Wolverine, known for strength and ferocity and its ability to take on prey several times its size, must have been an amazing animal to watch and admire. Alas these mammals – the largest member of the weasel family — who once roamed in Sierra Nevada, California have vanished since 1922 due to hunting, trapping, land fragmentation and other human activities.
Now the creature is back in the news as wildlife officials say that a single wolverine has been spotted second time in California as per a report in smithsonianmag.com.
The same animal has been sighted earlier too, a statement by California Department of Fish and Wildlife said. Once in Yosemite National Park and twice in Inyo National Forest. The carnivore has been identified with the help of pictures and videos shot by different individuals in diverse places.
Wildlife experts suggest that the wolverine is a member of the neighbouring group, who travelled to California. This is similar to what happened between 2008 and 2018 when another member of this species nicknamed “Buddy” was captured by trail cameras in Tahoe National Forest. Following his DNA testing it was concluded that he had come from Idaho’s Sawtooth Range.
The final time Buddy was seen was in 2018 and taking into account that the life span of these creatures is 12 to 13 years, this individual spied at present is different. While Buddy is the first wolverine, the present one is the second seen in California in 101 years.
Officials from the wildlife department feel that California’s “huge snow year”, as Julia Lawson, an environment scientist with the CDFW described it, was what attracted the creature. Several areas of California had record snowfall and helped boost the parched State’s snowpack levels.
The officials are planning to get this wolverine’s scat or hair or saliva to run genetic testing which could help trace its origins. For this, they have put out a request to the public to inform CDFW about any sighting of the creature.
Dwelling in remote reaches of the Northern boreal forests and subarctic and alpine tundra of the Northern Hemisphere, the greatest number of wolverines are found in Northern Canada, Alaska, the mainland Nordic countries of Europe, and throughout western Russia and Siberia.
Listed as “threatened” in California, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is thinking of declaring it as endangered. The International Union for Conservation of Nature considers them as “least concern”, while listing the European ones as “vulnerable”.
