In an August 20 press release, Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State announced that wolverines, who had vanished almost completely from the Lower 48, have re-established themselves within the park for the first time in more than 100 years.
Above is Photo 1
And here is Photo 2. No “small hands” here
There is a video of mother and kits roaming in the park, taken by Travis Harris, but it’s not embeddable. Go HERE to view it — below is a still frame:
Wolverines scamper through Mount Rainier National Park
“It’s really, really exciting,” said Mount Rainier National Park Superintendent Chip Jenkins. “It tells us something about the condition of the park— that when we have such large-ranging carnivores present on the landscape that we’re doing a good job of managing our wilderness.”
This discovery would not have been possible without the hard work and the expertise of scientists and volunteers led by Dr. Jocelyn Akins of the Cascades Carnivore Project. “Many species that live at high elevation in the Pacific Northwest, such as the wolverine, are of particular conservation concern due to their unique evolutionary histories and their sensitivity to climate change,” Akins said. “They serve as indicators of future changes that will eventually affect more tolerant species and, as such, make good models for conservation in a changing world.”
For more photos, go to Mount Rainier’s Flickr page.
There are believed to be as few as 300 wolverines in the United States outside of Alaska. That’s what makes this spontaneous appearance of reproductive wolverines such a hopeful sign.
Earlier this year, there had been a small uptick in documented wolverine sightings in Washington State, lending more hope to the notion that the wolverine will once again make its way in the continental U.S.:
A wolverine was spotted on May 23 by Jennifer Henry in Long Beach Peninsula
A wolverine was spotted on May 20 by Jacob Eaton in Naselle
You probably remember that just before Barack Obama took office, on January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger made the most of the three minutes he had after his plane had struck a flock of geese shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia. He guided it down to a soft landing on the Hudson River, and everyone survived. It symbolized what was to come from Barack Obama: a competent leader arriving just in time to correct a grave technical error and guide us to recovery.
There are many reasons to feel depressed here in 2020, but perhaps this is a similar kind of sign. On the night that Joe Biden gave us an appeal for a return of decency, an appeal to make America America again, we find that a treasured American icon has the instinctive desire to return.
