We have detected at least 11 different wolverines over 8 years of monitoring!
Understanding this required sifting through all 5749 of the wolverine photos that we have captured and looking for every wolverine’s distinct chest blaze, or pattern of light and dark fur across their throat and chest. Nyn Tomkins helped us a great deal with this. Three of the individuals in our database are further distinguished with genetic samples, with hopefully more genetic results on the way.
Is this a lot of wolverines? Well, for comparison, the number of wolverines live trapped in the northeast corner of the Washington Cascades during the decade-long USFS North Cascades Wolverine Project was 13 wolverines. The study areas of that now-ended project and ours overlap considerably – we continue to monitor at sites such as Hart’s Pass and Twisp River originally utilized by the North Cascades Wolverine Project.
We’ll be introducing these individual wolverines to our followers on social media over the next couple of months. First, we profiled Stella:
Back in 2015 near Harts Pass in the North Cascades, during the final stretch of the USFS landmark study of Washington’s wolverines, researchers identified a female wolverine they nicknamed Stella. A few years later, in 2018 she appeared about 30 miles south near WA Pass at one of CWP’s “natural studio” stations, designed and rigged by cofounder David Moskowitz. These experimental stations blended portrait photography with remote-camera trapping methods, allowing us to take remarkable images such as the one above, without any researchers present.
Stella was the first wolverine to be detected by our fledgling monitoring project, filling us with giddy astonishment and cautious optimism that our efforts might gradually bring us closer to tracking an exceptionally rare, quiet, and clever creature, using non-invasive techniques. She popped up a year later about ten miles away, at a different station, and then never again. At least, not yet. Wolverines live about 8-10 years in the wild, sometimes longer. We’d like to believe Stella is an exceptionally long-lived gulo, romping through the high hills right at this very moment. If you head up to WA Pass to bask in the golden larches of October, keep your eyes out for her, a lone wolverine loping into her own golden years.