Wolverine to get Endangered Species Act protection

The Obama administration announced Friday that it wants to add the wolverine, a rare and solitary denizen of the Rocky Mountain region's highest and most remote mountains, to the list of threatened and endangered species.

The species is considered vulnerable to climate change-caused loss of its snowy habitat. Gulo gulo luscus depends on late spring snow cover for dens in which to raise young.

"Scientific evidence suggests that a warming climate will greatly reduce the wolverine’s snow-pack habitat," Noreen Walsh, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Mountain-Prairie Region director, said in a statement.

FWS proposed a listing as a threatened species. It did not suggest designation of any critical habitat for the wolverine. The agency will also prepare an Endangered Species Act regulation that would permit most extractive activities now occurring in wolverine range to continue.

"[FWS] does not consider most activities occurring within the high elevation habitat of the
wolverine, including snowmobiling and backcountry skiing, and land management activities like
timber harvesting and infrastructure development, to constitute significant threats to the wolverine," an agency press release said. "As a result, the Service is proposing a special rule under Section 4(d) of the ESA that, should the species be listed, would allow these types of activities to continue."

The 4(d) rule would allow the killing of protected wolverines as a result of activities other than hunting and trapping.

FWS also wants to re-establish a population of wolverines in Colorado. The agency's proposal to do that under the authority of section 10(j) of the Endangered Species Act would be implemented by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

In the mainland United States wolverines are known to occur in Washington's North Cascades, portions of the Rocky Mountains in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, and in Oregon's Wallowa Range. During recent years single wolverines have been detected in the Colorado Rockies and in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

FWS indicated in 2010 that the wolverine was eligible for ESA protection but said then that other priorities precluded listing the species.

The agency will accept comments on the proposed listing for 60 days.

Montana judge ends wolverine trapping

A judge entered an order Monday that effectively ended any possibility of wolverine trapping occurring in Montana this year.

Broadwater and Lewis & Clark County district judge Jeffrey Sherlock extended a temporary restraining order entered last month after the parties asked that a Jan. 10 hearing to decide whether to grant a preliminary injunction be rescheduled.

He set the expiration of the temporary restraining order after the end of the proposed trapping season on Feb. 15.

"Basically, the injunction is in effect and we're going to report back to the judge on March 1 whether we still need it," Matt Bishop, an attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, said.

By then, the fate of next year's trapping season may be known. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is scheduled to decide by Jan. 18 whether to add the wolverine to the list of endangered and threatened species.

"We're going to have to wait to see what the feds do," Bishop explained. "If they decide to list the wolverine, trapping won't be allowed in Montana."

According to a Dec. 19, 2012 report in Greenwire, the Obama administration is expected to propose Endangered Species Act protection for Gulo gulo luscus before the mid-January deadline.

The animal was designated a candidate for inclusion on the list of threatened and endangered species in  2010.

Montana is the only one of the lower 48 states to allow trapping of wolverines. The state had proposed to allow five of the rare and elusive animals to be killed that way during a season that it planned to start last Dec. 1.

The environmental group plaintiffs in the Montana anti-trapping case include Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Friends of the Wild Swan, Montana Ecosystem Defense Council, Native Ecosystems Council, Swan View Coalition, WildEarth Guardians, and Footloose Montana.

Photo of wolverine (Gulo gulo luscus) courtesy U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, photo by Steve Kroschel.

Montana judge halts wolverine trapping

A judge in Montana has blocked the trapping of wolverines in the Treasure State after environmentalists argued that allowing it would further imperil a species already at risk from climate change.

District Judge Jeffrey Sherlock issued an temporary restraining order against the state's wildlife management agency until a hearing on the merits of the lawsuit is held Jan. 10, 2013.

"There's a state law that says the state wildlife agency has to take action to prevent candidate species from being harmed," Matthew Bishop, a lawyer for Western Environmental Law Center who represents the environmentalists, said. "We're arguing that, by allowing trapping, they're making the situation worse, not better."

Bishop was referring to the wolverine's status as a species eligible for inclusion on the federal list of threatened and endangered species, but not included due to administrative concerns.

"The warranted piece of that is the science, the precluded part is more of an administrative decision that 'we're too busy,'" Bishop said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's decision to classify Gulo gulo luscus as a candidate species was announced in Dec. 2010.

A federal judge in Montana has ordered FWS to announce by Friday when it will decide whether to list the wolverine under the ESA. The order sets a Jan. 18, 2013 deadline.

Leith Edgar, a spokesperson for FWS' regional office in Lakewood, Colo., said that he is not currently aware of any reason that the agency would miss the January decision deadline.

There are 300 or fewer wolverines in the entire nation, according to FWS, while about 400 breeding pairs are needed to assure continued genetic viability.

"No one knows how many wolverines there are in Montana," Bishop said. He explained that his clients are concerned that the state of Montana is authorizing trapping without any understanding of how the decision will affect the species.

"The state doesn't have any population data or any surveys to monitor the wolverine," he said.

One 2009 study indicated that there may be as few as 35 breeding wolverine individuals in the region that includes Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

Dr. Kevin McKelvey, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service at its Rocky Mountain Research Station, explained that counting wolverines in the wild is a difficult logistical and financial challenge.

"It would be probably several million bucks to do it," he said.

 McKelvey said that an alternative approach to counting individuals that involves assessing the extent of habitat available to the species is not likely to be a reliable method of obtaining an accurate census.

"I wouldn’t do that myself because those numbers tend to be really errant," he said. " One problem is the area might be different from what you thought it was. Another one is they’re not everywhere where there’s habitat."

George Pauley, the wildlife management section chief for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, rejected a request for FWP data on wolverine numbers in the state and declined to comment on the method by which the agency counts them.

Aside from the species' population numbers, several studies indicate that the animal will be significantly affected as climate change proceeds. A 2010 paper showed that, as the snow upon which wolverines depend for dens melts earlier in the spring, the extent of the species' range will decline throughout the contiguous United States. The study projected that the animal would lose about a quarter of its range by mid-century.

Another study from 2011 indicates that climate change will cause fragmentation of the wolverine's populations and reduce available habitat by as much as two-thirds by the latter part of the century.

The problem, according to McKelvey, is that,while it's clear that ongoing climate change may harm the species, researchers have a difficult time figuring out the appropriate baseline against which to measure current climate change impacts on the wolverine.

"Thirty or fifty years out, significant declines in snow pack in these areas and, presumably, a decline in wolverines is likely," he explained. "The issue is muddled by the fact that we either wiped out, or came close to wiping out, wolverines in the lower 48 [states] by about 1930. Since that time, their population has generally expanded and, as far as we can tell, it’s still expanding."

Given the uncertainty about the extent of the population of wolverines in Montana, the impact of trapping on the species is not easy to determine.

“I really do think our game management agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and folks like that who have to make those calls, there's still uncertainty out there," McKelvey said. 

The Treasure State had set an annual trapping quota of five wolverines, according to a FWP webpage. The season was to run until Feb. 15.

Montana is the only U.S. state that permits hunters to trap wolverines.

Environmentalists filed the lawsuit in October after a previous petition aimed at convincing FWP to hold off on a trapping season failed.

Photo courtesy National Park Service.

NOTE: This story also appears on the Examiner.com website. Here is a link to it.

Enviros Sue to Force Wolverine Listing

Environmentalists have challenged the Bush Administration's refusal to list the wolverine as an endangered or threatened species. In a complaint filed Sept. 30 in federal court in Missoula, MT, the plaintiffs argue that there is "substantial genetic discontinuity" between Canadian and U.S. populations of the mammal and no substantial migration or cross-breeding and thus that the American wolverine population is "discrete" and entitled to Endangered Species Act protection.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service denied a petition to list the wolverine in March on grounds that the species would survive even if all American individuals were extirpated because of genetic links between those wolverines and wolverines in Canada.

The case involves wolverines outside of Alaska.

Global climate change is an issue related to the fate of the wolverine, as the creature requires spring mountain snowfall to rear young.

Should the Wolverine Be Put on the Endangered Species List?

The wolverine (Gulo gulo) was once a ubiquitous presence across the United States.

According to the Wolverine Foundation,

The historical North American distribution of the wolverine included the northern part of the continent southward to the northernmost tier of the United States from Maine to Washington state. It extended south along the Sierra-Cascade axis through Oregon into the southern Sierra Nevada in California and along the Rocky Mountains into Arizona and New Mexico. Records of the wolverine within the upper midwest apparently pre-date human settlement, with the animal most likely absent by the early 1900's. The wolverine has been extirpated from the northern plains states east of Montana.

In California, the historic range of the wolverine included much of the north coastal area and the Sierra Nevada. . . .

Wolverines likely occupied a wider variety of habitats during pre-settlement times as evidenced by historical presence in upper mid-western states, and fossil evidence of extant representatives in Great Basin habitats of southern Idaho. Human encroachment into historically occupied wolverine habitat may have forced the wolverine into its present distribution.

The Bush administration, disregarding the loss of range in this country and the decline of the species to no more than several hundred individuals in the northern Rockies, declined in March to list the wolverine as an endangered species. The Interior Department justified its decision on grounds that sufficient numbers of wolverines exist in Canada to make extinction unlikely.

Now the New York Times has weighed in with an editorial urging Bush to reconsider.

The paper specifically took aim at the administration's rationale that the animal is plentiful enough in other countries to preclude protection here:

If that logic — ignoring the health of an animal here if it is doing well elsewhere — had been allowed to prevail, many of the act’s notable successes, including preserving the grizzly bear and the American bald eagle, would never have happened.

Several environmental groups are considering a lawsuit challenging the administration's refusal to list the wolverine.