The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 421: Wolverines

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Steve Rinella talks with Rebecca Watters, Janis Putelis, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics include: The Oedipus complex; sexy critters; Steve getting serious about climate change because of poison ivy; the special tiki bar in Nashville; the Phelps Harrison Owl Hooter; how claims of private property value diminution are irrelevant when it comes to whether corner crossing is legal or not; a real breakdown of the refried bean dilemma; the bigger the better, when it comes to scorpions; The Founder Effect; how snow leopards are attracted to Chanel No. 5 and Obsession by Calvin Klein; being fluent in Mongolia; the bioclimatic envelope of the wolverine; seeing a wolverine in the wild; shirtless Putin with an Amur tiger; deriving special energy from wolves; the very long trip of M56; long-term parental care; International Wolverine Day as a better reason to celebrate February 14th; digitigrade vs. plantigrade; eating marmot; how to donate to wolverine research and get in touch with Rebecca if you spot a wolverine; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater Merch See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Alright everybody, we're going to dig deep on Wolverines today. We've got a lot of stuff to cover, but we're going to get way into Wolverines with Rebecca Waters. Is that right? Yes. Director of the Wolverine Foundation. I'm going to start things off by fact-checking Yanni.

Do you believe, Rebecca, Do you believe, Rebecca, do you believe that Yanni believes that a Wolverine will hang out with his dad and then one day, how's it going? One day he kicks his dad's ass. No, they get in a big brawl. They get in a big fight. And they're basically like mortal enemies for the rest of their lives.

They get in a giant fight. Duke it out. He was saying how it's a lot like people. Like you're raised by your dad. You eventually get in a giant fight. Duke it out. And then you separate ways. Never to talk again.

Do I believe that he believes that? No, no, no, no, no. Oh to talk again do i believe that that he believes that no no no no do you know do you think that's true about wolverines do i believe that it's true um i think so that they will actually separate at a certain point yeah from their dad from their from their parents yes it's not you know if it's precipitated by a large fight? Oh, I don't think it's... Yeah, like a father-son thing. Oh, you know, I don't know that we have recorded instances of father-son fights like that. So I'm not sure.

You know, I don't know whether believing it or not believing it makes it true. It's just I can tell you that we've never actually observed that happening but we have observed young male wolverines coming into the territory of an older male wolverine and getting into a big fight with them and kicking them out so maybe kicking the old man out kicking the old man out but maybe not your dad you know like maybe just some random old man who you don't like wow that's like uh everybody knows the part about Oedipus about what happens with his mom but they don't know what happens with his dad do you know can't remember okay Oedipus doesn't Oedipus the Oedipal complex Oedipus doesn't, Oedipus, the Oedipal complex, Oedipus doesn't know that he's, he doesn't, he doesn't know that he, like he's not raised by his parents, but he thinks he's raised by his parents. He doesn't know he's adopted.

And he goes to like a witch doctor and the witch doctor says, I'll tell you your future. What are you, what are you smirking about? He goes to a witch doctor. What do you think he went to? No, I love, no. He went to a seer. Yes. A seer. Continue? No, I love, no. He went to a seer. Yes. No, continue.

I love the modernized. S-E-E-R. He goes to a seer. Same, same. Witch doctor, seer. The seer says, here's your fortune. Here's your, what's the word I'm looking for? Your future.

Here's your future. You're going to kill your dad and marry your mom. So he says, bet not. I i'm just gonna run away far away but he doesn't know he's adopted where does he wind up in another town what's he do kills his dad marries his mom i don't know why that Wolverine story made me think of that. So we're going to get into all, we're going to get into, um, way into Wolverines. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

We'll sit and, Corinne and I will sit and talk about what would be the best animal to have someone that knows a lot about said animal coming, right? And we'll, we'll, we'll reject animals. What did we reject recently?

Wasn't sexy enough for us. Well, we hit mountain lions a bunch. Almost too sexy. I was like, do you want panther or jaguar? And you were like, eh, we've hit those two. Jaguar I thought was a little less so terrid. Oh, what was the one that you said no to? Well, I was into.

You were like, that's just not sexy enough. Yeah, you wanted to do one like on marmots or something like that. I was like, it's not going to work. No, I don't think it was marmots. You should just go through the whole weasel family. Pine Martin? No, I would do that. Yeah, maybe, no.

I think it was Martin. No, no, no, no, no, no. I would have done that. No, I think you were like, I'm trapping, no. Fishers? I'm trapping them, so no. We're thinking about beavers. A beaver biologist.

No, she's a historian. She's not a biologist. While I was in Nashville at the turkey convention, I heard that there are some people pointing their fingers directly at the fisher cat in Maine as to why the turkey populations are declining there. I'll buy it. There's a lot.

Oh, they're not even from? Mike Chamberlain said no. Turkeys aren't native. Oh, he doesn't think so. Man, I'll report right now. I was telling you guys, I'm covered in poison ivy, which I was telling Brody I'm going to get real serious about climate change

now because to get poison ivy in Michigan in February is unheard of. Yeah, I wish we could throw up a visual for people. It's bad. And here's the thing. Let me tell you what happened. Is it all over you? Yeah. Well, zones.

So it's clearing up on my face. That's getting better. Here, hold on a minute. A little sneak peek. Ooh, that looks like the shit I had my hands the other week. Yeah,

but it's not. So here's the deal. We were hunting squirrels and Zuck, guy Zuck, he, for some reason, he was like admiring the heft of a big fox squirrel, okay?

Which it annoys the hell out of me. He calls them red squirrels, which confuses everybody because that's another word for a pine squirrel. So no one knows what anybody's talking about. Yeah, but down south they do that. Because they don't have pine squirrels. I know. They're like, you guys call them something else, but down south they do that. Because they don't have pine squirrels. I know. They're like, you guys call them something else,

but down here, these big old red squirrels. I'm like, yeah, but they're not. They're fox squirrels anyways. So he lays one. He had one laid like on his arm, you know? And he gets, I have, I'm like a 24-hour delay on poison ivy, but he gets it fast. And he's like, man, that's poison ivy on my arm. I'm like, that can't be poison ivy.

He's like, man, I've had poison ivy enough times. No, because they got it on them. And he. Transferred from the squirrel. Yeah, because here's what he was telling me. He's seen it. He sees this happen. You know, the vines.

So they're nesting. They're getting ready to nest right now. No, he, he says they gather that. Oh. They gather that and line their nests with it this time of year. So those suckers must be immune. Oh yeah, I'm sure they're immune. So cleaning squirrels, man.

Did you see it coming? Nothing like this has ever happened. It finally, today was the first day I haven't developed new spots. Yeah. My wife thinks I'm like a lapper. I'm like, dude, it doesn't work like that, you know? My question is, like, did you shove one inside your shirt? No, because you get the oil on you and you just, whatever you do, you go to scratch.

Like here, my forehead was the first thing that got bad just because rubbing it on there. And that urushiol can be basically like vaporized, I think is the- It can be aerosolized. I've gotten it in my lungs from burning it. Yeah, but if you get it- Got real sick. If you get it like on your wrists and ankles and then you sweat, just that heat can actually carry that oil like up through your pant legs.

Because how else do you literally get it on the inside of your thighs? That's where I got it. Anywhere on your body where you got real shitty skin, like thin, pasty, shitty skin, like between your fingers. That's just my whole body. Yeah. Yeah, I feel he'd be like, right?

Like underneath your feet. No, never there. No? In between your fingers. No, that's tough skin. Inside your arms. No, the arch, not the pads. No, that's not the feet. No, never there. No? In between your fingers. No, that's tough skin. Inside your arms. No, the arch. The arch, not the pads.

No, that's not the kind of shitty thin skin. Yeah, I had a run with poison oak one time, and it was all inner thighs. Yep. And, like, my stomach. Yep. It was rough. Just thin, shitty areas on your hide. And that's not the first time you've gotten it via another animal.

No, I got it. The worst I've ever gotten was from a wild pig. That landed me in the hospital. What? And I wound up in a Jewish hospital and the last thing the doctor said to me

when she was walking out the door, I'm not kidding you. I'm not joking. She's walking out the door and she turns and says, stay away from pigs. Yeah.

And when I told her the story, she's kind of like, what the fuck do you think is going to happen but now you're a climate change activist now this is what you know like NIMBY like not in my backyard this is my wake up call man

so Yanni real quick hit that owl hoot Yanni was just at an owl hoot explain this now. I was at the National Owl Turkey Federation's annual convention down in Nashville, Tennessee. And unfortunately, the only calling competition that I got to go and watch was the owl hoot and the gobble because it was later in the evening. We were recording turkey stories from 9 to 4 every day.

How many did you do? We got 41. Are you serious? Holy cow. Was Phil, did he go to the tiki bar down there? Oh, yeah. We all went. I sent you a picture of us at the tiki bar.

No, I didn't get that. Which is very, it's not the normal tiki bar. This place is like robot themed. And instead of having Jimmy Buffett playing, it's got Fergie playing and the next table down to it has had some 20-year-old gals standing up rapping Fergie at full

capacity. I was quite entertained. We had tiki drinks. Me and Phil went to that. We ran into a lady with a pet possum or something like that. It must have been a different place. She had a wither? No, no. I don't know how we got on the subject with her but she had had a pet possum anywho um we got 41 it was cool that's how i was telling you a story from mike chamberlain it was uh pretty Yeah, I want you to touch on that, and I want you to touch on that turkey call on your hand. So, yeah, the air and friction contests

were going on during the day, so I didn't get to go and check those out. But one evening, we went and checked out owl hooting and then gobbling. I was surprised to find out, out of the 36 competitors for owl hooting, only one uses natural voice. Everybody else is running a hooter.

I can't believe that you're allowed to use. I can't believe that you'd be allowed to use a hooter. That's Yanni's train of thought too. They were, and I was surprised that they didn't have both, but they said it literally just comes down to participation. They said we could open up a voice calling owl hooting section. There'd be two people. Yeah, and just nobody would be in there.

And it's only recent. In the last 10 years, 10 to 15, I think these were developed, and they just sound so much more realistic that the voice guys can't compete with the hooter. But, yeah, I felt the same way, even with the gobbling. I thought that, you know, because when we were recording stories, we had some great storytellers that could gobble, you know, within their story. And it just brings so much.

Are they as good as your daughter, Mabel? To the story. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Maybe a little better. Hers is still a little high-pitched, you know. But anyways, yeah, I was surprised to not hear voice callers. So there's a, Phelps Game Calls now has a thing called

out the Harrison Hooter. And I didn't even know when I'm watching James Harrison on stage that I didn't put two and two together that the Hooters that were at my house

that I was trying to blow on and it didn't even sound like a train whistle. My wife's like, please put those away. Stop. You're not making owl sounds. I'm watching him and then later i run into

him at the show i'm like oh phelps t-shirt oh okay and i put two and two together and then he ran through and gave me the 101 who who had the bear grease hat on that was another competitor i didn't run into him but he was using a mouth call uh yes like like a hooter like this. And he very likely was using this one because out of 36 competitors, 10 or 12 were actually running the Harrison hooter. The wood, not the acrylic. You know, some of them tape it all up in black electrical tape so that the other competitors can't see what call they're using. I like it.

He said that even some of them will add like another four or five inches it doesn't do any not ain't for any other reason just to throw people off as to what call they're using one of them east coast goose tutors but yeah i'll be probably by the time this airs i'll have posted a video james harrison giving me the one-on-one on how to use it and um yeah there's a couple great tips the The best tip though, you said, when you hold it, you make like an okay symbol with the one hand

that you're going to hold the call with. And then your other hand comes around and you want to cup the bottom of the call as if holding a baby chicken, a chick. I'm with you. Right? So it's head sticking out of your hands. You're controlling it,

but you're not squishing it, right? So a little bit of air can get out. After that, you make the same notes, who cooks for you, who cooks for you all. Rip it. I got a lot to tell you about this because I've got an order coming. You might already have it, the pileated woodpecker call that can also sound like the screech or the scream of a barred owl. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

That gets them gobbling. You think so? Yeah. I mean, it's the stuff that you like. It's super loud. It's super high-pitched. I don't think they're gobbling because they think it sounded exactly like an owl. No, no, no.

But it's a sound that just carries. That's what Chamberlain ought to study. His point, when I brought up your point that you always make, which is what you just said, his point is like, yes, but if you sound like a real owl, you might get other owls going on other ridges

that are then reaching turkeys that your sound, whatever you decided to use, is not reaching. And thus, you're sort of being able to broadcast farther and possibly hear other turkeys. Pretty soon the whole county's gobbling. And then everybody else is going to get all the turkeys. Waking up the woods.

All right, here it goes. So there's your little chick, Harrison Hooter. This is a Phelps Harrison Hooter. Yeah. Ooh, I like that little roll in the end. But now do it with no call. I have a hard time rolling for whatever reason. Hit it with the call again.

It does sound better at the call. Oh, that roll. Do a far off elk bugle for everybody. This is the elk way off. I want to do this often. I want it to be one so far you're not even going to go over there. That's too close. I'd go after that.

Bill, just turned the volume down um okay go ahead that well i could keep blowing on that thing but oh real quick the uh uh champ mike dr chamberlain dr chamberlain told you about the unkillable turkey can you hit that real quick for us i will and i'll go to say too that it was cool out of 41 stories. It was great to start recognizing the different themes that flow through these stories. And not just because it's a theme of stories that people like to tell, but what people think is important or, or important to them to come and tell you about. It's a lot of first timers, a lot of first time Turkey stories, a lot of mentorship stories, a lot of family type stories.

You know, I was out with my kids or my kid, whatever. I took my dad for his first. Um, and the one that got away or the unkillable turkey. Sure. Or one fella called his, this bird, the boss, which we've heard before. But anyways, yeah, Mike had a story and I'll, uh, I'll summarize it quickly, but basically this turkey that he thinks cannot be killed because he's developed a tactic where as he comes close or as he realizes that he's being fooled with,

he'll actually fly up into trees out of shotgun range and then hop from tree to tree or sit on one limb walking back and forth and looking for the hen that is supposed to be there. And then once he clears it out and there's no hen, just pitches and flies off the other direction. I don't know, man. You ever shot a turkey out of a tree? Yes. Fall in Nebraska. I don't even know if it was legal, but I did.

Blood lust. I haven't. Missed one. So I tried. but i did yeah blood lust i haven't missed one so i tried um there's a couple other things i can talk about no let me talk about that oh here's the interesting deal we have covered non-stop since since the beginning the why the famous now wy Wyoming corner crossing case. And as we pointed out a whole bunch, I don't want to recap. I don't want to recap

the whole thing. Don't recap. Everybody knows what's going on, right? Okay. Here's the deal. How many millions did the landowner say his property value went down because these guys corner crossed on it? Three or seven million? Yeah, I think it was six or seven. He's saying because

you corner crossed on my land you cost me let's look it up someone look it up six or seven million bucks um because he felt that he he felt that he had the exclusive access and now he doesn't and then everybody was like well i don't understand how could that like why would someone corner crossing um cost you millions of dollars right and damages it just didn't make any sense well there's an interesting development in this case now judge skavdahl s-k-a-v-d-A-H-L. Scavdahl? I don't know. Close enough. Can I interject for a second?

Yeah. I'm seeing ranges from $3.1 million to $7.75 million. Another, it seems like a real estate agent was saying on behalf of Elk Mountain Ranch that it would be devalued about $9.39 million. So a lot. I think, oh, and our article on TheMeteor.com says the ranch owner was claiming as much as $7.75 million. Yeah.

If you're unfamiliar with this whole- Are you going to do a synopsis? Go read that article. Oh, there you go. That's my synopsis. Well, here's the deal. You know who this guy really should the landowner who his complaint is he should be contacting the real estate broker like it's not the he should be

calling the the listing agent saying because we saw the listing when he bought it saying your real estate listing um says that it's exclusive access to all this public land. So, or his attorney who's supposed to vet and do diligence. That's who cost him money. That's who led him down the path of thinking that all this public land was his and his alone. That's true. Like he's suing the wrong person. Either way, the judge, the Wyoming judge, ruled, okay, Judge Scavdahl, sorry, judge, if I'm dicking your name up.

Judge Scavdahl ruled that evidence of diminution of value of private property if corner crossing is legal is irrelevant. Meaning the court will focus solely on the issue of whether corner crossing is legal. Not whether legalized corner crossing will affect the value of private property. I mean, that makes total sense. It's two different things. I know. He's getting way ahead of himself to be like, and I want $7 million. Yeah.

That's a good thing so far. Because the criminal case just said we didn't break a law. So you're saying I owe you money and I didn't even break a law? Usually when I sum this up, I usually use the story about the Jews when he got acquitted for killing his wife and that waiter,

but then in civil trial got found guilty, but I'm not going to do it. Cause we're not going to sum it up. Um, we had a law. So this, this letter begins, we get a letter from a listener.

Hola amigos. We're having a conversation about why refried, like what makes refried beans refried beans. But it wasn't also, it was like stemming off the fact that we had people write in about like when you put the prefix re- in front of another word.

And that all started from when Jesse said that he was like dry curing something and people were like, no, you're just putting rub on it. Like pre-season and season. He doesn't like all those food terms. And then we got to talk about with refried beans. My understanding is they're not refried. They're fried. They're fried.

This guy has a lot to say about it. My name is Adrian Martin and I'm a second generation Mexican-American. Both my parents were born in Mexico and immigrated over to what is now the People's Republic of Washington. Hold on, that'd be like him first generation. Hold on a minute. Both his parents were born in Mexico.

Immigrated to Washington. Yeah, so he would be first generation. Sorry, buddy. That makes his material, that makes his information more relevant in my view. Yes, it does. Not what less relevant. He says, I'm an avid bean eater myself.

I believe that with my background, I can provide some insight to the recent refried bean dilemma. Here's my take on it. Refried beans come about from first boiling beans until soft. He prefers pinto beans, he says as a parenthetical aside. Back to the quote. You take those beans and fry them for the first time in some kind of oil

and smashing them until you get desired consistency. Another parenthetical aside, I prefer using olive oil that has had a jalapeno cooking in it for five to ten minutes prior to adding to the beans.

Huh, he doesn't use lard. But then he breaks from his parenthetical aside to say leave the jalapeno cooking in it for five to ten minutes prior to adding to the beans. Huh, he doesn't use lard. But then he breaks from his parenthetical aside to say, leave the jalapeno in there with the beans, which I feel it should be part of the parenthetical aside. Going on. You can eat these, quote, fried beans at this point, and most of the Mexicans I know refer to the beans at this point as refried beans. However, you could also let those beans sit in the fridge overnight and proceed to fry the fried beans with a little bit of oil and eat them that way as well.

Technically speaking, only then would they become refried beans. You could repeat the refrying process a couple more times, but usually I eat them all by the second fry. You could create an evolutionary chart of beans becoming refried beans. The stages would go something like hard beans to boiled beans to fried beans to refried beans to refried, refried beans. Truth be told, I've had beans refried up to three times before and they were pretty good. But I prefer a true refried bean. Adios. That clears that up.

Do we need a new t-shirt on the evolution of the bean? Oh yeah, for sure. It'd be good. Do we need a new t-shirt on the evolution of the beard? Oh yeah, for sure. That'd be good. Okay, a little clarification on scorpions. Someone says, I was listening to episode 413 and a question came up about whether or not smaller scorpions are really more dangerous. Steve didn't seem to believe it, but in general it's true. Here's where I screwed up.

There's a couple of things I screwed up. This and another thing. What I meant was this. I was mixing up two things. What is it when they're talking about across different species? Intra? No, intra I think is... Intra is within a species.

Okay. When I said that about bigger, littler, I was talking about this idea that let's say you take the same rattlesnake. Okay. You take a prairie rattler or a green Mojave or whatever, any kind of rattlesnake. And there's a myth, there's a legend that within the species. Okay. that within the species, okay, so a prairie rattler, that a smaller prairie rattler is more venomous than a big prairie rattler, and they say because it somehow can't control the venom output.

And herpetologists have repeatedly written in to say that's not true. Toxicity would have to do with when did it last strike something. Right, okay. Okay. So when this came up, like a big scorpion versus a little scorpion, I pointed that out and I was erroneously meaning like within a species. So say you're taking the northern scorpion. I was saying, I don't know that I believe that a small northern scorpion

is more venomous than a fully mature, larger specimen of a Northern Scorpion. But this person wrote in to say, well, in general, first off, there are 1,200 Scorpion species. In general, you got some big honkers. The Emperor Scorpion. Okay. Relatively, that's a giant scorpion relatively harmless while the much smaller death stalker scorpion that's a hell of a name geez yeah that doesn't sound like yeah it doesn't sound i would call him the death dealer unscathed yeah he stalks he's

he's so bad he stalks death. The death stalker scorpion. He's badder than death. He says, I've owned two emperor scorpions. You can handle them without a glove, but I'd never try that with a fat tail or a death stalker. So generally, big old honkers, big old honkers are less venomous than some smaller varieties scorpions sting more than a million people a year and kill 3 000 not phelps do we know what kind of

scorpion he got stung by because you guys like kept it as a pet how's that scorpion doing i don't need an update okay um the guy goes on to say in indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal How's that scorpion doing? I don't want to comment on that. Okay. The guy goes on to say, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I gave up on Indiana Jones long before. When was that? That was like 15. Like the 18th one? It was the fourth one, but it's, yeah, it was bad.

I think they had lost a lot of audience by then. He says, Indy says uh when it comes to scorpion the bigger the better indy has the scientific evidence to back him up uh anything else interesting here last highlight about the evolutionary trade-off it's pretty interesting oh but i think we got into this when we had the guy, remember that research we had on about animal weapons, Doug Emlin?

Oh. Good memory. Gosh. Yeah. Is it Doug Emlin? Mm-hmm. The findings point to an evolutionary trade-off.

They're talking about a researcher named Fry. Some guy. Or woman, i don't know fry when scorpions first appeared scorpions relied on big crab-like claws to attack prey he speculates but once they evolved a deadly sting they didn't need to grow big claws now we're we're a little in over our waiters now on that one we have to you get the thing uh here's my big correction i've a bunch of times i've misused this to some point this out i need to offer up a correction on the use of the on the on the usage of the founder effect steve has multiple times on the podcast referred to this effect

as new animals doing well in a new environment. I was mixing something up. I can't think of what I was actually talking about. Let me finish the correction. While it's possible that this could be happening concurrently with the founder effect, it isn't the same thing. The founder effect is basically a statistical misrepresentation of a population by taking only a few members of that species to found a new population. For example, let's say there's a population

of black bears in the continental U.S. that is 95% black with 5% blonde. He goes, I don't know the real numbers, but just making this up, okay? So let's just say, right? Then three bears swim to a new island and start a new population of black bears and two of them happen to be blonde so like a freak statistical freak occurrence right now you've got this whole population that starts off of

an atypical representation and And then the founder effect, the new population winds up being in this instance, he points out possibly the new population becomes largely blonde due to the attributes of the founders. I was using it for something that Valerius Geist used to talk about, which is like, like I should look up what it is. When, when animals are colonizing new habitat

like when the when the glaciers were receding and animals are colonizing new habitat you have um you know or like when you introduce a predator to like let's say you introduce a predator to an island that's never had predators and the prey is not used to it right they kick ass is there a term there like bringing like when wolves came into Yellowstone in the late 90s. It's not founders. They kick ass for a while. Or it's founding.

Do you know, Rebecca? I don't know the technical word for it, but there is a, you know, kind of like a colonization or recolonization effect where for a while, if you introduce a new species to a place, they will like,

their population will go like this and then eventually plateau. So it will go up very quickly and then plateau. They're like, this place is great. Yeah great yeah the animals don't run there's a lot of them uh he says for example the africaner population of just that's just an aside that i just did a little bit of googling so that wasn't him that's this is like from uc berkeley's department of evolution this crin talking the afrikaner population of dutch settlers in south africa is descended mainly from a few colonists today the afrikaner population has an unusually high frequency of the gene that causes huntington's disease because those original dutch colonists just happened to carry that gene with unusually high frequency.

This effect is easy to recognize in genetic diseases, but of course, the frequencies of all sorts of genes are affected by founder events. That's interesting. This is why our wolves here are so big and bad because when they trapped them remember they trapped 50 and chose the biggest meanest ones to bring to yellowstone we even heard from a guy they'd go in and he was telling us they'd poke him with a stick and pick the meanest picked a meanest nasty not mean enough let that one go don't send him that one he's not mean enough he smiled at me when we poked him with a stick He's not mean enough. He smiled at me. When we poked him with a stick, he wasn't mean enough.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Okay. The Wolverine Foundation. Yes.

Tell me what the Wolverine Foundation is for starters. So back in 1996, all of the Wolverine biologists in the entire world, which was like probably five people, you know, got together and they were really looking for a way to raise the profile of this very poorly understood, poorly studied species. And, you know, in order to raise money and in order to raise awareness, they started the Wolverine Foundation and they've run it as an organization that does education and outreach and also gives pretty small grants in the world of grant-making, up to maybe $20,000 at the most, to help facilitate Wolverine research projects.

I took over in 2015, and it's still a very small organization. I continue to run it primarily as a small grant- organization. And then again, like outreach and education. So coming onto podcasts, traveling to universities to give lectures and you know, just generally raising awareness about this amazing species. You come on a lot of podcasts. I've been on two and I've never had one that officially has like a recording studio before. So this is a new and fascinating experience. I was getting jealous. Are you affiliated with a university though? No, neither as an individual nor as the Wolverine Foundation. We are an independent 501c3 nonprofit. But you work with, you probably work with university people. Yes. So the way it works is if you, the interested public, happens to have a Wolverine project, and that can be a graduate project, some kind of academic project, an agency project, or a project that's run through a nonprofit, you can write a grant application to us, and then we will review it and potentially grant funds. I love it. So, yeah, a lot of the people who we grant funds to are actually affiliated with universities

or with agencies like the Forest Service or, you know, nonprofit organizations. But we ourselves, once we give the money, we can still serve in an advisory capacity if the people running the project want that. But we don't, we're not like actually involved in the field work once we make the grants. Got it. Yeah. Explain, I know that Mongolia played a big role in your resume and your sort of genesis as a Wolverine person. Yeah.

So that's my personal story. And it's a little bit aside from the Wolverine Foundation, but I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mongolia from 2000 to 2002. And Peace Corps, Peace Corps is a great program. It's what you make of it. But in like the infinite wisdom of like bureaucracy, I had an undergraduate degree in anthropology. And I had been like sort of involved with the environmental organization on campus. And they were like, great, we're going to make you into an ecology teacher. I'd never taken an ecology class in my life. So they sent me out to this town in central Mongolia. Hold on a minute. The Peace Corps wanted you to be an ecology teacher? Yes. Yes. I thought you guys mostly like delivered vaccinations and water stuff.

No, no. I think that in probably at the closer to the founding of the Peace Corps, it was more of that like humanitarian aid type of organization. But by the time I went, they, you know, Mongolia was coming out of 70 years of socialism and they were trying to bring their educational system up to speed. And they had all of these national parks that they had just founded. A lot of environmental organizations had gone there and they were trying to work with the Mongolian government to set aside a land to be protected in a sort of in the system of landscape protection and conservation that we're more familiar with as opposed to sort of the Soviet model that they had been working under. And so they wanted to reorganize their ecology and biology education program within the schools. And so they decided Peace Corps matched me up with a town that had requested a school in a town that had requested somebody to help work on both English teaching

and also on refining their biology curriculum and retraining their biology teachers to incorporate ecology into the curriculum. So I went over there. I was there for two years. And in my spare time in the summers when school wasn't in session, I started kind of volunteering with snow leopard research programs. So I would go out and help do snow leopard surveys for the animals themselves and also for prey species, ibex and argali. Did you ever lay eyes on a snow leopard? I did, but not while I was a Peace Corps volunteer. Really? Yeah, it was in 2017. I was assisting with a snow leopard collaring operation in the Altai, and we trapped two snow leopards and collared them.

Trapped them how? with leg snares. Um, really? And you got to see them. Oh yeah. I got to, like how, how, like what, what do they, what do they use for a set? It's a, it's like a, it's a wire snare. Yeah. And then, um, you, uh, I think you, you, it's on a spring lock, right?

It's, I don't, I didn't actually set the snares. So I can't, I'm trying to remember how, and it wasn't my project either. So I wasn't the one who was in charge of doing it. I was actually there to try to set up cameras for camera trapping wolverines and then went along with these, these two snow leopard captures. So it's a leg snare. You bury it in the, in the kind of talus and then you spray for whatever reason, snow leopards are like really attracted to high quality perfume. Oh yeah.

Remember we're talking about this before they found some, I can't remember. There's some, there's some cologne or perfume that's like killer on cats. Chanel number five. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember we saw, we had a news article about that. We covered one obsession for men, Calvin Klein.

What? I wonder how they figured that out. I think they did it with snow leopards in the zoo. But, like, yeah, when I'm doing camera trapping for snow leopards, which I have done, you know, you're in the backcountry of Mongolia. You haven't showered for, like, two weeks, and you reek of, like, very, very high-quality perfume. Oh, that's great.

Crawling around, like putting up your your camera traps and then like spraying rocks with like 80 worth of you know so that's what like okay so when you're setting a camera trap for uh for a snow leopard you're not hanging like a roadkill carcass you can just use just perfume yeah yeah bring it into the camp and bring it into the camp. Yeah. Yeah. And then, um, I don't know how like effective this was, but you know, snow leopards also scrape. So if you, you know, they do that little paw thing. Yeah. Um, to, they do it, their hind legs. So my other role on that snow leopard collaring expedition was to be the scraping snow leopard. So they would, they would make me do all the scrapes by the snares to get the, to get the snow leopard to like come in and be like, oh, is there another snow leopard here that's marking territory?

And then put their paw in. And that's those little, like mountain lions do it. Like that little, remember I said they do it with their front foot, but I think it is, I think some Floyd Green, I think sent us trail cam stuff where the cat does it with his back foot. It's not like after dogs go to the bathroom and they kind of like wipe off their feet. It's something different than that. It seems to be some kind of, it's like a territorial marker.

And you can tell what way he was, I don't know if this is true. I don't know if you, do you guys still like in the mountain lion world, do you still believe you can tell it's a lion of travel? Yeah. That it does it, it leaves, it does it as leaves, so it kicks its dirt back. It's back, yeah. There's like a little wall of debris behind it. And he was going the other duff.

Yeah. Got it. So they do that. The other day when I was, this was last spring, I was with my buddy Jeff Flood, and he pointed one out. I was like, oh yeah, I know all about that. And I said, yeah, it's going that way. Or that. And I said, yeah, it's going that way. Or he asked, I said, yeah, it's going that way.

And we literally went 10 yards and there's another one going the other direction. And I'm like, well, now we don't know. He changed his mind. Yeah. So, gosh, what was that? So they had him to foot snare. Yeah.

And then they tranquilized and you got to hold one. Yeah, we tranquilize them. And then not only did I get to hold it, but I had to like shove my hand down its throat to attach like the oxygen monitor to its tongue. So, you know, there's that like that moment where you're like, oh, my gosh, I have my hands on a snow leopard. This is like the mystical moment of achievement for a wildlife biologist. And then the person in charge is like, grab its tongue. And you're like, what? Like actually put my hand down its throat and it's like yeah and so you're like avoiding the teeth and trying to

like pull the tongue out and it's actually a lot harder to get the little uh monitor attached to uh unconscious cat's tongue than you would suspect and that's just why you're working it up you got to do that yeah yeah you just want to make sure that you're not going to harm the animal how big did that one way uh oh um oh you had to ask me about numbers. I mean, was it like in excess of 100 pounds? It was about 100 pounds. The other thing is that we had to use my duffel bag because they had forgotten the little thing that they usually use to weigh it. So my duffel bag has been retired as like a shrine to the snow leopard because it's still covered with snow leopard fur.

So I just have this duffel bag at home that has a bunch of snow leopard fur in it. And yeah, so I think it was somewhere around 100 pounds. And it was a male, a young male that we caught at first. He might've weighed a little bit less. And then the next animal that we caught was his mother and she weighed a little bit more. So she was traveling with two cubs

and we caught one, we didn't catch the other. So, yeah. I was talking to these guys. I think I've told this story before, but I'm going to tell it again because I like it. I was talking to these guys that they were some green braids that served in Afghanistan. And they were doing a thing in a mountain pass one time. And they caught a guy. They caught some guys coming up through this pass and shot one of them.

And he dropped the big recoilless rifle. And then his buddies carried him back down off the pass, but that recoilless rifle was set up there. And this kid was telling me how he sat there all night watching, thinking that someone was going to come back for that recoilless rifle. And he saw a snow leopard come through that pass and smell the blood where he shot that guy. Isn't that wild? Yeah, that is.

He saw it through his night vision. Again. Yeah, just like incredible, man. Seeing a snow leopard in the wild because we trapped them. So it doesn't, it doesn't count to the same degree that it would if it were just like casually, you know, crossing a mountain pass while you happen to be looking at a gun intently, um,

waiting for some human to come back. But that's pretty cool. Yeah. The strange collision of very emotional things. Yeah. I mean, it's the war situation is quite horrible, but,

um, seeing the snow leopard is, that's pretty cool. Where did Peter Matheson write the snow leopard, that's pretty cool. Where did Peter Matheson write the snow leopard about? That was in Nepal. Okay, so not where you were. No, no.

And yeah, that's a different, I don't know as much about what the conservation status of, or what field research is like in those environments because it is, I think, fairly different. But yeah, that was Nepal. And do, and when, I know we're still getting into your time in Mongolia, but wolverines overlap with snow leopards in Mongolia? Yeah. So to pick up the Mongolia-Wolverine connection piece again, I was doing work with these snow leopard, you know, programs and I really wanted to do snow leopard stuff, but I didn't. First of all, I grew up in New England. My parents are both historians. So until I went to Mongolia, I did not realize that there was such a thing as like making a living running around in the mountains looking at wildlife. I think if I had known that when I was younger, I would have like keyed into that and followed that trajectory a lot earlier.

But it was really revelatory to me that like you could actually make a living doing that. And that was a thing. And so I really was like, I think I want to do this and I think I want to study snow leopards. But I didn't have any idea how to go about getting into the field. And snow leopards, you know, scientists, researchers of like charismatic megafauna are sort of notoriously territorial. There's that saying, of course, that you start to resemble the animal you're studying. And so it just seemed like a very limited field. And I was thinking about other species that might be in the same kind of environment

because the cold northern mountains was a huge part of it. There's no way I wanted to study things in some hot, like, jungle environment or anything like that. Yeah, too much poison ivy and shit like that. Too much poison ivy, leeches in the trees. I have actually worked in those environments too. It's not my thing. And so, wolverines, I didn't really know anything about wolverines when I was in Mongolia. But when I was leaving, somebody gave me a wolverine pelt as a parting gift. And I was like, what is this? It's just like this weird brown pelt.

Like, I don't even know what this is. And so I looked it up. And because it's a sighty species, I was like, you know, I can't really take this out of the country. And I ended up leaving the wolverine pelt there. And then I was in graduate school. I ended up going to grad school for wildlife ecology. And I was doing my master's research on wolves and the wolf reintroduction. And I was working with during this. You know all about picking the big nasty ones.

I do. And I would actually rather not get into too many of my thoughts about that. But yes, indeed, I heard many of those stories. I was interviewing ranchers in the Upper Green and I was interviewing Shoshone and Arapaho tribal members about their thoughts about the wolf reintroduction 10 years after it had happened. And the organization that was hosting my summer research, the director of that organization was also the field coordinator for the Absaroka Beartooth Wolverine Project. And he invited me to go out on a wolverine expedition because the guy who was supposed to go with him couldn't go. And over the course of talking to him about wolverine stuff, he said, oh, there's this unstudied population in Mongolia

that nobody knows anything about, but we'd really like to learn more about them. And he made some kind of comment about like, but who knows anything about Mongolia? Or like, who knows anybody who knows anything about Mongolia? And I was like, oh, well, actually, I'm fluent in Mongolian and have worked on wildlife issues there in the past. And so it's kind of... You're fluent in Mongolian? Yes. Yeah. Actually, today, and today is actually the first year of the Mongolian New Year. So I should also say, which is like best wishes for the year of the water rabbit. So it's a very auspicious day. Oh, great.

Say when, oh, Kevin Murphy, he's going to be fired up about that. Water rabbits, sloth rabbits. Can you say this? Say something like, Yanni is probably not correct in Mongolian. Yanni's probably not correct, and we don't have anything to back us up on how the father and son fight it out. That's why I'm here in Mongolian. Oh my gosh.

I hate questions like this because it's always so, like, on the spot. Oh, my God. What is the word for two animals fighting? Duking it out. This is actually not a word that I actually know off the top of my head. But, yeah. That gives me enough.

Yeah, that's beautiful. Take that, Giannis. I didn't actually get to the verb. So anybody who speaks Mongolian out there is going to recognize that that is not actually a complete sentence. But I apologize about that. That's pretty good, though. How the hell did you learn that? Did the Peace Corps train you in that?

So Peace Corps does this thing, or they did when I was a volunteer, where they send you to like three months of what's basically like the worst adult summer camp you've ever been to, where you're like there with 50 other volunteers in a small Mongolian town. And they give you like three months of language training and cultural training. You're living with a Mongolian family. That part was great. And, yeah, that's how I mean I learned the basics through their language training. And then I was put into a town where nobody else spoke English. So I either had to figure out how to speak Mongolian or I was not going to talk to anybody for two years. That's what it takes, man. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. And I still can't spell

anything. It's really funny because like, you know, when you learn a language primarily through talking to people, like I, people try to, I try to write things to people and I have to go back to the dictionary all the time because I'm like, how do you spell that word? How do you spell that word? So it's a very different kind of experience, I think, than if you're in a classroom learning a language. But yeah. Yeah, but it's like highly functional though, right? It is.

It's very functional. And yeah, I've been told my accent is really good. I'll buy in it. Okay. Great. Um, yeah. So I, uh, had this conversation with this guy who is, uh, uh, involved in the Absaroko Beartooth Wolverine project and then ended up, um, starting my own project in Mongolia. And, uh, you know, that was not a collaring project that would have been way too difficult too difficult to run just because of the way you collar wolverines.

You have to kind of have a vet on hand. And, you know, it's a lot of like backcountry access issues. And that's hard enough here where we have like snowmobiles and helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. It's still really, really hard to man the traps and monitor the traps and get people in once you have a wolverine in the trap to get people in there on time to make sure that the animal isn't hurt. And so instead of sort of trying to do something like that, I was thinking about how much more all of my Mongolian colleagues know about wildlife than I do. You know, they're just, they're people who,

a third of the population is still like on the landscape as herders every day. And when I showed up as an environmental volunteer with my ecology book that I was going to teach the Mongolians, you know, about how to do ecology or whatever, I had one of my fellow teachers put me in my place really fast. She was like, you know what chingis khan passed the world's first environmental laws over a thousand years ago like what the heck have you guys done that's comparable to that we know how to manage our wildlife and we know how to manage our environment and i was like oh you know and if you're 22 years old and you're like a cocky american going into a foreign country. Let me tell you people about environmentalism. I am so grateful to her for doing that because I see so many people who work internationally with this kind of attitude of like it's almost like a missionary, like superiority complex kind of thing where you're like, guys, you got to humble yourselves a little bit and see this as an exchange, not as just you showing up in this place to tell people how to live their, their lives and how to do their thing.

You know, can I, uh, like talk about the Peace Corps and what you're talking about right now? Have you read the Ugly American? I have not. Yeah. Everybody thinks like the Ugly American was the good guy. Like people say like, oh, you know, when, when Americans go overseas and they're out of touch, people are like, oh oh it's this classic ugly american but like the ugly american and the ugly american in this

fictitious country of sarkhan is ugly and humble and shuts up and and he's very effective okay yeah i mean i think i i haven't read the book, but I think that that is, like, the most effective people I have seen working internationally are the people who are, who listen. Yeah. You know, they show up in a place and they sit there for six months, they learn the language to the best of their ability, and they listen to what people are telling them. And then they have a basis for doing better work because they have the relationships that they need and they have the understanding that they need. And, you know, they're not going in with a preconceived notion of what's best. They're like actually co-creating something that's much stronger. So anyway, sorry, that's a little bit of a

soapbox spiel. But yeah, so I was fortunate to have this woman put me in my place. And I think what I was trying to do was create a wildlife monitoring project and a conservation project that was really built from Mongolian values and perspectives and that prioritized Mongolian knowledge and understanding of the species. And so I just traveled around Mongolia and asked a lot of questions and interviewed people about what they knew about wolverines. And I went to places that were wolverine habitat. I went to places that were not modeled wolverine habitat as kind of a control to understand like what people in wolverine habitat were saying versus what people outside of wolverine habitat were saying about the species. and the background there's like a side note background to this is that uh there are pretty tight models of wolverine distribution

worldwide um that have to do with environmental factors i think we're going to talk about this a little bit more hit it because it's like i like like there's a when i when i was reading in the in in corinne's notes there there's like some really somewhat simple parameter. Yeah. So there's a paper that was published in 2010 about the bioclimatic envelope of the wolverine. And bioclimatic envelopes are species distribution models that are defined by basically climatic and biological factors. And so for wolverines, it seems like you can model their distribution worldwide based on places that have maximum August temperatures of less than 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

And that's not averages. No. That's the maximum August temperature, right? So. Does that correspond generally with a certain latitude? Yeah. Or is there some. It's latitude and elevation.

And so. Yeah, because like the Alpine zone, like super high country in Colorado would have wolverines, right? Exactly. Right. Yeah. Which had to be like little, just teeny islands of shit, right? You guys are hitting all of the, this is great, I love talking to you guys, because you're hitting all of these important

ideas about like where Wolverines are and why they are there, and you understand how that distribution is working. So, maximum August temperatures of 70 degrees Fahrenheit was one of the parameters, and the other was late spring snowpack. So, snow that remains on the ground through, in that that 2010 model through May 15th. So if and then and then there is a

latitude break off. So north of 60 degrees north latitude, that relationship breaks down. But south of 60 degrees north, it's it's very, very, very strict, except in Mongolia, where you have a lot of reports or you had a lot of reports of wolverines well outside of this, at least outside of the snow model. They still tend to be inside the temperature model. So the point of like traveling all over Mongolia and talking to people inside the snow model, inside the temperature model, and then outside of both of those models, because there are places in the Gobi Desert where it's really outside of the both of those models, was to understand from using local ecological knowledge and bringing that into the center of the work to understand like where wolverines were, how they

were behaving, how much people knew about them, what they were saying about them, what they were eating, and using that as a main source of information. What is generally, like I got two Mongolia questions. I'm just going to hit you both right now. There's got to be some wild ass country in Mongolia. Yes. So put it to me like if you walk that distance, if you walk that direction for blank distance, you're not going to run into a road. Oh.

Okay. Hit me with some of that. And also, what is their general, like in Mongolia, what do they regard the wolverine as? Do they regard it as a fur-bearing animal? Do they regard it as like a don't touch? Like generally, what is the view of it? So the question about roads, when I went to Mongolia in 2000, I think there were there were only 900 kilometers of roads in the country or something like that when I first went

there. So you could go forever without running into a road. It's there is a lot of very, very wild country there. Like hundreds of miles and not running anything. Yeah. I mean, so there's a little bit of a paradox, though. The land, I've heard it described as the land is like very lightly inhabited on the surface in terms of like the density of people and the density of infrastructure. But the relationship that people have with that land over every square kilometer is so deep. Got it.

And so I don't – I get really hesitant to describe it as wilderness because people do have these relationships with all of it. You know, there's always somebody who has some kind of relationship with whatever piece of land you are on. But in terms of the things that we consider markers of human habitation, like infrastructure, it's very sparsely spread. But herders, whoever, like people, if you stay in some spot, people are at some point in the year for some purpose utilizing the area. And they wouldn't regard it as uninhabited or abandoned. They would definitely not regard it as uninhabited. And the other thing that's important to mention about Mongolia when I first went there was there was no private property in the country. So, you know, there was no private land ownership in the country when I arrived.

So, you know, that idea of inhabiting a place or, you know, having a sense of like ownership or connection to the place wasn't vested in the same things that we would consider markers of that. So nobody had the right to like say, oh, this is my property. You can't cut across it to go hunting. You know, that's like that would be a very would have been a very foreign concept at that time. In 2001, they did start introducing a limited system of private ownership for people who had been occupying their houses in towns. They were able to receive title to it. But my friends came to me at that time and they were like, oh, the cadastral service is doing this whole thing where we're supposed to have title

to our land. And we don't understand what that means. Can you explain to us? And that was a that was another one of those moments where I was like, oh, this place is just a really different and interesting place. And so, yeah, there's been a lot of change in those 20 years. And now there is a fairly significant amount of private land, but all pasture constitutionally in the Mongolian constitution, the bulk of Mongolia's landscape must remain public. That's in their constitution. There have been also a lot of roads built since I was first there. So now you can probably go a much shorter distance before you run into a road. As for how Mongolians relate to wolverines,

the majority of people I've spoken to do not consider it a significant animal because they're so rare on the landscape. People don't run into them that much. They still know way more than an average American would. Like if you go up to somebody on the street in the U.S. because I've done this and you say, tell me what you know about wolverines. They're like, well, like the X-Men, you know, or something like that, you know, where they just don't really even understand that it's an actual animal. In Mongolia, you can ask people about wolverines and they will generally know the basic outlines of what it is and, you know, that it's a species that wanders around a

lot and that it eats meat and it scavenges. But they're not present strongly enough to be like very culturally significant. Wolves are hugely culturally significant in Mongolia. And I was thinking when I first started talking to people about wolverines, oh, maybe there's going to be some of this kind of like wolf – similar to the wolf stuff where, you know, there's some kind of spiritual connotation or something like that. It really wasn't on the same order. But they are associated with Erlikhan, who's the king of the underworld. So there's that sort of spooky, like, you know, wolverines are a little dubious. They kind of seem to be somewhat associated with some chaotic powers kind of thing. Yeah, and they have like in a lot of northern in North America, a lot of northern indigenous groups have a sort of like it's like a devil type creature because of their ability to like ruin your shit. Yeah.

It's yes. They are notorious for doing that. They'll rob your food cash. Yes. They'll rob your trap lines. They'll like, you know, they're not always welcome. They are unapologetically about their own, you know, well-being, I think is a good way to put it. And there are also many of those stories. Like one of the populations I work with in Mongolia are reindeer herders. And they,

so they're up in the taiga in the mountains with their reindeer and they are still largely hunting people. They use their reindeer for transportation. They milk their reindeer, but they don't usually eat them. So most of their protein comes from hunting. And they go out on these winter expeditions where they will hunt and then they build these like little log shelters and they put the meat in there and then they'll leave it. Elevated or on the ground? They're on the, they're built, the ones I've seen are built, they're just like little log boxes. They're not that elevated. But they have a platform inside. They do have a platform inside, yeah.

And then they'll go and they'll continue their hunting rounds and they'll come back and retrieve the meat because it stays frozen. And one of those guys was telling me a story about how he came back to a place where he had cached a moose and there was a hole that had been chewed through and that the wolverine, he said, must have been in there for like weeks just eating the entire moose. And the wolverine could have been going and coming back, but he said, oh, you know, actually wolverines, I think, are a very tidy animal because, you know, there was a place where it was doing its business inside the box. And then there was a place where it was clearly sleeping. And these were all like – and then there was a place where it was eating.

And so it was keeping its household in order. Yeah, like a little layout. Yeah. But, yeah, they do have this reputation. Of course, like one of the colloquial terms in English is devil bear. They have a reputation for being tricksters they are kind of known as like buffoons sometimes but also with that dark edge of like you know potential potential chaos and and problematic uh association if you if you do

the wrong thing or if you cross them if you you look at a Mongolian wolverine, are there distinctive, like in terms of size, coloration, the bars, would you ever be like, oh, that's a Eurasian wolverine and that's a North American wolverine? No, I think visually they appear quite similar. Genetically, you know, at least in terms of the haplotypes, which is what we look at for evolution, you know, at least in terms of the haplotypes, which is what we look at for evolution. You know, there are, there are different haplotypes in North America and in Eurasia, but there are also overlapping haplotypes. So it's basically the same animal as far as we can tell behaviorally and in terms of like what they look like. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. how many have you seen without how many have you seen in the wild without like not trying to lure him in one yeah yeah me too well you've seen two right annie yeah i'd love

to hear that one stories yeah oh you did dragging that moose leg well we were all in the same hunt with my dad but you but then you saw one robin caribou carcass. Yeah. And you saw one robin moose carcass. And on that trip, I saw in a way off, on a way off distant mountain, I saw another wolverine. It was miles from where we saw the one that was stashed in the caribou parts. More than likely probably the same one,

but could have been my third one. Wow. Where'd you see the one you saw? Mongolia same one, but it could have been my third one. Where did you see the one you saw, Mongolia? No, actually it was in Wyoming. So that very – I was mentioning the guy who I worked with who was the field director for the Absaroka Beartooth Wolverine Project. And so it was that expedition. In fact, they had had collars out on a bunch of their wolverines, and he wanted to go in and look at a cluster of locations from that collar to see if we could figure out what the wolverine had been doing in that location. And it was up on the, you know, the Absaroka-Beartooth Plateau. We went on off of Togeti Pass, and it was like a hike. It was like 42 miles in two days.

I was not in shape to do something like that, but he really needed somebody to go with him because the Forest Service protocols said that he couldn't do it by himself. So he's like, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. It's totally fine. Once we get up there, it'll be entirely flat. And I was like, okay, you know, I'm up for it. Whatever, I'll go.

And so we went and he kept saying like, it's going to be a little up for it. Whatever. I'll go. And so we went. And he kept saying, like, it's going to be a little bit hard. It's going to be a long hike. But it'll be fine. It'll be flat when we get up there. But we're not going to see the Wolverine because you never see the Wolverine. So don't get your hopes up. And so he had his dog with him.

And the first night that we were out, it was dusk. And we were – I was washing the dishes after we had eaten. And all of a sudden I heard him just screaming his dog's name. And he's like, come back. No, come back. And I was like, whoa, what is going on? And he's like, it's the Wolverine. It's the Wolverine. And so I, I looked down over the little ridge and the dog and the Wolverine were like running at each other. Oh, really? Yeah. And I dropped, I remember dropping my dishes and just like sprinting for my binoculars. And then luckily his dog was obedient and came back because I don't think that would have ended well for her if she hadn't done. And so she came back and we sat there with our binoculars as the sun went down

and it got dark and that Wolverine circled our camp for probably like 17 minutes. And it really, yeah, it came up and it kept like, it kept like looking at us from one rock and then it would like hop off of that rock and it would go to another rock and get up on the rock and look at us again. And, you know, we were staring at it and it was staring at us. And it was just this moment of mutual curiosity. And that was when I was hooked. I was like, OK, this is really cool. And now I definitely want to do this project in Mongolia and go learn more about this species. So, yeah, that's the only wolverine I've ever seen in the wild. I've handled two in traps and I've seen a lot on camera traps. But that remains my only wild wolverine sighting.

Were you doing the camera traps in Mongolia? Yes. Yes. And how were you getting the what were you doing to lure them in? Nothing. You know, they. So this is one of the really interesting things about the Mongolian wolverine work. With wolverines in the U.S., it seems like if you set even camera traps, you need to put a lure out to get them to come to that location. And usually what you do is you hang a bundle of bones from a wire up in the trees and

you put scent on it so it broadcasts the scent. Just put like skunk smell on there. Yeah, exactly. And eventually you'll get a wolverine coming in and they will return. Once they know that there's a source of food someplace, they will return again and again and again to that place, even after the food source is gone. Like they'll check it out. In Mongolia, we set up a grid of 50 cameras in these national parks where I was working in northern Mongolia. And I do know that my ranger colleagues were like, they were peeing much in the same way that I use the, you know, perfume to lure in the snow leopards. They would like pee on a spot near the, where the camera was aimed. But that was the only lure that we used. And in some cases, they weren't even

doing that. And so you would just get these Wolverines that were like traveling along. But you're setting it up on trails or not even on trails? Well, trails is like, I mean, they're like travel routes that are used by both wildlife and by human herders in those national parks. Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of it really depended on the rangers' knowledge of where they had seen tracks in the past. And so they would set these cameras up. So they'd know a likely crossing spot or whatever, some pass that they're using. Yeah, because they've been out on this landscape their whole life.

Every single one of those rangers had been, some of them were former hunters. And, of course, hunting is now illegal in those national parks, which is a whole other discussion. But, you know, some of them had been brought into the national parks conservation that is really tied to that wildlife population and knows the landscape really, really well. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

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Snow leopards. Really? One snow leopard, yeah. And we know that she's a female. She's the first snow leopard that was found in that park in 50 years, I think. And I'd also done a long-range ski expedition in 2013 in those parks, and we had seen snow leopard tracks. So we knew that there was one up there, but we did get her on camera. We get a lot of lynx, boar, elk, moose.

Is there tigers in Mongolia? Not anymore. No? Nope. No kidding. Moose. Yeah. Is there tigers in Mongolia? Not anymore. No? Nope. But, you know, if the Russians, I mean, say what you want about the Russians. They do have some cool tiger conservation stuff going on. And maybe if they keep it up, there might be some back in eastern Mongolia at some point. Huh.

Yeah. The Russians are good about tigers? Yeah. I mean. Listen, man. You can hold. There could be like, let's just talk about tigers in Russia. They got some tiger conservation. They do. Yeah. Yeah, I mean... kind of have this affectionate scornful thing about Vladimir Putin and tigers because he had all of these photos of himself

shirtless, darting tigers and riding horses around on tiger conservation projects. Dude, there's a shirtless photo of him with a huge yellow perch. Which I didn't know they had. It's a different species. They're European perch. My boys did some research on this

because they've seen those pictures of those four-pounders in Europe. If I caught that perch, My boys did some research on this because they've seen those pictures of those, like, four-pounders in Europe. If I caught that perch, I wouldn't have had any clothes on. Well, thank goodness you didn't catch that perch.

Yeah, it's something else. I'm just going to make a poster now. Dude, yeah. He caught a big perch. I've seen that picture. Yeah, so part of Vladimir Putin's, like, I don't know, he was trying to do, like, 12 months of a Vladimir Putin shirtless calendar with all the wild-o species or whatever.

But he, yeah, he had a shirtless tiger photo at some point. And, yeah, so that's Putin and the tiger thing. So that's the, what's the, not Bengal, no. Amur. They're Amur tigers. Yeah, Amur tigers. So the Amur River. But what's another one? Siberian tigers. No not Bengal, no. Amur. They're Amur tigers. Yeah, Amur tigers. So the Amur River. But what's another one?

Like. Siberian tigers. No, no, no. Like what's the, you know, the Dersu, Uzala. What's that tiger species? That would have been also the Amur tiger. Oh. Yeah.

Siberian tiger? Siberian tiger. Is that the same thing or not? Yeah. I mean, well, you know, there are lumpers and splitters and there are all of these taxonomic debates all the time. But Siberian tigers, the only extant population of Siberian tigers are Amur tigers at this point. So those are the same thing. Heads up, people at home.

Who's the famous Japanese director that made all the samurai movies? Akira Kurosawa. He made a movie, Derisu Uzala, The Hunter. Nothing to do with samurai stuff. And it's like Russians. It's like the Russian army working in Siberia and they hire a hunter as a guide. And he has this crazy relationship with Siberian tigers. There's that book, too, that was popular, whatever, 10 years ago.

About the guy who's trying to kill a tiger who was killing we've always had we've always talked about having him on the show man it's a good book but he does a lot of like i'm i was like text message buddies with him he does a lot of like don't say anything bad we were text buddy well no there's a lot of like speculation about how the tiger thinks and things like that in the book you know it's interesting um that same author though wrote the golden spruce that's right you want a book that'll curl your hair anyhow it's a cool book lynx yes mo Mm-hmm. Place sounds like the promised land. I love it.

Yeah. It's my second home. So you just hail Mary out a trail camera on a trail. Some guy's like, I saw a track here once. I mean, you got to have like a lot of cameras, a lot of days, and a lot of shit besides wolverines. It's, yeah. I mean, there's so much wildlife in these protected areas. And I think it's a, you know, people say that Mongolia is kind of this like last refuge for Eurasian wildlife because of this very deep rapport and sense of relationship that Mongolians have with wildlife. Like it is cosmologically important to them in a general sense, like maybe not Wolverine specifically, but, but wildlife and relationships with wildlife are important and

they didn't have a lot of infrastructure. So, you know, it was a, it was a place where there was still full connectivity on the landscape. And although respecting wildlife and having this rapport with wildlife does not mean that you don't hunt them. But you might be less inclined to think they should kill every last one of those things. Precisely. Yeah. Like when I talk to a lot of my herder friends about how we wiped, we European settlers wiped wolves out of the lower 48. And, you know, this is a herding culture.

They are constantly dealing with wolves coming in and attacking their livestock. And they were so, I mean, categorically, everybody has just been like, what is wrong with you people? Really? That is completely stupid. Why did you do that? Hmm. Yeah.

So they deal with it like wolves are adversarial in some respects, but that doesn't mean that you'd want them to cease existing. Yeah, because wolves carry this power called humor. And they're like, humor comes from the sky and it conduits through wolves. And so there's a saying

in Mongolia that it's lucky to see a wolf, it's luckier to kill a wolf. So if you see the wolf, you get humor. If you kill the wolf, you get even more humor. But if all the wolves are gone,

humor's gone. It's gone, right? I need to write this down. And so basically it's really important for men too because, you know, women can get humor in a number of ways. But for men it's like a lot more precarious. So basically what they're saying is like when they're astonished that we wiped out wolves, they're astonished precisely because they're like, well, you know, how are men men? There are no men if there are no wolves. Wow. How do women get

humor? Well, from wolves as well, but mostly from seeing them, not killing them. Women can, I've been told, get, renew their humor. Like, if your humor is down, your life starts to go badly. So, you know, women can do it by just, like, doing embroidery.

Really? Yeah. Of course. Of course. Yeah, you know, like just, you know, taking care of their kids, like lighting the fire. Women have a specific relationship with the hearth and fire too, which helps keep them more in order in that regard cosmologically that men don't necessarily have. So anyway, I like I'm not I'm just describing things that have been told to me.

I don't want to be saying that I'm necessarily advocating for women doing more embroidery or whatever. You're conveying your understanding. Yes, this is what I have been told. I want to move. I could talk about Mongolia all day. I want to talk about America a little bit. Okay. That's what I have been told. I want to move. I can talk about Mongolia all day. I want to talk about America a little bit. Okay.

Why, the other day, who was I talking to? Not you. I was talking about how you were coming on the show. And I was in Michigan, and that's where I was brought up. Okay. And I was like, why do they call Michigan, like, why is it the Wolverine State? So I looked up current and historical range maps. And a number of them showed historical range.

And I don't know how far back they're going. Like, I don't want to look at historical range maps from, like, 20,000 years ago. Like, ice sheets and shit. But I was trying to, like, at the time of european contact let's say right um so if i was looking at that it was saying like like all of michigan which i don't buy i don't know all of michigan northern wisconsin northern minnesota like what's the best understanding of in in in uh in the in historic times okay or wherever you can use as a jump off point, like European contact, historic times, whatever, where were they? It is a matter of some discussion and debate. But we think that, you know, wolverine habitat requirements still within the historic past from European contact and before, you know, they still had the biological requirements of needing a cold, snowy niche to occupy. So

what is generally accepted now is that they were through the Rocky Mountains of the U.S. down to New Mexico. They were in the Sierra Nevada in California. They may have been in the very northern part of New England. And they may have been in some of those northern parts of, you know, Michigan and Minnesota in the Midwest. I think Lewis and Clark record a wolverine sighting in like Nebraska in their journals or something like that. But I'm not totally convinced that that was actually a wolverine. You know, Dirt Miss dad saw one in Mile City. There was one in downtown Lewistown last winter. Yes.

Like in the cemetery or something. I don't know where they saw it. I told him a hundred times. I'm like, it was a badger. And he's like, listen, just one thing my old man knows, it's a badger. Not a badger. So we can talk about why that those are. I don't ever dismiss completely out of hand people who report out of range Wolverine sightings to me. Because you were saying that some guys treed one, like scared one into a tree in Michigan.

Yeah. So the Michigan thing is interesting. I think what is what people speculate about why Michigan is known as the Wolverine state. And I hope I'm not disillusioning you as somebody who was raised there, but that the fur trade was the first encounter that a lot of Europeans had with Wolverine pelts. Like that was the first time they ever ran into Wolverines because most of these people were coming from England and France and there were no longer any Wolverines in any of those places. And so they were like, oh, here's this weird animal that's coming through these fur trading posts in Michigan.

So Michigan was the point of first encounter, but it might not have been the place that those pelts were originally. Shit coming all out of Canada, down into Detroit. Exactly. And you're like, oh, it went to Detroit to the fort and some guys that came from 400 miles north had a bunch of Wolverine pelts. Exactly. Wolverine state.

Yeah, exactly. And so that's probably why. That was like a conduit to the north. Yes. Those, yeah, the trade routes that were converging in Michigan were kind of the source of that. And then.

That's a great theory. I'm going to start just telling people that that's what it is. You should. I mean, as far as we understand, that is the case. There was a Wolverine that was treed in Michigan

in, I think it was 2008. And some guys were out coyote hunting. And they had dogs with them. And they ran this animal into a tree. And fortunately, they realized that it was, I mean, obviously they knew it was not a coyote because it was up a tree. But fortunately, they didn't shoot it. Speaking of shooting things out of trees, they did not do that. They called the game and fish department. They were like, I think this is a wolverine. And sure enough, it was. And there was a math and science teacher from the local area who set up

some camera traps and decided to track this, this wolver. Um, he was baiting his traps with chicken. And, um, so obviously that was a big incentive for this, this Wolverine. Um, and she would show up on camera with a whole bunch of raccoons. Apparently she like had some raccoon buddies she was just like hanging out with, or they were all drawn to the chicken. I don't know. Yeah. Um, but they, they seem to be very tolerant of each other. And he continued to monitor her, the teacher continued to monitor her until in 2010 or early 2011, she died of congestive heart failure. So they were able to find her body and necropsy it. And that's how they knew that she was a female. And, you know, they know how she died. They ran her genetics and she did group with, if you exclude Alaskan wolverines, this is my understanding of this. I haven't actually seen this report. But my understanding is that if you exclude Alaskan wolverines from that genetic analysis,

she groups with Ontario wolverines. So there is a possibility that she came into Michigan naturally. The theory is that she might have been on like a garbage disposal ship that came down from Ontario and just jumped off in Michigan. If you include Alaskan wolverines in that genetic analysis, I think she groups with Alaskan wolverines. And that would suggest that she might actually have been an escaped captive animal because that's where that's the genetic grouping for most oh man i know but they always go that route that's how they dismissed people that would see mountain lions in crazy places for decades yeah escape pets like a hell of a lot of escape you know i mean and after a while it kind of fell apart but it's like it's like the first thing that – but look at crazy places they go. Yeah.

I mean – It's not that unreasonable. It's not that unreasonable. You know why people dismiss those sightings. I mean, those game and fish agencies, they're like, oh, my God, the last thing we want to do is have to manage a population of mountain lions or manage a population of wolverines. Like, people are going to freak out. So it's better if we can just have some other explanation for why these animals are here. Yeah, you got to hire

like another biologist and then you got to have like a plan. You have like people who are like freaking out about their kids getting eaten at the bus stop or what, you know,

it's just a whole host of things that you just want to ignore. And then you get one that's like, well, here's a female that was never declawed. It has babies. It's reproduced multiple times.

Yeah. It's got like porcupine quills embedded in it from like years ago. Don't tell me it's another pet. Mountain lion from like North or South Dakota that was killed on a highway in Connecticut. And that clearly was a natural dispersal. So wolverines are capable of those kinds of movements. We have a record of a wolverine who was collared off of Togeti Pass in the winter of 2008. He was collared by the Wildlife Conservation Society. His identifier was M56. And he,

my sister and I tracked him off of Togeti Pass in January of 2009. We heard him. We didn't see him. And- Heard him. Yeah, he had a collar. So we went out with the telemetry equipment and we could hear. Oh, hear like that. I got you. Yeah, not just him growling in the underbrush. Not GPS. No, they are GPS collars. At that point, satellite upload collars were still really, really expensive. So most of the collars they were putting out had internal GIS trackers. And then they would also have the, shoot, telemetry, just radio signals. So you got that little antenna

standing on the bottom. Yeah, with a little antenna. And you have to be within range of it. Like the animal has to be kind of like within almost like a sight line for you to actually hear that. Like you have to be in proximity to the animal as opposed to GPS, GIS, which will upload, now they'll upload to a satellite and like download to your phone. So when you heard it, when you pinged it, was it just like thick shit? You couldn't tell what was going on? We were up in some stuff that, yeah, it was a lot of, there was a lot of forest and there was a lot of topography.

So I think it might have been, he might have been like a couple of ridges over or something like that. So we heard him. That was January of 2009. And then they were flying flights like once every couple of weeks or something to monitor where he was. And this happens a lot, especially with young male wolverines. Like you put a collar on them and you'll fly and then you'll never hear from them again. They'll just disappear one day and you have no idea where they went.

That's it, yeah. In this case, the guy who had the plane flew down the Wind River Range and picked up this M56 at the southern end of the Wind River Range. And the wolverine community was kind of all abuzz because like at that point we didn't have any definite evidence that there were wolverines in the Wind River Range. So we were like, great, he's like colonizing a new range. And then they flew again a few weeks later, and he wasn't there anymore. And we were like, oh my God, did his collar malfunction? Like, where did he go? What happened? So we gave him up as like another wolverine that we were never going to know anything about. A few weeks later, there was a rancher in central Wyoming who went out to look at a cow carcass. And there was a wolverine on the cow carcass. This is way outside of what is modeled wolverine habitat. And again, luckily, this guy was like, oh, that's weird, and called Wyoming Game and Fish. They called the pilot. They went down and flew. Sure enough, it was M56. And at that point, the whole environment,

or the whole wolverine research community was like, oh my God, this animal is going to go to Colorado. And there had been no definite recorded resident wolverines in Colorado for about 100 years. So for a few months, all of us were just like, where's M56? Where is he now? Where is he now? Where is he now?

Is he going to get across the interstate? Shoot, he might get hit. And it was, I think it was Memorial Day. He went across the interstate and sure enough, went into Colorado. And his transmitter remained online until 2012. People would see him periodically in Colorado. So we knew where he was. He went all over Colorado.

He went through Rocky Mountain National Park. He did. Yeah. And people would photograph him there. You know, he just was enjoying his time as a mountaineer. In 2012, his transmitter died and we were like, well, who knows where he is. But maybe people will continue to see him. In 2016, somebody picked up a photo or saw a wolverine and took a photo of a wolverine running across a field in northern Montana.

In northern Montana. In northern Montana. I do not know for sure that that is M56, but I do know that a straight line trajectory from that sighting a couple weeks later, I think it was in April of 2016, there was a ranch hand in North Dakota who came out into his pasture and saw an animal in with the cows and unfortunately shot it and put it, he apparently didn't know what it was. He put it on Facebook. He calls it souped up badgers. He's like, you know, I shot this critter in my, in with my cows this morning. And people on Facebook were like, dude, that's a Wolverine, like call game and fish. And so they came and they necropsied the animal. And we also implant transmitters when we collar wolverines because, you know,

they're built like football players. They can shrug those collars off like relatively easily. And so when they opened up his abdomen, they found the transmitter in there and that was M56. No way. Yeah. So from... Okay. Yeah. Just do a quick run through. Yeah. From where he was collared on Tokati Pass to Colorado is a straight line distance of like 500 miles.

He certainly was not traveling in a straight line during that time. From his last known sighting location in Colorado to the place where he was shot in North Dakota was 700 straight line mile distance. And did he ever, did that Wolverineine ever run into a wolverine? Who knows? I mean, there's two ways that you can speculate about this. Of course, a male wolverine, when he's dispersing, is probably primarily interested in finding a place with a female wolverine, preferably not his mother, to avoid that Oedipus thing that we were talking about at the outset of the program. So he wants to go as far as he can from his natal area to find another area that has female wolverines in it.

The fact that he didn't stick anywhere either suggests that there were no female wolverines in those areas, or it suggests that there was another male wolverine in that area that, you know, booted him out. All the highways he crossed without getting hit is crazy. And I hate to think that he ended the way that he did because he's truly like, he's one of those wolverines whose story we actually know, which is really rare. Most of the time, wolverines are out doing this stuff, and I'm sure they've done even more amazing stuff, and we just don't know about it.

But this happens to be a wolverine who's famous. I get letters from school kids who are like, where's M56? What happened to him? And then I have to write to a classroom of fourth graders like, oh. It's not like things are going to kill a cow anyway. No, definitely not. That's another thing from the Mongolia work. I talk to a lot of people about livestock conflict with wolverines and they're they laugh about that they're like this is the only way a wolverine could kill uh of like healthy livestock animal

as if it wasn't actually healthy you know so um it was definitely not a threat to the wild he went that far that's the thing about all this oh sorry well no no go ahead but i was just gonna say we should talk about their uh viciousness right because that's what everybody likes to talk about. Everybody has a story, and I think it was even in our notes that there's a moose that was taken down by a wolverine. There's some story where a grizzly bear has a kill and the wolverine runs the grizzly bear

off because they're so badass. And then we should also talk about their territoriality, mating, behavior, all the other great things in our notes too. We'll move on. i just want to observe though um there's not that many like we don't have that many critters running around with collars on them and so you go and put a collar on something and how many i mean how many wolverines in america run around the collar on them right now oh very very few yeah so you happen to have one that goes

like what about the one you don't know about exactly goes like, what about the one you don't know about? Exactly. I mean, statistically. What about the one that isn't wearing a collar? How many are in the lower 48, like right now? Oh, gosh. So this is a really tricky question to answer because there have not been the kind of long-term consistent studies over a wide enough area to really give us a good idea of how many there are. Do this for me. I know you guys, every time you deal with a biologist, they play this game with you. Okay.

Pretend Steve's holding a gun. Tell Brody, no. Tell Brody, fill this sentence out. I would be surprised to hear there are more than blank, and I would be surprised to hear there are more than blank, and I would be surprised to hear there are less than blank. Okay. I would be surprised to hear that there are more than 300 and maybe 25 in the lower 48. You're getting close to a good number here, bro. You ready for this? I'm going to give you a really precise number in a moment. So I will not do the biologist game all the way through this little spiel.

I would be extremely surprised if there were more than like 350. That's actually more than I thought there'd be. Yeah, and we typically have said 300 animals. That's the number that we use. I've upped it a little bit because we know that there's a reproducing population now in the Cascades, which was not there at the time that we initially were estimating how many were in the lower 48. There's also there was one wolverine in the Sierra Nevada in California, which brings me back to something I should have talked about before when we were talking about the original range and range contraction. So why was it that M56 was the first wolverine in Colorado in a century and the first wolverine in North Dakota in a century?

That's because when there were predator control programs, primarily against wolves in the late 19th and early 20th century, part of that was poison carcasses, right? You put out a lot of poison carcasses to try to get rid of the wolves. And wolverines are a naturally rare, sparsely distributed animal on the landscape. And they are really, really good at sniffing out dead animals. In Alaska's wolf man, when he's checking his wolf poisons. Yeah.

Yeah. Real common. Yeah. So- He's like, five wolves and two wolverines. Yeah. So that just wiped wolverines out of the lower 48 all the way back up to the Canadian border. And what you've seen since the middle of the 20th century is recolonization. So you have that effect that you were talking about where wolverines are coming back into unoccupied habitat. And so there's a pretty sharp population increase because they are – this is like a wonderland for wolverines, right? Just gradually filling in.

Yeah. So that's what happened there. Now, there's also an effective population, which is the number of adults that are actually contributing genes to the population. And this we can actually get a fairly precise number on because we can use genetics to do it. And so in 2009, there was a study that was done out of the Rocky Mountain Research Station, which took all of the genetic samples from wolverines in the lower 48, or in the U.S. Rockies, actually, and analyzed the number of contributing reproductive adults. And that number was somewhere between, like, 39 and 52. Adults or females?

Adults or females? Adults. So these are territorial adults who are actually contributing to the population through reproduction. So you can have 300 animals on the landscape, but 250 of them are extraneous. They're not actually occupying a territory. They're not successful enough to reproduce, which makes managing the species in this situation where they are living in islands of habitat that are widely separated because most of where they are is on the mountaintops, right? It makes managing the population a lot more complicated than it does in a place like Alaska where basically everything is wolverine habitat, right?

You're managing populations and you have to maintain dispersal corridors. You have to make sure that reproductive adults are occupying these mountain ranges at a pretty consistent rate to continue to produce offspring to disperse to new areas and so on and so forth. Is the carrying capacity there in the lower 48 for there to be a lot more of them or is it like there's only a limited number that could ever live down here now? Yeah, precisely. Corinne and I were talking about this, but for people who live here in Bozeman, I like to point to the Bridgers and say that that mountain range could hold maybe one wolverine. They have really huge territories when they're territorial adults. Males can have territories

that are up to 500 square miles. Females can have territories that are up to 300 square miles. So like even a range the size of the Bridgers couldn't really serve as an effective population node within the larger meta population because, you know, you have to, by happenstance, you have to have a female arrive there, decide to stay. You have to have a male arrive there, decide to stay. She has to like the male enough to reproduce with him. And then, you know, they're reproducing and then they'll send out kits who may or may not make it. You know, those kits have to disperse to some other mountain range, maybe the Crazies, maybe they go down into Yellowstone, maybe they go to the Absarokas, who knows. But all of this is like it's really, really a delicate balance. And then inherently, because they only occupy these areas that have snow on the ground until May 15th, you have a very limited amount of habitat within this area for them to occupy. So there is a natural carrying is that there are climate models

that suggest that late spring snowpack is going to decline substantially within the coming century. And so we're really dealing with an expanding population and a contracting amount of habitat for them, which is a really, that also makes management very complicated because it's easy to point to the population between 1950 and now and say like, oh, look, the population is on this great upward trajectory. So wolverines, it looks like they're doing great. But at the same time, you have this oncoming, you know, locomotive just like bearing down on them of climate change that's going to contract the habitat. So people who say, oh, the population

is increasing and wolverines are doing fine are sort of posed against people who are like but climate change is coming and yeah we have a guy we're going to get into that issue around polar bears where it's where it's you can get rep like you can get reprimanded by the scientific community for pointing to the fact that polar bear numbers are really strong right now because they, they like climate activists don't want people to know that polar bear numbers are really strong right now. Cause they feel that then people will become apathetic about climate. Yeah.

They want it to be like, sure. They're strong, but trust me, it's going to get bad. Yeah. Don't even tell anybody that they're doing well right now because it's counterproductive as though people can't like be intelligent enough to sort to like sort this out in their head yeah they want to like conceal the information i think it's i mean it's a really that is a when we talk about climate change i think it's really interesting that people have decided that charismatic wildlife need to be the root through which human beings should care

about climate change like you're covered in poison ivy and you said that you're going to be a committed anti-climate change activist now because you don't like to itch, right? Like maybe it's better to talk to people about climate change. Yeah, you're going to be getting mosquito bites more. There's more poison ivy. You're going to have more pandemics. You're going to have more wildfires. You're going to have more wildfires, you're going to have less water. Like, I don't know that. I think that it's great to talk about the impending effects of climate change on wildlife, but I don't think it's necessarily the best thing to do to try to organize our entire

reason for caring about climate change around narratives about wildlife. Like, you should care because it's coming for your kids and grandkids, and it's going to make their lives worse and more unhappy in small ways like poison ivy and in very large ways like conflict over water. And you don't want the Wolverine to have to carry all that burden on his back. I don't. I just want people to think that Wolverines are cool and they deserve to persist because they're cool and they deserve to persist. They're an awesome animal and they have a right to be here and to continue to live in the world. You know what I think you guys mess up in your world?

Have you ever read Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper? I have not. A very meticulous note taker. And he combed out what would have been the 1820s. They worked everything, like all the stuff, like all the stuff the absarokas yellowstone okay and he took he takes meticulous notes about where they're at what they saw he it's

interesting he calls wolverine's common oh and he's he's you know like like his journal is sort of one of the main, you know, it's one of the main historical texts about that era because he was just a fastidious note taker about location, distance, counting. You know, it's a little dry at times. But anyways, he describes Wolverines as common. Now, you know that there's a big debate here about how many grizzlies are here, right? And we even had the guy that we had a guy from the USGS, Frank, I can't remember his name. He was in charge. Oh, Frank Van Manen. Yeah.

He ran the count on grizzlies. Okay. And he was saying the model he feels, I'm paraphrasing here, so apologies. I'm not going to mess this up too bad. The model's outdated. Their understanding of how big of a territory a breeding age female needed was based on that in the absence of bears, in the absence of grizzlies, female grizzlies were using a much bigger area.

So when you take all the suitable habitat and chunk it up into like well we know a female needs a chunk of ground this big whatever square mile 100 square miles whatever it is every breeding age female needs that so how many of these hexagons fit in the landmass okay so like here's the area we know that each let's say each wolverine wants 300 square miles. And so we take, and you make like a shape and you go like, how many of these shapes fit in this place? But it might be that you're basing an assumption that is bait.

Like your assumption about what they need is based on low density and what they can use if they have it. Let me put it to you another way. I pulled, you know, how a wild raspberry grows around here in the high country? Yeah. Okay. He's growing in the rocks, right, in a scree slide, and he's got like four inches of vine and a berry.

Yep. Okay. I took one of those with my kids and buried it in my yard, in my raspberry patch, and started to fertilize it. Guess how big that sumbitch is now. Oh, I'm sure he's taken over your my yard. Yeah. In my raspberry patch. Yeah. And started to fertilize it. Guess how big that son of a bitch is now. Oh, I'm sure he's taken over your entire yard. So meaning like if there's no wolverines around because we poisoned them all off 150 years ago.

Yeah. And you look and be like, this female uses 300 square miles. Well, maybe in 50 years, she's going to be like, it was sweet. I used to have the whole mountain range to myself, but I now am like a little more boxed in. And the model's wrong. Because this guy was even saying like, he doesn't believe his own model, but he doesn't have the autonomy to update the model.

So you'll say like, how many grizzlies are in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem? 700, probably more. Yeah. Well, how many? More than that. But I won't tell you how many. Yeah.

Because I can't independently update the model, even though we realize our model was wrong. Yeah. So, meaning, why did Osborne and Russell think they were common? So, I have two, I have, well, I have a couple things to say about that. I definitely think, I'm so glad that you guys were talking at the beginning about that colonization effect because, and this is where I'm going to tie it back to Mongolia. Remember, I was saying that in Mongolia, you have wolverines outside of the habitat model, and that this was really puzzling to a lot of people. When we talk about wolverine territories, that's the amount of space that a territorial adult needs. But within the territorial adult's territory, her kits are also going to be living for up to a year and a half.

So we haven't really talked about how the reproductive biology works and, you know, coming back to the whole thing about whether they're attacking their dads or just killing some old man that they meet. Wolverines have their kits and then they have this like interesting model of like long-term parental care, which is pretty uncommon in large mammals. So they actually let their kits hang out in their territory for up to 18 months after the kits are born. And how many do they have, two? Typically two. They can have up to four. So if you have a female wolverine who has four kids, if her territory is really rich and she has the body fat and the condition to have four kids, she will become pregnant with four kids and then she will have those four kids. And then they will be running around in her territory and her partner's territory for quite some time. So now there's six.

So now there's six wolverines. But it's one female's home. It's one female's territory. Two breeding adults and four of those extraneous animals. So I, we see this in Mongolia too, where again, like you set up a camera and you just get wolverines on the camera and that's kind of unheard of here in the U.S. Rockies at this point. I think that part of the reason is because we are still in a recolonization phase where the landscape is not fully saturated with wolverines. And once you get a really interconnected metapopulation where all of the territories are occupied with reproductive adults, and they're all sending out kits.

You do get a lot of wolverines that are running through habitat that is not wolverine habitat because those are young. They're dispersers. They're like the equivalent of us when we're in college. They're just kind of like goofing off and trying to figure things out, going here and there, trying to find a place to be. And then this may also pertain to why you see wolverines in the historical record in places like Maine, potentially, or in Michigan. If you did have live wolverines there, part of the reason is because they were coming down from those much more robust reproductive populations that are centered further to the north. So it's a classic sort of source sink. You know, there are areas of really good habitat and there are areas of marginal habitat. And wolverines can reproduce outside of optimal habitat. So that May 15th spring snowpack habitat, female wolverines give birth in the snow in mid-February.

So we say for anybody who hates Valentine's Day and or for anybody who wants another reason to celebrate it even more, we say that Valentine's Day is Wolverine birthday. That is the internationally officially recognized Wolverine birthday holiday. That's when they drop them. Yeah. And are they altricial or precocial? Like, do they have little hairless babies? They're like, they're not hairless, but they're pretty, I mean, you couldn't just toss a newborn wolverine out into the world and have it survive. Are they as helpless as like a bear's baby? Probably not as helpless as a bear, but they are in the den, in that snow den with their mother until Mother's Day. So Valentine's Day to Mother's Day.

And at that point, after those three months of staying in the snow den, they are pretty much capable of like going out and surviving, although they still apparently have a lot to learn, which is why they continue to hang out with their parents, sometimes with their mom, sometimes with their dad, sometimes with their sibling, just like kind of exploring the landscape, figuring out how to use resources, you know, whatever it is that wolverines do in the course of becoming adult dispersers. And so to go back to the question about, like, are biologists underestimating the number of animals on a landscape, I think it does depend on the animal that you're talking about and the model that you're using. There is no doubt that models should be continually updated, depending on population density. But in but in the case of Wolverines, I think that a lot of the kind of the perception that they are common comes from the fact that if he was, if he was in an area where there were reproductive adults, he was probably seeing a lot of Wolverines and a lot of Wolverine sign just

because they were there with their, with their young. and he's dealing with a lot of carcasses. He's dealing with, if he's dealing with carcasses. Oh, yeah, of course. You're going to be like, yeah, there's wolverines all over the place. They live off the land in the high country, right? Yeah, exactly.

You're probably creating in the animals some idea of how to find shit. Oh, yeah. An association, right? You can certainly have wolverines who, I mean, they're very smart animals, I think, and they know what's up. Like when you were talking about the wolverines in the caribou hunting area coming in and like, you know, taking pieces of caribou and stashing them places. That is, those wolverines are smart. They figured out like, oh, there's a food source here. We're going to come in and we're going to, you know, optimize our interaction with this food

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. What's the biggest thing they'll kill without needing to find it already dead? I think there is a report and this is anecdotal. I have not seen the primary source on this, but it's a widespread report that I've heard from multiple wolverine biologists as I was first coming into the field, that there was a 30-pound female Wolverine in Alaska who killed a full-grown moose. Man, I've heard a report, it's in a book I read, and the book was by a biologist in Fairbanks, of one killing a doll sheep. Or it was like someone watched it happen or something. I can't remember. I might be mixing it up. I have a friend who was a fellow Peace Corps volunteer in Mongolia who watched two, who watched a wolverine charge to Argali,

which are, you know, like 200 pound bighorn sheep basically, and try to run them off a cliff. So there's like, there's no doubt that like they are capable of doing that either through, and I think what usually happens with large prey, large ungulate prey is that they're stranded in the snow. Uh, wolverines of course, walk plantigrade. They have these big snowshoe feet. They can float up on top of, of the, uh, snow a lot better than, um, you know, ungulates and even, uh, digigrade animals like cats or dogs, which punch through. Um, and so they find these animals that are bogged down in the snow. I need to know, plantigrade versus digigrade, like you're saying it just doesn't, the foot doesn't flex forward

and push through or what is the difference? Oh, sorry. Yeah. So humans and bears and wolverines, we all walk plantigrade. That means we walk with our heels down. Digigrade animals have evolved to kind of walk up on their toes. So if you look at a cat or a dog, right, they have that little, like their legs are kind of shaped like this. Um, they're kind of have that L shape and that little, the corner of the L is, uh, where the heel actually would be if they were walking plantigrade. So, um, when you walk heel down, you've got, you know, obviously more surface area and a wolverine is relatively small.

I know there's a lot of reports that there are like 60-pound wolverines out there. But in this ecosystem, a very large wolverine would be about 30 pounds. That's very large. That's pretty substantial, yeah. Further north, of course, they get a little bit bigger, up to like maybe 40 pounds. But, you know, they don't get much bigger than that. They look bigger because they've got all that fur. But yeah, so they will attack animals that are bogged down in the snow. And there's a video, if listeners want to see this, you can Google like Norwegian wolverine attacking

reindeer. It'll probably come up. Yeah, I've seen that. It's crazy. Yeah. It's like in a snowstorm, the reindeer is kind of blinded and confused by the snow. There was a guy who happened to be like recording this whole thing and the wolverine just keeps like jumping on the reindeer's back and attacking it and weakening it. And then eventually it dies. It's a messy experience when we're talking about wolverines being vicious. I don't like to promote that image of them because I think, you know, people don't like to try to conserve vicious animals. But I also don't like to skirt around image of them because I think, you know, people don't like to try to conserve vicious animals. But I also don't like to skirt around the fact that this is an animal that is carnivorous and it is killing other animals in ways that are pretty, pretty gruesome. So I think that a lot of a lot of it seems to be that they just wear these animals down by bleeding them out and attacking them.

And, you know, yeah. And then they have a food source that they can eat for like a month or so, especially if it stays cold. It's, you know, that carcass stays preserved. They know where it is. If it's buried in the snow, so much the better. Because then other things can't get to it. Did you hear about that collaring project in southeast Alaska

where they had a bunch of stuff collared in an area because they're looking, they're always looking at building a road. Is it the Haynes Highway or whatever the hell? Yeah.

And they had a collared moose fall into a crevasse. Mm-hmm. A collared, a part of, a grizzly bear that was part of the collaring project

climbed in there, got stuck, died, and then a wolverine that was collared as part of the project got in there and scavenged the carcasses. I did not hear that. Wow. Okay.

That is, yeah, that wolverine was like, oh my gosh, my year is made. And another one out of that same project, another one got caught 250 miles from where they collared it. Got caught by a trapper in British Columbia. That does not surprise me at all. Like that is the kind of thing when, and that's why when people say, oh,

I saw a Wolverine running through my field in Ohio, I'm like, highly skeptical, but tell me more. You know, I like. You want to know something about Corinne? Sure.

Long time ago, I said that she ought to get whoever ran that whole collaring project on the podcast. Still hasn't happened. Wait, which collaring project? Where they did that crazy collaring project around that road construction project in Southeast Alaska and they had the collared

moose, bear, and wolverine all come together. Oh wow, I totally forgot about that. That'd be a good guest. That's why it hasn't happened. Not to knock on today's guest, but that'd be a good guest. That's why it hasn't happened yet. Not to knock on today's guest, but that'd be a hell of a guest. Who did that? Okay, homework assignment for me. Probably dead now of old age.

Because I just forgot about it for four years. I feel like that was you I was telling about that. I feel like this might be the first that I've heard of it. Maybe I just thought it. Maybe I thought, I need to I was telling about that. I feel like this might be the first that I've heard of it. Maybe I just thought it. Maybe I thought, I need to tell Karina about this. What's the most impressive thing about wolverines that people, you think people should know about that they don't know about?

Brody, that's deep. I like that. Like something you've seen, like whatever. Something you've seen them do. Cold-blooded killers. I mean, I think I talked about the thing that is most impressive to me, just the endurance that they have. The way that they can travel, you know, pretty much endlessly. And, you know, they also – there was a big study in Glacier National Park, and this is probably relatively well-known because there is an author named Doug Chadwick who wrote a book called The Wolverine Way, where he talks about the wolverine that, you know, started to like go around Mount Cleveland and then just decided, you know, the hell with it. It's going to be easier to go over the top and went up 5,000 vertical feet or something like that in about 45 minutes and down the other side.

And there was a carcass on the other side that it was trying to get to. And you could see in the collar data, like it started to go around and then it was like, nope, I'm just hungry and I want to get to my meal immediately. And up it went and over and to that carcass. And so that to me, the fact that they are such incredible mountaineers and sort of endurance athletes, I think is something that a lot of people don't know about them. And then on the softer side, I would say too, that they are actually really good parents, which is not something that most people know, but like they invest a lot in their young, they take care of them. They have these ongoing relationships with them for quite a while after they are sort of technically independent.

Do both sexes take part in the parenting? Yeah, I think that was one of the most interesting things to come out of that glacier research. For a long time, there was sort of this like myth around wolverines that the male wolverines would go and like kill the kits, which doesn't make any sense evolutionarily. Like if those are your kits, like the last thing you want to do is actually kill them. Yeah, but that is a thing though. I mean, like on Kodiak, like a primary food source

of male brown bears is baby brown bears. That is true. So presumably there's a chance. There is a chance. And I think a lot of people, because wolverines look like bears, they've got five toes like bears.

They, you know, one of their scum bear. They're like, oh, it's just a little bear. They act the same way. But what they actually saw in the collar data was that these male wolverines were visiting the dens. We don't know what they were doing there,

but we do know that they would regularly visit the dens. Maybe they were bringing food, and that after the kits came out of the den, they would travel periodically with their mom and periodically with their dad. Really? Yeah. That's cool. Like taking a trip with their dad. Yeah.

That's when they'd have that big fight. I mean, maybe they do get into these big disagreements. He was coming to the dens like, you ready yet? Ready for that fight yet? Oh, you guys are just now disrupting my whole tranquil vision of Wolverine family life. But that is wild

though, man. He'll come and check that he'll come around and check. Yeah. Yeah. And, and this is my kids. They're always talking about some animal and they're like, wonder where his daddy is. You know,

I'm like that deer. Yeah. We'll have no interaction knowledge of it. Just isn't. It'll stay glued to its mom, but it's like, it's not. Well,

if it's a buck though, it might spar its dad one day yeah someday yeah it might spar with dad but yeah i'm just like like he he doesn't know or care yeah that deer it knows his mom like inside and out but has no idea that yeah um no that's it's different for wolverines and i would love to know more about why um but they yeah they do have these these sort of family relationships that that persist for quite a while i don't know i don't know if like if the young wolverine left and came back whether his dad would still be as like tolerant of him um but you know as far as we know

they do interact with each other amiably uh they also have you guys not had any chance to go to a den and just set up like good cameras and just observe like what's going on at the den? Or is that just too hard to pull off? I have never done that. They do. So they do collar kits. I have never personally done this. You go in right at that cusp where, you know, it's they're almost ready to be out of the den.

So like mid-May, dig them out, stick a collar on them, and then they're out. But there have been a few projects in Canada that have set up cameras next to the den. And what they've seen in I think every instance is they go in,

they put this camera up on the den, and the female moves the kits within like 48 hours. Oh, they don't like it. So even though they are like relatively tolerant of certain levels and kinds of human activity, if you stick an object that they can smell and see like right at the place where she has her kits, she is not going to like that. Got it.

So we just tend to – I've had a lot of film projects contact me and be like, hey, can you like give us a den location so we can put a camera on it? And I don't think it's ethical to do that and i'm not going to assist with things like that yeah do they uh like does the male let's say he's just out cruising about like old 65 was it m56 56 yeah does he does he have a den location no uh so this is another thing i get a lot i get so many reports of wolverine sightings and i i dearly love interacting with the people who send them but one of the red flags for me whenever anybody's like oh I got a wolverine in a den in my backyard I'm like that is not a wolverine um like that's his little spot where he goes to sleep at night I they definitely I have seen you know males and females alike will dig holes in the ground and cache meat in there um they will go under talus to rest, especially if it's hot out.

Like that's probably one of the ways that they thermoregulate when it's hot. But they don't have a den that they are faithful to. The only time that wolverines are in a den is when the female is in there with the kids. My buddy in the Beartooths saw one digging through an avalanche debris field. And then my brother Danny watched two digging through an avalanche debris field. Uh-huh. And then my brother Danny watched two dig through an avalanche debris field in Alaska. Okay. Yeah. So this is really another interesting thing that they do. You

see like in the collar data wolverines will cruise the bottoms of avalanche chutes and they are looking for carcasses. Shit that got swept up in there, right? Yeah. Sheep and goats that have gotten swept off. And who knows what swept up in there, right? Yeah, sheep and goats that have gotten swept off. And who knows what, you know what I mean? Like what kind of crazy junk gets scraped up by an avalanche?

Yeah, and then the other thing they do in talus fields and probably avalanche debris fields as well, if there are pikas in there, they'll go and they'll hunt pikas. Oh, like they're actually hunting, not living, not scavenged, but living pikas. Yeah, yeah. And then also marmots. In Mongolia, they will dig hibernating marmots. What a terrible thing for the marmot.

But they'll dig hibernating marmots out of the ground and just like, you know, it's a little fat bomb for them. Coincidence, your favorite food. Oh, so yes. There's a background. There's more detail than that. But yeah. Yeah, we can just leave it there if people want to wonder. But no.

So marmot is a delicacy in Mongolia, and I, like, if you... Not just for wolverines. Not just for wolverines, yeah, no, this is an overlap between wolverine and human culinary arts, I guess, but wolverines eat them, and humans also eat them. You shoot the marmot and you cut it open, gut it, stuff it full of wild onions and hot rocks and cook it up. And it is so good. Really? You told me when I was younger that like I would one day be really excited about eating a fat rodent.

I would have just been like not believing about that. But yeah, it's it's really really good um of course then the like the little bit of spicy risk to that is that marmots are also the reservoir species for bubonic plague which is still we had a we had a story we covered some time ago of a couple i don't know how it even wound up being reported but a couple that died from uh yeah was that in mongolia or was it mongolia yeah that happens every year and so there are yeah it's weird it's like one of those things that you like like it got picked up in international news you know and you're like how did like how did

this come to be picked up international news and like i bet it happens it's just weird that it and then it got all over the place i'm sure because the Black Death has like such a resonance in like the Western imagination because of how catastrophic that was for European history that people are like, oh my God, the bubonic plague. Like that sold people on the story. Probably.

I mean, I feel like it pops up like every year, every couple of years in the international press. Somebody has died of bubonic plague in Mongolia, but the Mongols, the Mongolians

and the Mongol Empire as well have been managing that disease for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years. And so they know how to like if somebody comes down with it, they quarantine the whole town basically. And during marmot hunting season, at least when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, there were checkpoints outside of Ulaanbaatar, and everybody wants to eat marmots. So, like, people would try to bring them into the city, but they would, like, stop and search the car and your luggage to make sure that nobody was bringing a marmot into the city because it's manageable when the population density, human population density is very low.

You can quarantine the town. But if something like that ever got loose in Ulaanbaatar, where half the population of the country lives then you would really be in trouble that's how this became a news story okay you reminded me okay it was a news story because the journalist was stuck in town okay well that makes sense yeah yeah that's what it was that's how that's how it became reported yeah is they got quarantined okay because of a of a bubonic plague death from eating marmot. Okay.

So then it, yeah. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. And so this goes to hunting too and like traditional knowledge in hunting because I have been told, I have not seen anybody hunt this way, but historically there was like a specific thing that you were supposed to do when you were hunting marmots where you would set up like a little stand for your rifle and you would put the rifle on it and then you would have a feather

and you would like move the feather. And if the marmot could like track the feather and was aware of the feather, then it was like healthy enough. You knew it didn't have the plague so you could shoot it. People don't bother to do that anymore. No, no one I know. Well, no one I know either. So like, yeah, then there's a greater risk of getting an animal that actually is carrying the plague.

So they're eating it knowing they're playing with fire by messing with those things. Yeah. I mean, usually what you do is after you hunt it, you also blow torch it to kill. To get all the mites. It's the fleas that actually carry it. So you blow torch the pelt and then you cook it. But if it's already infected, then if you eat anything that has like that lymph tissue in it, then you also still run the risk of getting it.

Man, we were hunting cottontail rabbits yesterday. My kids got so full of those little fleas all over those rabbits. Oh, really? Oh, my God, yeah. I was afraid I was going to get tularemia or something. Oh, gosh. All their clothes are hanging outside right now. Well, at least the rabbits don't have bubonic plague.

No. They're like, I see them, we're cleaning rabbits, and I see they're all, like, itching their ears a lot. And I'm like, go take a shower. Take your clothes outside. Take a shower. To get him a blowtorch. Oh, I guess you hunt rabbits for the pelts, though, don't you? No, no, no. We just eat them.

Okay. Man. So how do people find you and follow your work? Can I interrupt? Yeah. And before we do that, I think we have maybe like a public service announcement that you mentioned you wanted to talk about before. Like the public, like kind of enlisting the public. Stop shooting Wolverines.

No, no, no. Because they're looking at your cow. No, something else. Well, yeah, please, if you do see a Wolverine looking at your cow, please don't shoot it. Please just call me. You can find me at thewolverinefoundation.org and submit a report immediately if you see a wolverine looking at your cow. Do you want anyone that sees a wolverine to let you know? Yeah, I do.

I think it's important to let us know because we do collect sighting reports. And then also it's really important to let the local state game and fish department know because they're the ones who are going to be capable of being on the ground there to assess the report and to take any action that might be necessary to monitor the animal. We do get a lot of, I do get a lot of reports of wolverines that are not wolverines. I've gotten a few reports of werewolves. We do not study werewolves. Please do not report them to me. That's a different species. Somebody else deals with that. What is it normally? A skunk? Badgers? The most common thing I think actually are porcupines and woodchucks. Nobody knows what a porcupine looks like. I mean, you guys do.

Your shit don't look like a wolverine. You guys know what a porcupine looks like, but the general American public doesn't. I could see the... You know how they have a tail? Yep. Wolverine's got that big kind of flat tail. Yeah, I'm with you. Big, flat, yeah. Yeah, they're roughly

the same size. And wolverines got that kind of weird almost like coloration of a circle on its back. You're right, the body to tail ratio and the way the tail rides. Yep. And they have that, you know, porcupines

also have that kind of humped profile. So they look like they're sort of, like, round on the top. And a lot of people think of wolverines as looking that way. And if you see a porcupine from a distance, you don't see the quills. It just looks like it's kind of fuzzy, right? And they have, like, a light-colored halo. Yes. To them that I think a wolverine has, too.

Yeah. So, yeah, thank you. And they walk, you know, like, porcupines also have kind of flat feet, too. Although they're a lot smaller than wolverine feet, they do have that kind of, yeah, thank you. And they walk, you know, like porcupines also have kind of flat feet too. Although they're a lot smaller than wolverine feet, they do have that kind of like gate that could be sort of wolverine-y

from a distance. Do wolverines like eating porcupines? No, you know, this is something I have never heard of. I mean, fishers are specialized on.

Fishers and pine mounds. Fishers are like, fishers are a porcupine specialist. Yeah. They open it up on the belly. Fishers are like, fishers are a porcupine specialist. Yeah. They open it up on the belly and. Yeah.

No, we've never, we've seen duck remains, bird remains. We've seen, you know, all kinds of things that wolverines will eat, but I have never heard of a wolverine eating a porcupine. So if you do see a wolverine or you see wolverine sign, which are tracks, please take photographs if possible. If you're taking photos of the tracks, make sure you put something in there for scale because wolverine tracks and Martin tracks and even like least weasel tracks are the same darn tracks. If I don't have something in there for scale, I can't tell what it is. And then send it to me. There's a submission form on wolverinefoundation.org. And let your local wildlife management agency know as well. And we will put it into a database.

This is important, too. I know that the listeners of your podcast are, in general, really, really skilled outdoors people. And I have total faith and trust in people's wildlife knowledge. But because of the way science works, I always have to be a little bit skeptical. And I have to ask more questions about the report. So if you send a report to me, do not think that it is a commentary on your own assessment of your wildlife skills. If I come back to you with questions, it is just because I have to do everything I can to verify and make sure that it is not something else. I've had some people get very angry with questions. It is just because I have to do everything I can to verify and make sure that it is not something else.

I've had some people get very angry with me. Who are you to tell me what I saw? Yeah, there's some guy who was like riding a four-wheeler around a dump

in like Alabama or something and reported a Wolverine and I was like, um, could you describe what the facial mask looked like? And he got so angry at me. He was like, you need to take some yoga classes

and learn to chill out. Yikes. I took a yoga class the other day with my wife. Did it help you? No, it disgusts me out. It made my poison ivy itch so bad because it was 100 degrees in there, man. All sweaty from the poison ivy.

That'd be awful. So yeah. And then if everybody knows how to identify wolverine tracks, that's great. But for those who don't, they have five toes. They have a little crescent pad in the middle. It kind of looks like it's like arched like a crescent moon. And then sometimes there is a heel pad that registers and sometimes there is not a heel pad that registers.

But if the heel pad is there from the tip of the toes to that heel pad, it's probably like six or seven inches. It's a big track. And they have a very distinctive three-by track. Give me the dimension again. If the heel pad shows. If the heel pad shows, it's like six to seven inches. It's like the size of, I mean, it's like a wolf track, which people don't, I mean, people are surprised by that, but it's a pretty big track. It could be like almost as big as your hand. Yeah. I mean, that's how I, yeah, that's why I'm holding up my hand.

It's about that. You need to talk to this guy. This guy looks for tracks all winter. He'll find one for you. Okay. Well, I will talk to you about Wolverine tracks. He rides a snowmobile just doing that. Snowmobilers and backcountry skiers, I feel like, are an undertapped resource for Wolverine citizen science. And I would love to have more people who are out in snowy conditions just being on the lookout and being aware and taking those photos and sending them to us.

Because it's really important to track where there are actually verified locations for the species. So thanks to anybody who's willing to do that. Was that the public service announcement you were talking about, Corinne? Yep. Thank you, Corinne. All right, man. That was good. We could do like a whole other one.

Like keep talking about wolverines. I will happily talk about wolverines for hours. So thank you for the opportunity. Tell again how to go find you guys stuff. It's wolverinefoundation.org. And we have a Facebook page and we have a Twitter account. Tell again how to go Do you guys accept donations? Oh, we do accept donations. Yes. And those donations go to support the Wolverine research projects in the field. So if you have a specific Wolverine project that you want to support, you can talk to me about that.

And I can put that money aside in a fund for that specific Wolverine project. General contributions go towards the general pot of money that we then periodically open up for proposals from Wolverine researchers. You know, we didn't talk about was the idea that the that a rock that like that northern peoples would use the Wolverine fur on the rough of a parka because it's a hollow and it doesn't carry frost. Yes. But then I heard that that's actually not very accurate or is that accurate i don't know if it's because it's hollow but it does shed it does shed it sheds frost yeah that's why you that's why you trim your parka so when you're exhaling yes it doesn't build up on the parka rough exactly yeah or you can shake it off or whatever right and it doesn't just stick on there. Like if you had a coyote rough, it just gets caked in ice. Yeah. So and I think wolf fur also does the same thing. I know ungulate fur is hollow. And so that's why it's so insulating. But I don't know whether wolverine carcasses where, you know, it's in the spring and the snow all around the carcass has melted.

And then you like pick up the wolverine and there's still like a patch of snow under there because the insulating properties of the fur are so good. They're thermoneutral, I think, down to like minus 40 degrees. So, yeah, wolverine fur is a preferred fur in some northern places for that reason. In Mongolia, I have been told you should never put wolverine fur on your head because it is associated – it's an animal that's associated with the underworld. Oh, really? So you just don't want to be doing that. But that said, also, there are people in Mongolia who wear wolverine fur hats. Got it. for hats. Well, the next time you're in Mongolia and someone gives you a Wolverine hide,

sew it into your hood and just go home like minding your own business and don't just be, don't be showing everybody what you got. Just be quiet about it. Pretend I don't know about sightings. Yeah, no.

When you say you want everybody to send in their Wolverine sightings, I'm guessing not if you're an Alaskan. I mean, I'm always interested in hearing about people's Wolverine stories. So, like, you can totally send me your Wolverine stories from Alaska. But as far as what I'm interested in monitoring scientifically, it's much more about the Wolverines here in the lower 48.

So, if Brody's dicking around down there in Colorado and he finds one, you want to hear about it? I do because as far as we know, since M56 left, there is still no population in Colorado. And you were mentioning before the fact that there's habitat there. So one of the things they're talking about is potentially reintroducing wolverines to Colorado. Yeah, they like doing that stuff in Colorado. Listen, I'm all for it, man. I'm all for it. Why not?

There's no negative. No, I'm not saying they did it with lynx, right? She had a facial expression. I would love to hear the the anti-wolverine argument she's got yep there would be oh no no hit it real quick because you do have a good one well i don't it's not that i'm opposed to it it's just that wolverines are really good dispersers right and i think that the best way to handle this personally is just to ensure that the population further to the north is robust enough to keep sending out dispersers to get there naturally because you're robbing

peter to pay Paul, right? Precisely. Like if you start punching holes in the wolverine population further to the north, because it's so precarious, like if you start taking reproductive adults out of Montana to put them in Colorado, you create a hole in this metapopulation that potentially has repercussions later on. So, um, that makes good sense. Yeah. And I, and I generally like the natural, I generally like the natural disbursement thing socially too. Yeah. It's socially better for people.

It's so much better because then you don't have the, you know, you don't have people getting together arguments about how these like nasty, big Northern carnivores are so much more ferocious than the ones that should have been here or, um, you know, those kinds of, that kind of resistance doesn't come up. So yeah. Yeah, Diane Boyd. Yes. You know, she very much said that she wished that they never transplanted them here into Yellowstone.

Remember that? Yeah. She said you would have wound up in the same place with a lot less friction. Yeah. All right. Wolverine Foundation. Yes, wolverinefoundation.org.

All right, everybody. Next time you see a badger, give them a call. Big old boy. 50 pounds. Keeps my life interesting. Thanks, Rebecca. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians.

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