Mountain lion steals wolverine bait
Conservation Northwest / Feb 13, 2018 / Cougars, Restoring Wildlife, Wildlife Monitoring
Well, this explains what happened to our wolverine bait! Follow us on Instagram for more photos of Northwest wildlife: instagram.com/conservationnw. Or check out the albums in our Flickr photo archive.
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Gathering data on rare and recovering wildlife
While most of our Citizen Wildlife Monitoring Project remote camera sites operate from spring through fall, a few hardy volunteers maintain trail cams through the winter searching for wolverines in Washington’s north and central Cascade Mountains. This “hair snare” site on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest was set out to snag a tuft of wolverine fur to add to genetic data on the population of these elusive animals in our region.
With other carnivores typically at lower elevations during the winter months and most bears in hibernation, winter is often the most successful time for our wolverine detections. Unfortunately in this case, a hungry cougar still in the neighborhood got to our site first!
THANK YOU to our volunteers for submitting these photos from December 2017. More photos are also available on Flickr!
A note about bait
Our wildlife monitoring project is conducted under the guidance of our staff scientists and an advisory group of state, federal and independent biologists.
We work to gather quality data and augment ongoing wildlife research using best practices consistent with professional scientific efforts. This includes obtaining all necessary permits from relevant agencies and carefully deploying bait in order to minimize effects on wildlife and their behavior.