We are two thirds of the way through our winter field season and it has been a full winter already. We have our largest number of deployments out of any winter yet. We have had about 20 track observations submitted to us from backcountry skiers here in the Cascades. We were joined by Colin Arisman of Wild Confluence Media and Tyler Wilkinson-Ray of The Wilder Studio for a week of filming for a story about wolverines in the North Cascades and our project.
But most excitingly we have had wolverine detections on one of our cameras close to Holden Village deep in the North Cascades. Based on images we got of the animal’s chest blaze we believe the same animal visited the station in January and again February. In March we collected a hair sample from the tree closest to the hanging bait we have set up at the station which we fitted with a hair snagging device to collect genetic samples. The hair is off to the lab to determine if indeed it is from the wolverine and if so more information on its relationship to other wolverines whose genetics have been collected here in the North Cascades.
While spring skiing in the backcountry we are hoping to get more reports of potential wolverine tracks from around the Cascades. Learn more about how to identify wolverine tracks and access our submission form for sending us your observations at: https://cascadeswolverineproject.org/wolverine-tracks/
We will be collecting all of our winter camera traps starting in April and will be reporting on all of our results and sharing more images from the winter after that.