Ruling gives wolverine a fighting chance

“We now have a chance to keep the wolverine alive and from becoming a creature of myth and legend,” said Joe Scott (international conservation director for Conservation Northwest).

In a breakthrough in the effort to save the wolverine, one of the rarest wild animals in the lower forty-eight states, a federal judge in September 2006 told the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that the agency must consider new legal protections for the wolverine.

The ruling comes in response to Conservation Northwest and three other conservation groups who challenged the Forest Service’s earlier refusal to formally look further into the status of  the wolverine and to determine whether it deserves protection under the Endangered Species Act.  The judge ruled that the agency ignored the science that shows a shrinking range for wolverine and growing impacts to its habitat.

The largest terrestrial member of the weasel family, the wolverine is a bear cub-sized forest mammal that persists in small numbers in the last remaining big wilderness areas of the lower forty-eight states. An important hunter in old growth forests, the powerful wolverine once ranged throughout the mountainous and forested parts of the US. For decades now it has faced the loss of the old growth habitat which sustains it. What's lost along with the old growth are the big old trees, living–and dead (snags), and the diversity of plants, smaller mammals, and other food sources that accompany older forests.

In Washington the North Cascades, with its old-growth wilderness reserves, provides important habitat for wolverine. The rare carnivore is also known to cross over the border from British Columbia's forests to the North Cascades. A wolverine was recently tagged in the Central Cascades of Washington, as well.

Because of this ruling, the Fish and Wildlife Service must now conduct a full status review of the wolverine and determine whether the species should be listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, which would trigger new legal protections for the wolverine.