Wolverine

Wolverines are the biggest terrestrial members of the large and varied mustelid, or weasel, family. They measure about three feet long (four counting the tail) and weigh between 25 to 40 pounds.  “The diminutive wolverine,” said a recent National Parks Conservation Association report, “possesses a legendary reputation for toughness, resilience, and, some would say, cantankerousness,” while the true nature of this beast appears to be its need for room to roam.  Recent research in Glacier National Park and within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem substantiates earlier reports of the wolverine tendency to travel.

Doug Chadwick, the author of a forthcoming book on the animal, writes, “Wolverines monitored by the Glacier project traveled day and night at a relentless pace, keeping it up even as they scaled almost sheer cliffs and cols, waltzed across avalanche chutes and padded along overhanging cornices.”

M3, a wolverine tracked and mapped by Jeff Copeland of the Wolverine Foundation’s Glacier National Park Wolverine Research Study, summited Mt. Cleveland (Glacier’s highest peak at 10,466 feet), the last 4,900 feet straight up in 90 minutes. In February. After climbing Cleveland he went way up into Waterton Lakes. First, he crossed into British Columbia, then into Alberta. His territory turned out to be several hundred square miles.

During the 19th century, wolverines were found across the northern states from Washington to Montana and reported from the Great Lakes to Maine. Its range continued south along the Pacific Coast range and Sierras well into California and all the way down the Rockies into Colorado. Today, the wolverines of the Lower 48 are confined to remote parts of Montana, Idaho, and northern Wyoming, as well as Washington’s North Cascades. They may total no more than 400 and possibly as few as 218.

In the lower 48 states, wolverine habitat is naturally fragmented.  As a subalpine weasel, the wolverine inhabits a narrow band of habitat a little above and a little below timberline.  Never occurring at large numbers, wolverines rely on movement to connect populations that occur across isolated mountain ranges of the western U.S.  Increasing development and encroaching winter recreation continue to this fragmentation further threatening the long-term persistence of the wolverine.  As such, wolverines are currently being considered for listing as threatened or endangered south of Canada.

Wolverine Solutions
To help survival of the wolverine, we need to protect isolated populations that are generally small in number, and make sure  linkage corridors remain between Glacier’s wolverines in the north, and the Yellowstone populations to the south, as well as across throughout the northern Rocky Mountain Ecosystem.

The Cabinet-Purcell Mountain Corridor (CPMC) includes portions of western Montana (Bitterroot Mountains), northern Idaho (Cabinet and South Selkirk Mountains) and southern British Columbia (Selkirk and Purcell Mountains). It encompasses almost 28 million acres, and is a crucial link for maintaining the long-term biodiversity of the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) region. Covering approximately 18% of the Y2Y region, the Cabinet-Purcell Mountain Corridor is one of the keys to the Y2Y landscape’s ecological future.

In 2007, 88 acres of key valley bottom habitat in the Cabinet-Purcell Mountain Corridor were acquired by the Nature Trust of BC, with financial support from Y2Y, The Nature Conservancy-Montana, and The Vital Ground Foundation.

Vital Ground (the author, Doug Chadwick, serves on their board) has safeguarded several properties in the Swan Valley of Montana, which lies south of Glacier Park and adjoins the western edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex. This valley serves as part of the north-south corridor for Rocky Mountain wildlife. Most of these properties (most are still owned by private individuals; VG purchased conservation easements on their land) also lie within a designated grizzly bear corridor/linkage zone between the Swan Mountains/Bob Marshall complex and the Mission Mountains, which rise from the western side of the Swan Valley.

There are hopes that the Waterton Lakes Park may be expanded to the west, which would greatly expand the corridor area.

Inspiring Person: Wolverine
Rick Yates conducted the day-to-day field work for the Glacier Wolverine Project from mid-2002 to December 2007 as a biological technician for  the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Montana.

“Scotch-Irish by background, Yates hails from the hills of rural Virginia  and wears his dark hair long and his beard bushy,” writes Chadwick. “His family ran a farm and butchery, and one of his jobs was picking up carcasses and offal from neighbors for rendering. Good training for a future investigator of wolverines, the ultimate scavengers, who crunch up even the bones.”

Yates started working in Glacier on a trail crew; he has climbed many of its peaks. Before he did actual wolverine research, Yates conducted winter snow-tracking surveys searching for wolverines and other carnivores in Glacier. Yates was motivated to work on wolverines by the paucity of information on them, the mystery and lore that drove the knowledge base and by the types of habitat that they occupy. The High Country of the Rocky Mountains has always intrigued him, and the wolverine rules the High Country in winter and summer.  “Studying an animal that has so little known about it is as good as it gets for a wildlife biologist,” says Yates.  Currently he works in Glacier National Park as a backcountry carpenter, so that he can continue to work in and around the alpine areas that wolverines traverse. “I’m even more motivated and in awe of the lives these magnificent critters lead.  We learned much in our five years in Glacier, but there is no substitute for long-term research studies of such a little-known animal.”

For more information on wolverines and corridors:

Wolverine Foundation
http://www.wolverinefoundation.org

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, Cabinet-Purcell Mountain Corridor:
http://www.y2y.net/Default.aspx?cid=131&lang=1

The Nature Trust of British Columbia:
http://www.naturetrust.bc.ca/campaign/

Vital Ground:
http://www.vitalground.org/main.php

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Whooping Crane

The tallest bird in North America – five feet tall and white as snow, with black wingtips and a splash of red on the crown –whooping cranes once nested from Canada’s parkland to the prairies of the upper Midwest, and perhaps as far east as the Carolinas. In winter, the crane’s  trumpeting call could be heard from the Chesapeake south to the Gulf Coast and Florida. But reckless gunning reduced the cranes to a few dozen by the twentieth century, and even with the dawn of wiser policies toward endangered species, the whooper teetered on the brink.

“The whooping crane is doomed to extinction,” noted ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush predicted flatly in the early 1900s – and there was little to suggest otherwise.

Now, there are nearly 540 in several wild and captive flocks –  but  they still aren’t out of the woods.

A major cause of mortality in whooping cranes is collision with power lines on their 1,200-mile migration between Canada and Texas.  Newly planned wind farms could be a real hazard for the birds. Cranes, as far as researchers know, aren’t killed by turbines, but those wind farms will require thousands of miles of new power lines right in the middle of their migration route.

Another obstacle, true for all migrating birds, is eroding wetlands and development in areas where the birds stop to feed on their migration routes and where they winter. The original wild flock of cranes nests in remote Wood Buffalo National Park in the Northwest Territories and Alberta, then migrates 1,200 miles south to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge on the coast of Texas.  But marshes near it are being eaten up for housing developments, and the river water that keeps the salinity of the estuaries perfect for blue crabs – the whoopers’ main food – is being diverted to urban centers like San Antonio.

Whooping Crane Solutions

The original wild flock reached a record 266 cranes in 2007. A nonmigratory flock of about 30 cranes, established in 1993, lives in central Florida, and the International Crane Foundation, working with partners including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Operation Migration, has also created a flock of more than 90 whoopers that migrate between Wisconsin and Florida, with ultralight planes leading a fresh batch of chicks south every autumn.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued a position paper on mitigating crane collisions with wind energy turbines and power lines in their migration corridor(s). The U.S.F.W.S. recommends a number of innovative ways to mitigate or avoid loss of cranes to power lines. http://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/oklahoma/Documents/Wind Power/Documents/Whooping Crane and Wind Development FWS issue paper – final  April 2009.pdf

Because cranes have a long migration, much of what counts towards success in protecting their corridor(s) is conservation and management of the places where they must land. (Whooping cranes land every night during their migration.)  Two recent projects are particularly innovative:

FACT – Farming And Conservation Together; private landowners and conservation professionals are making good on a promise to enhance and restore natural landscapes as well as keep farmers and other residents on their land. (For more information contact Eric Schlender at pheasant1@lycos.com)

Potato Collaboration – The International Crane Foundation is a part of a collaboration (WWF/WPVGA/UW Collaboration)between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Wisconsin Potato and Vegetable Growers Association (WPVGA), and the University of Wisconsin – Madison (UW). The collaboration’s goal is to work towards more ecologically sound potato and vegetable agricultural systems while also improving ecosystem restoration wetlands, grasslands, and savannas (including crane habitat), soil health, water quality, and many other resources that come from private lands.

Inspiring Person: Whooping Cranes

George Archibald was a Ph.D. student at Cornell in the 1970s when he began to work with cranes.

“I knew that if you did the right thing with the birds in captivity, you could produce a ton of cranes,” Archibald told writer, Scott Weidensaul, who has written extensively about birds and furnished the information for this profile. (http://www.scottweidensaul.com) So in 1973, Archibald and a fellow Cornell student named Ron Sauey founded the International Crane Foundation on the horse farm owned by Sauey’s parents just north of Baraboo, Wisconsin. Horse stalls were converted to crane pens, enclosures built, and an incubator installed

For Archibald, doing “the right thing” meant, among other things, leaping and dancing like a male crane to bring a human-imprinted female whooper named Tex into breeding condition, then using artificial insemination to allow her to raise a chick – called Gee Whiz.

Today, Archibald is universally recognized as the world’s foremost authority on cranes.

For more on whooping cranes go to http://www.savingcranes.org/abouticf.html

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Pronghorn – with their protuberant eyes, black, white and fawn coats, and narrow-boned legs  – hold several records: fastest land animal in North America, with speeds up to 55 mph, one of the only hoofed animals to have evolved in North America, and the longest annual mammal migration within the contiguous 48 states and one of the longest animal migrations to be found between Argentina and Canada.

The Path of the Pronghorn starts in Grand Teton National Park and ends up to 170 miles southeast in Wyoming’s Red Desert.

This incredible journey takes place across the backdrop of western Wyoming, with its beautiful landscape and all of its conservation challenges.

The Path of the Pronghorn is sometimes no more than 150 yards wide. In just five years, traffic in areas where pronghorn winter has increased tenfold. Conservationists have seen up to six animals splattered on the road, all killed by a single vehicle. The habitat is being degraded and fragmented, and animals are starting to avoid areas they formerly relied on to make it through the winter.

Energy exploration and resource extraction are seeing a boom across Wyoming. In the Upper Green River Valley, one of the pronghorn’s native habitats about 90 miles from Jackson Hole, more than 80 percent of the landscape is leased for oil and gas development. In the next decade, we may see up to 10,000 new wells.

An even greater threat is the proliferation of houses and ranchettes pushing the pronghorn out of open valleys – where they feel most comfortable – and into closed forests – where they feel most vulnerable to predators. ?Another big challenge is the increased number of fences that have popped up in the area over the past 5-10 years. Pronghorn rarely jump fences and passages can quickly become impenetrable by the addition of a single fence.? Pronghorn Hotspot

Trappers Point, Wyoming, a spot where the Green River and the New Fork River swoop within 1 mile of each other, was a bottleneck on the pronghorn migration route before humans were present– pronghorn like to see far and run fast, and will not venture into river bottoms and willows–but now we’ve made it worse. A housing development and roadways have reduced Trappers Point down to ½ mile wide. Between 2,500–3,500 mule deer and 1,500–2,000 pronghorn move through the bottleneck during the spring and autumn migrations. HWY 191 cuts right through the middle of this narrow path so pronghorn are first forced into a narrow chute and then made to cross a major highway.

Pronghorn Solutions

In 2008, a local land trust won a million-dollar grant to help ranchers replace the bottom strand of fencing with barbless wire and raise it high enough so pronghorn can slip under.? In the gas fields, the solutions aren’t as easy as switching out fencing, but there are new ways to at least mitigate the impact: directional drilling allows wells to be clustered 25 or more on a single pad, and piping instead of trucking out the fluids produced in the wells saves tens of thousands of truck trips a year. ?In addition, in 2008, the U.S. Forest Service amended the Bridger-Teton National Forest Land and Resource Management Plan to protect 45 miles of the Path of the Pronghorn corridor that are on Forest Service lands.  The amendment represents the first federal administrative wildlife migration corridor designation in the United States. ?Also, in 2008, the Pinedale District of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved a plan that designates 9,540 acres around the Trappers Point Bottleneck, an Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC). This is a special designation that seeks to preserve the pronghorn migration route on a portion of the BLM’s lands and is the agency’s first ACEC dedicated to wildlife migration.

With a little bit of ingenuity we can give animals freedom to roam.

Inspiring Person: Pronghorn

Joe Riis, a 24-year-old photographer from South Dakota, photographer, is a “Young Explorer” at National Geographic Adventure, and a biologist-in-residence at the Murie Center in Moose, Wyoming.? The Path of the Pronghorn is the focus of Joe’s life.  He lives in the back of his beater pickup, which he drives from one pronghorn area to another, and under the foam mattress he has a life-size cutout of an antelope that he uses as cover to get close-ups. Potentially, the more effective tools in his pickup are his infrared-triggered camera traps. Joe is the first photographer to make close-up photographs of the pronghorn during migration.? Joe wants to photograph the migration, but he also wants to document the threats facing the migration corridor. On BLM land leased to ranchers, he has found one impediment to the migrating pronghorn: fences. Pronghorn’s legs are too spindly to jump over them, so they have to crawl under. But that provides a solution: pronghorn-friendly fences with a no-barb bottom wire at least 16 inches off the ground. ?Joe has also photographed housing developments that encroach into the migration corridor, as well as the gas fields at the southern end of the corridor, during two aerial surveys. Here the solutions aren’t as easy as switching out fencing, but there are new ways to at least mitigate the impact: directional drilling, which allows wells to be clustered 25 or more on a single pad, and piping instead of trucking out the fluids produced in the wells, which saves tens of thousands of truck trips a year.? Consider that Joe has spent one-twelfth of his life committed to this project.

To learn more about pronghorn,? visit http://www.pronghornpassage.com

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