Whither the Wolverine
wildness incarnate
Of all the rare and wonderful creatures that our planet is blessed with, few maintain a reputation as fantastical and formidable as that of the Wolverine.
I don’t recall when I learned of the existence of Wolverines, but my first memory of them is from watching one in Planet Earth.1 Given that the whole appeal of nature documentaries is that they show crazy parts of the world you'd never expect to see for yourself, I never considered the possibility. They are a creature of legend, so elusive that I imagined many lived their entire lives in the boreal forest without ever seeing a sign of humans.
This all slowly changed when I started doing winter wildlife surveys in far northern Ontario with my current job. I was suddenly spending weeks in the winter flying low over the boreal forest, and many (though not all) of my coworkers had seen one themselves. Their size and colouration means that it’s essentially impossible to see Wolverines from the air in the summer (and there’s never really any chance of seeing one from the ground). But in the winter, constrasted against the snow, there was a definite chance that if I stayed long enough, I could see a Wolverine.
I saw their tracks. I helped set up bait stations for them, and reviewed the resulting camera trap images, showing them in all manner of ridiculous poses trying to reach the bait. Finally, 3 years later, last week I saw one.
We were looking for Caribou tracks along a winding stream when our pilot called it out, wading through the snow and shrubs on the floodplain. It’s always crazy seeing animals moving through deep snow, because they’re generally much better adapted and can move much more quickly through it than we can.
They're not very big, maybe largish dog sized, but stouter and with the face of a bear.2 We circled it a couple times while it lumbered through thickets of alder (been there) before going on our way.
Wolverines are members of the weasel family, Mustelidae, which also includes martens, fishers, ferrets, and otters. All members of this family are disproportionately powerful for their size, predatory, tenacious, and stinky. I’ve only handled Short-tailed Weasels before, smaller than a squirrel, and their aggressiveness was scary. Wolverines are one of the largest in the family, with only Sea Otter and the Giant River Otter of the Amazon (which apparently occasionally preys on caimans and anacondas) being larger. It makes sense that Wolverines have a reputation for ferocity.
Weasels generally exist in low densities and are fairly secretive, so they aren't seen often by most people. At the extreme end, the Colombian Weasel has only ever been photographed once, in 2011 (one got stuck in an outhouse). The species I've seen the most is American Mink, as there are large water bodies near home and mink have been very successful in the absence of river otters. But I see other species only very rarely, and I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to see one of the largest and hardest to find.
Wolverines as a concept, like other large carnivores, fulfill a deep desire we seem to have for unreached wildness, for monsters on the edge of the map. Unfortunately, seeing one looking up behind itself as it scampers away from a helicopter doesn't fit that image very well. It mostly looks kind of cute.
In contrast to my childhood imagination, northern Canada is far from unreached. Winter roads and transect lines crisscross the forests, while aircraft crisscross the sky above very day, connecting remote communities with the rest of the world. Between those and biologists surveying them, every Wolverine has almost certainly seen traces of humans. Roads and other infrastructure push further and further north, and likely, so goes the southern edge of their range. Mythical beasts and civilization don't tend to get along very well.
Check out this incredible footage from a more recent BBC documentary.
The constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, which the Big and Little Dippers are part of, are named after bears yet have tails. Misidentified Wolverines? 🤔