We’d like to shed some light on the creature we’ve chosen as the primary symbol for The Woodsrunner School of the Wild, the legendary wolverine.

I don’t know why we need the Sasquatch when we have the wolverine.  Elusive, mythical, shrouded in mystery, he scours the remote fastnesses and our imaginations both, leaving little evidence of his passing save some outsized prints here and there and a trail of hair-raising tales.  And while you may be able to chase down the latter, you must be either very dedicated or very lucky just to see an actual track.

The wolverine is a creature like no other.  Sure, as the largest terrestrial member of the weasel family he has some close relatives, most closely those of the Martes genus, (fisher and martens,) yet he nonetheless exhibits an aura and form, a movement, energy and an aesthetic  all his own.  I suppose if you wanted to manufacture your own wolverine, you might take a fisher and cross it with a bear, add a dash of canine somewhere, and then stick the tail of a yak on the result and you might get something close. 

Wolverines were long thought to be solitary, and certainly they need a lot of room to roam. Individual wolverines may travel 24 kilometers (15 miles) in a day in search of food. But while adults of the same sex exclude each other, males and females, and family groups including the mother and/or father may travel together, engaging in play sessions much like the otter.  I once came across a place deep in the wilderness of northeast British Columbia where tracks on a forested ridge told the story of the meeting between two wolverines.  One of the animals became aware of the approach of the other, hid, and then leapt out in ambush.  A tussle in the snow ensued, but as there was no blood nor hair left behind, I suspect this was play between two individuals who knew each other.  They then lit out through the forest in tandem. 

Wolverines frequent remote boreal forests, taiga, and tundra in the northern latitudes of Europe, Asia, and North America.  During the course of one study, I was able to demonstrate the necessity to the wolverine of dense, continuous conifer cover in areas where deep powder snow conditions prevail.  Have you ever walked in an evergreen forest when the snow lies deep on the land?  Then you know how such continuous cover buffers the snow depth and allows travelers like the wolverine, never sure where his next meal is coming from, not to tip his energy budget into the starvation zone. And yet wolverines also live in tundra habitat, far from any trees.  How can this apparent contradiction be?  They can live on the tundra because the tundra is a near-desert, with low snowfall and windpacked crusts that the wolverine can easily travel on top of, for this animal has the lowest per-square centimetre weight-load on his feet of any creature.  In other words, his huge feet (he’s an animal the size of a spaniel with feet the size of the largest wolves,) act as snowshoes.

Wolverines are dependent on persistent spring snowpack to den, they cannot establish breeding populations unless there is deep snow through mid-May. They are also generally found only where the maximum temperature in August is 70° F.  Their most southerly range in North America is Wyoming, not really a “northern” area, yet the elevation there allows for conditions in some places that suit northern wildlife.

Wolverines, like people of northern latitudes, may eat a bit of vegetarian fare, like plants and berries in season, but they must have meat to survive. They’ll eat pretty much any other creature they can catch and overpower.  I have found where they have successfully run down snowshoe hares, and on the other end of the spectrum, they have been reliably documented bringing down moose where they had an advantage.  One small female wolverine in one study made a regular habit of killing caribou.  She had the skills down-pat!  I know of one other recent study where the researchers were surprised to find beaver was an important part of wolverine diet in northern Ontario.  But if they had been reading the old journals of the coureur-de-bois from the area, they’d not have been surprised at all – a common name lent to the wolverine in those times was “beaver-eater,” a name borrowed by the traders from the Chippewa.  

The wolverine's Latin species name, "Gulo," means "glutton."  Early woodsmen noted that a wolverine left with a mountain of meat in the evening may have single-handedly cleaned it up by morning.  They came to the mistaken conclusion that it had all been eaten, when in actuality the wolverine had eaten some and dismembered the rest to carry off to various points of the compass and hide as a cache for the next time he came through.  Their memories for these caches are amazing.  In tracking wolverines, I have followed straight to old cache sites with the weathered condition of the bones involved suggesting the passage of many months, if not a year or more.  I doubt they could have smelled these bones unless right on them - I think they remembered the site, not even a dot on a map in a sea of wilderness.    

Wolverines scavenge on wolf kills, and they can subsist for some time on bone, having massive jaw muscles and molars that allow them to crush this meal and get at the marrow.  I have tracked numerous wolverines to their food-caches in the wilderness and found that they often consisted of nothing but bone, and in some cases maybe a little moose-hide.  They always seemed to situate these caches in areas of old growth were there was a good view of the surrounding territory relative to the more enclosed cover they obviously preferred for traveling.  I expect they were watching for wolves, common in the area.  This would explain the other feature of all the cache sites I examined: a good climbing tree, always with evidence of recent use!  Another regular feature of these caches was the presence of a large, mature spruce somewhere nearby with branches forming an umbrella effect at the base.  The wolverines always seemed to like digging in the dirt under such spruces, perhaps hiding tidbits there.

Male wolverines scent-mark their territories with their skunk-like scent glands.  It is probably these glands that help the wolverine chase larger competitors from kills, but they must be careful at this.  Wolf packs are known to kill wolverines, which like their relatives the marten and the fisher, can escape up trees if they know their foes are coming, as we’ve already hinted.  Bears have killed wolverines, too.  While the wolverine is an extremely powerful, formidable and mostly a determined beast, his reputation for ferocity relies heavily on exaggeration.  He avoids man to the extent that you are very lucky to glimpse a track, let alone the animal itself.  In pioneering the use of remote cameras to identify individual wolverines by their chest and throat markings, I was often in close proximity to individual wolverines (as revealed by matching the time signatures on the resulting photos with field-notes,) yet never once did I lay eyes on one in the ten-year course of the study.

Nonetheless, we are still the wolverine’s #1 foe.  He has an extremely beautiful fur that is worth quite a lot of money at times relative to other furs, but he should not be trapped.  Animals suited for fur-harvest are those that can withstand such annual additive mortality, like beavers and muskrats.  Wolverines do not fit this bill.  Females only give birth every other yearif their body condition is good enough.  While the quota per trapline in Alberta, for instance, is only one wolverine and only certain types of traps may be used, wolverines roam over areas up to and beyond 1,000 square kilometres, making management of this animal on a per-trapline basis ineffective.  Additionally, traps set for other animals catch wolverine.  In fact, of the trappers I talked to over the years about the wolverines they had caught, it became apparent that not one of the wolverines involved in the specific interviews I conducted was actually trapped legally.  They were all trapped in traps illegal for wolverine, and often after the quota was already filled.  Trapping is an important skill to know in some settings and situations, but it is often a haphazard one.  Still, trapping is not the only liability humans pose to wolverines.  Our logging practices break up the conifer cover in powder snow country, making it hard to for them to stay on an energy budget, and the popularity of disruptive recreational vehicles like snowmobiles and quads don’t just alienate other people who prefer to be quiet and more skillful in the woods, they may drive wolverines from their breeding areas.  Additionally, in places like Alberta, for instance, agencies still poison wolves, a practice that is even more indiscriminate than trapping.  And then there is climate change.  An animal who needs a lingering snow pack to reproduce may have trouble ahead. 

But for now, they’re still out there.  They are even more fabulous in real life than they are in myth.  Roaming their massive home ranges through remote country that still allows for freedom of movement, the wolverine is the consummate Woodsrunner, the ultimate symbol of wilderness, of the determination to persevere under the harshest of odds.   Determined, resourceful, freedom-loving, avoiding trouble at all costs yet hell-on-wheels when it comes, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better animal role model in these respects than the wolverine.  Just knowing you are sharing territory with one delivers a tonic to life in the woods like no other.  It matters little if you never see one.   

Sasquatch-smasquatch.


- Jon