of 2006, I hiked in to the headwaters of the Thorofare in Wyoming to look at sites visited by a collared wolverine who was part of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wolverine Project study. Although I was warned before we set out that it was unlikely that we'd actually see the animal, a wolverine came into our camp that evening at dusk. Our dog saw him first, and luckily came back when her owner called her off. The wolverine circled us for more than 10 minutes, peering at us from all angles, jumping up onto talus boulders to get a better view, before eventually loping off across a snow field. He wasn't the collared animal we were following, nor was he any collared animal in any wolverine study - we sat frantically flipping through the frequencies on the telemetry unit as he watched us, and he remained a blank, a puzzle. We pulled hair from his tracks the next morning and, from the DNA, learned that he was a young male, caught and collared six months after we saw him. He subsequently disappeared, probably dispersing to another mountain range, a bare month after he was collared. Wolverines were largely extirpated from the US Rockies in the early 20th century, mostly due to poison baits left out for coyotes or wolves. They made a slow recovery throughout the 20th century, reinhabiting much of their former range. It would be a great recovery story, but now they're threatened by climate change. They require snow and cold weather to thrive. So the animal I saw was poised at the intersection of two stories, teetering between a triumphant return from past hardship, and a catastrophic future collapse. In some ways, it's fitting that we never found out what happened to him, that he simply vanished. It was an extraordinary sighting, and it turned me into a wolverine biologist.