Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Trapping Wolverine... It's Over In Montana!

I had occassion this week to converse with a Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department "official" whom I have known and trusted for some time.
The bottom line is its a virtual certainty that Wolverine Hunting and trapping in Montana has now ended forever.
Even though the Wolverine population is healthy and stable at around 300 animals (with a yearly quota for Hunters and trappers of 4 or 5 animals) the state has apparently chosen NOT to "fight" the current, expensive and ongoing court battles any longer!
Sad this.
I hope my interpretation and conjecture are wrong but reality is starting to set in over this situation (obstructionism by the greenies)!
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

300 wolverines for the whole state?

There aren't too many wolverines anywhere they live. Let's do the math:

Most biological surveys, including those in the far north, estimate 5-15 wolverines per 1000 square kilometers. (1000km2=386 square miles.) That's not a lot of animals, but the country they inhabit has very low biological productivity, because it's either high in elevation or very far north, and wolverines reproduce slowly.

Only the western third of Montana has any wolverines, and 1/3 of Montana is about 50,000 square miles. At most about 1/4 of that 50,000 (12,500 square miles) is the real wilderness where wolverines can live. Given 5-15 wolverines per 386 square miles, that means about 162-486 wolverines, an average of 324. Which may or may not be where the Montana game department got their estimate.

That's all you need, Custer kicked Jeb Stuart's ass at Gettysburg with only 500 Wolverines...

Mule Deer: Yeah... HOW do you count Wolverines???
I was staying a night in a motel (showering) in Buffalo, Wyoming some years ago.
I was on a spring Varmint Safari and had 12 Varmint Rifles along.
One of the fellows in the room next door saw me unloading my Rifles and struck up a conversation with me.
Turns out he was a Wyoming Game Warden biologist and he and his pilot were staying there for several days while working.
Turns out they were flying the nearby Bighorn Mountains searching for the distinctive "tracks" of Wolverines in the snow fields of those mountains!
Apparently they do this every couple of years or so and they "compare" notes over time for population trends.
I had seen their plane flying back and forth in the mountains as I had been Hunting in the high country for Rock Chucks thereabouts over the previous two days.
I do remember asking him "how many Wolverines are in Wyoming" and he avoided answering directly but said the population "was stable".
A local lady professional photographer here in Dillon got three pictures of a Wolverine this early spring on the road from Silver Star, Montana over the pass (Pipestone?) to Butte and she relayed to me the Wolverine was just a couple miles west of the last homes on the east slope of that range/pass of the Rockies.
Anyway I hate to see western Hunters and trappers loose ANY opportunities - the "anti's" and the "greenies" just keep chippin away at us!
I especially hate to see lost opportunities for PC type motivations (not based on sound biological reasoning).
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

I am lucky to actually see one in the wild then. Riding back from a point I was hunting from after dusk I saw one scurrying along a tree line before he ducked into the timber.

I've seen two, though only tracks in Montana, and I've spent plenty of time in wolverine country all across North America.

The first one was on a spring brown bear hunt in Alaska a dozen years ago, and the second was on a caribou hunt in the Northwest Territories--when I had a wolverine tag. Made a half-mile stalk and managed to get within 200 yards or so, and the hide is now on my office wall. It was an old male, with some broken teeth, so probably wasn't going to last much longer.

My link here from a leaked memo from the cursed Ctr. for Bio. Diversity dated 7-7-14 said there were 300 in the entire lower 48!


http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2014/wolverine-07-07-2014.html

Wait until the CBD and other green groups do a slam dunk on oil exploration by getting the sage grouse listed. You ain't seen nothing yet..........

I'm fine with this. Wolverines aren't hurting anything, and there aren't many around to begin with. We don't need to kill every [bleep] thing in the hills, just because it's there.

For those interested in Wolverines, The Wolverine Way is a really interesting read on these guys.

Prairie_goat: Then I hope YOU will also be "fine with" THIS, when the greens and the anti's come forth with injunctions, lawsuits and the like that stops YOUR favored type Hunting!
Wolverine trapping and Hunting is well regulated and has been going on successfully for decades!
Your philosophy is short sighted and idiotic as well as being self defeating and self destructive of the Hunting and trapping culture/traditions!
Again I hope YOU are going to be fine with any future restrictions and banishments of your favored outdoor recreations!
Sheesh!
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

Trail/game cams are proving wolverines are more widespread than believed. They've been caught on camera in Nebraska, Utah, Washington and Michigan and probably more that I don't know about.

I agree. I became one just after Obama's second term election success.-Mike

I remember you writing about that. If memory serves you shot it with a Merkel?

BGG insists he saw one this spring. I was inclined to believe him because I have never seen him run so fast.

But at the end of the day I decided he was FOS.


Travis

Yeah, it was my K1 single-shot .308. Got a good caribou with the same rifle on that hunt.

Good grief! Does this go for wolves too? Only a handful were taken each year anyway! Management by emotion is a poor means of taking care of our wildlife.

Never saw a wolverine but once saw one of their little cousins, a fisher, run two full-grown coyotes off a deer carcase in upstate New York. It hissed like a steam engine!

The only member of the weasel family that doesn't fight like crazy is the skunk. And they don't fight very fair....

Because skunks don't have to!

Wolverines stink. Back in the mid 1960s my cousin and I were hunting Mule deer out of an old squatters/trapper cabin in the Missouri breaks of Montana. It was on his dad's ranch and we packed everything in and out with horses.

One night we were awakened by a noisy raucous under the cabin floor that lasted for about 2-3 minutes and the place started to stink. We opened the cabin door to get some fresh air and contemplated sleeping outside. The odor was not like any skunk I ever smelled.

We hunted until noon that day and upon our return we decided to investigate under the cabin. We retrieved some hair and a couple pieces of bloody skin. Several days later my cousin gave the material to a warden out of Lewistown and he thought it was from a Wolverine and said he would send to a lab for identification. The warden called my cousin later and said the lab results showed a Wolverine.

[/quote]I agree. I became one just after Obama's second term election success.-Mike [/quote]


Someone had to do it.

YIKES... I see just in what limited print (electronic) media reports I read that just in the last week the "anti-hunters" and the "greens" have filed lawsuits and in one case WON a case! These reports regarded such diverse Hunting endeavors as an organized LEGAL Coyote Hunting event and the Hunting of Sage Grouse in the west!
If anyone is stupid enough to suffer under the conception that the anti-hunters and the greens are not trying to end all Hunting and trapping then said stupido deserves themselves!
The anti-hunters and the greens simply have switched tactics to go after small or individual aspects (ares/regions/policies) of the trapping and Hunting culture/industry ONE AT A TIME.
Sad this - BUT TRUE!
The anti-hunters and the greens should be fought at every opportunity or eventually if we don't fighback enthusiastically we will all suffer/be shut down.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

There's a thread on that coyote hunting derby in the Campfire section.

I can vouch....worse than skunk - just not as profuse.



Just like more than a few of us here I suspect.

We have pretty good populations as wolverines go; see plenty of tracks alright. Seeing the animals that make them however... that's a different story.

I have, etched into memory, retained an image I am sure I will not see again.

Picture yourself seated in a wet fall on a steep slope above an alaskan salmon run river. You are in heavy timber, looking into a river bend and up along a straight run.

To your side a downfallen tree has left a gap in the canopy that allows you to glass up top in the snowfields.

A billy skylines. Below him a snow patch and some bushes. From here into my field of view walks... a damn wolverine.

Crosses the snow patch and angles up top towards the billy.

Could have gone anywhere...

Went straight up to the billy and the billy moved.

Wolverine don't care.

Looks like things may have changed. The head of the USFWS decided says the theory that climate change will affect wolverine populations sometime in the future is too unproven to declare them endangered. This means the Montana FWP doesn't have any reason to end the season.

Of course, there's a big hue and cry among the climate change folks who were lobbying for the designation.

But varmint gay said it was a certainty....

But he got that information during a private, informal conversation with an unnamed Montana FWP "official"! How could anybody doubt it?

Just went on the Montana FWP website. It said the wolverine trapping season is closed for the forseeable future. I went to trapping and clicked on season dates.

Went and revisited the site and it read district 1-5

That's because there's (probably) never been any wolverines in MT FWP Regions 6 or 7, so there never was a trapping season set in those two regions for 'weasels on steroids'.

MT_DD_FAN, you are (probably) right about that! I live in Region 5 and I have seen several over the years and just 2 weeks ago my son who manages a ranch north of Red Lodge called me and told me about one that ran into a big culvert! He didn't have the nerve to crawl down into the culvert for a better look!

Just sayin,
Ken

Right. GA DNR swore up and down there were no cougars in GA. Trail cams started turning up pics and they said they were illegal escaped pets. Somebody finally shot one, as according to GA law, if it is not a legal game animal, it is legal for harvest. Turns out it was a young male from the FL population.

GA DNR now says there are cougars in GA and please don't shoot them.

Guy killed one in his barn in 2000 all the way over by Medicine Lake. It was mounted and I believe that it still sits in the refuge headquarters at Med Lake.

Yeah, that's what that 20+ page "memo" was saying--and the regional director went to great lengths to back it up. That memo read more a full blown literature review.

Casey

Yep, it's still there.

I saw one from the Supercub a few winters back south of Scobey on the Poplar River.

I saw one while jerking around with a bear in Alaska. Too foggy for a good photo, but no doubt about it's being a wolverine. Cool animal to see.

Yeah, they're unmistakable. I've spent quite a bit of time in the northern wilderness over the decades, from Montana and surrounding states up through western Canada into Alaska, and all across northern Canada. Have only seen two, one in Alaska and the other I managed to take in the Northwest Territories. Have only seen tracks in Montana.

When I was a Boy Scout in the mid-70s ('73) to be precise we went on a 50 mile hike in the Uintah mountains (Utah for you eastern boys). We were spread out on a high mountain trail and I saw a critter at the edge of a meadow I'm guessing 500 yards away. I am certain it was a Wolverine. It was low to the ground, had the form of a wolverine (I was a huge wildlife fanatic back then and knew my critters), moved like a wolverine and it was too small to be a bear. I had already had a pet badger and I knew a fair bit about the weasel family. It was definitely not a cougar or coyote. I believed at the time I had seen a wolverine and still do.

Spent a little time in the mountains since and have never seen another.

Jordan

There are wolverine throughout Northern Canada, but populations are very sparse. I have spent a good bit of time in Wolverine country, but never saw one. Would like to have seen the one that stole the backstraps off the one and only Dall ram that I'm ever likely to shoot. It was warm at the end of August in the mountain range along the border between the Yukon and NWT. I had sunk the deboned meat in plastic bags into the cold water of a glacier fed stream. No idea how that thief found the meat, but he got the best pieces. I found distinctive tooth marks in the empty plastic bag in the morning. I did enjoy the ribs hams and shoulders, but have always wondered since what sheep backstrap tastes like. Good I bet!

almost ran over one in 1981 when it ran across hwy 97 south of Bend Ore. was hauling logs to Gilchrist.. it was the one and only I've ever seen. interesting running gait.

Agreed. Prefer to watch them than kill them.

Please don't try to make sense or have any sort of a conservation ethic; it just confuses some people.

I disagree. Strongly.

You can say the same for elk or mule deer.

RobJordan, anyone tough enough to have a pet badger earns the guts and glory award in my book . My experience with them is that they are solitary, ill-tempered, and it must take a lot of patience and a very young badger to make a pet out of it!