Potential endangered status threatens U.S. effort to bring back the wolverine
By Randy Boswell
After the resounding success of a decade-long wildlife project that saw dozens of lynx airlifted from Canada to restore the tuft-eared wildcat to its historic habitat in Colorado, the U.S. state was preparing to turn to this country again for help in reintroducing the wolverine to the mountain forests of the American southwest.But Colorado's plan to welcome back the giant, razor-toothed weasel - a beast Prime Minister Stephen Harper has held up as a symbol of Canada's fierce independence - could falter for the most unexpected of reasons: the U.S. government's newly proposed designation of the wolverine as an endangered species.The Dec. 13 announcement by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may actually deter Colorado's conservation stakeholders from proceeding with the wolverine reintroduction because of the stringent land-use rules typically imposed on the habitats of endangered animals.In other words, says Colorado Division of Wildlife spokesman Randy Hampton, transplanting Canadian wolverines to the snowy terrain around Aspen would become much more complicated if the animal is officially deemed endangered rather than "extirpated," or regionally extinct.
"What we don't want to do is reintroduce an animal, have it come in here and move up on that priority list to become an endangered species, and then the federal government says to farmers, ranchers, ski areas, snowmobilers, landowners: 'Stop. You can't do X, Y or Z,' " Hampton told Postmedia News.He said it was ironic that proclaiming the animal endangered could scuttle a repopulation initiative. "It is a complicating factor, but not a dismissing factor," Hampton said. ". . . we remain interested in doing the reintroduction, but not at any cost - meaning we've got to take a look at the social implications."That leaves the wolverine in limbo in Colorado, but Hampton said the successful reintroduction of the lynx - thanks to imports of the predator from B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec, Yukon and Alaska - offers a compelling precedent for conservation advocates to persist with the wolverine transplant.
So, too, does the story of an individual male wolverine that wandered into northern Colorado last year from Yellowstone National Park in northern Wyoming. It was the first confirmed presence of a wolverine in Colorado since 1919, fuelling excitement over a possible reintroduction and the apparent reconnection - however fragile - of a continuous corridor of wild mountain habitat from Colorado to Wyoming to Montana to Canada via the Grand Teton, Yellowstone and Glacier national parks in the U.S. Rockies.
The U.S. federal wildlife service's proposal this month to declare wolverines endangered in the lower 48 states follows a controversial 2008 refusal to do so by the same agency. At the time, wildlife advocates accused the Republican administration of then-president George W. Bush of relying on Canada's higher wolverine numbers to avoid giving special protections to the animal in the U.S.Experts believe there are only about 500 wolverines in the lower 48 U.S. states. Alaska has about 8,000 of the metre-long animals, which can weigh up to 18 kilograms. Canada's population is estimated at 15,000.
Even so, Canadian wildlife advocates have expressed concerns about the wolverine's future in this country. Historic populations in Quebec and Labrador have disappeared, and climate change is seen as a major threat to remaining populations from Ontario to western and northwestern Canada, where the wolverine requires deep snow cover in rugged forests to maintain its niche in nature.
The voracious scavenger feeds primarily on dead caribou, and has even been known to fend off grizzly bears to protect a feast.
In 2007, Harper used a speech about Canada-U.S. relations to propose an alternative to Pierre Trudeau's famous elephant-and-mouse analogy for the two countries.
"I always felt that (Trudeau's) comparison sold us a little short," Harper said, voicing his preference for imagining America as a grizzly and Canada as a wolverine: "We may be smaller, but we're no less fierce about protecting our territory."
Colorado's proposed wolverine reintroduction would be the latest in a string of bi-national projects to restore long-lost wildlife populations to parts of North America where they'd thrived before urban development and other forces catastrophically depleted critical habitat.As with the lynx, officials managing reintroduction programs in the U.S. typically turn to Canada for supplies of animals to be transplanted. Controversial efforts to restore wolf populations in some parts of the U.S., for example, have typically relied on Canadian imports.In another major bi-national effort to rescue an iconic endangered species, Canadian and American wildlife experts have been co-operating for decades to sustain the world's last natural population of whooping cranes, which migrates annually between Wood Buffalo National Park along the Alberta-Northwest Territories border to summer feeding grounds in Texas.As part of that effort, eggs from whooping crane nests in Canada have been collected and hatched in U.S. bird sanctuaries to foster captive breeding populations.
Earlier this year, the discovery in Alberta of a dead lynx wearing a Colorado satellite collar was hailed as a promising sign for North American nature since U.S. habitats had evidently supplied enough rabbits and other prey to sustain the predator through its record-setting, 2,000-kilometre journey back to Canada.
"What we don't want to do is reintroduce an animal, have it come in here and move up on that priority list to become an endangered species, and then the federal government says to farmers, ranchers, ski areas, snowmobilers, landowners: 'Stop. You can't do X, Y or Z,' " Hampton told Postmedia News.He said it was ironic that proclaiming the animal endangered could scuttle a repopulation initiative. "It is a complicating factor, but not a dismissing factor," Hampton said. ". . . we remain interested in doing the reintroduction, but not at any cost - meaning we've got to take a look at the social implications."That leaves the wolverine in limbo in Colorado, but Hampton said the successful reintroduction of the lynx - thanks to imports of the predator from B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec, Yukon and Alaska - offers a compelling precedent for conservation advocates to persist with the wolverine transplant.
So, too, does the story of an individual male wolverine that wandered into northern Colorado last year from Yellowstone National Park in northern Wyoming. It was the first confirmed presence of a wolverine in Colorado since 1919, fuelling excitement over a possible reintroduction and the apparent reconnection - however fragile - of a continuous corridor of wild mountain habitat from Colorado to Wyoming to Montana to Canada via the Grand Teton, Yellowstone and Glacier national parks in the U.S. Rockies.
The U.S. federal wildlife service's proposal this month to declare wolverines endangered in the lower 48 states follows a controversial 2008 refusal to do so by the same agency. At the time, wildlife advocates accused the Republican administration of then-president George W. Bush of relying on Canada's higher wolverine numbers to avoid giving special protections to the animal in the U.S.Experts believe there are only about 500 wolverines in the lower 48 U.S. states. Alaska has about 8,000 of the metre-long animals, which can weigh up to 18 kilograms. Canada's population is estimated at 15,000.
Even so, Canadian wildlife advocates have expressed concerns about the wolverine's future in this country. Historic populations in Quebec and Labrador have disappeared, and climate change is seen as a major threat to remaining populations from Ontario to western and northwestern Canada, where the wolverine requires deep snow cover in rugged forests to maintain its niche in nature.
The voracious scavenger feeds primarily on dead caribou, and has even been known to fend off grizzly bears to protect a feast.
In 2007, Harper used a speech about Canada-U.S. relations to propose an alternative to Pierre Trudeau's famous elephant-and-mouse analogy for the two countries.
"I always felt that (Trudeau's) comparison sold us a little short," Harper said, voicing his preference for imagining America as a grizzly and Canada as a wolverine: "We may be smaller, but we're no less fierce about protecting our territory."
Colorado's proposed wolverine reintroduction would be the latest in a string of bi-national projects to restore long-lost wildlife populations to parts of North America where they'd thrived before urban development and other forces catastrophically depleted critical habitat.As with the lynx, officials managing reintroduction programs in the U.S. typically turn to Canada for supplies of animals to be transplanted. Controversial efforts to restore wolf populations in some parts of the U.S., for example, have typically relied on Canadian imports.In another major bi-national effort to rescue an iconic endangered species, Canadian and American wildlife experts have been co-operating for decades to sustain the world's last natural population of whooping cranes, which migrates annually between Wood Buffalo National Park along the Alberta-Northwest Territories border to summer feeding grounds in Texas.As part of that effort, eggs from whooping crane nests in Canada have been collected and hatched in U.S. bird sanctuaries to foster captive breeding populations.
Earlier this year, the discovery in Alberta of a dead lynx wearing a Colorado satellite collar was hailed as a promising sign for North American nature since U.S. habitats had evidently supplied enough rabbits and other prey to sustain the predator through its record-setting, 2,000-kilometre journey back to Canada.
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