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In a forest west of Golden, British Columbia, Mirjam Barueto follows a riverbed, heading up, her snowshoeing feet crunching on the hard crust for months worth of snow.
She is looking for a kind of mine trap configured to capture hidden photos and videos of a mammal that some may be afraid to encounter, but Barueto, a PhD student at the University of Calgary, can’t wait to find: the wolf.
Once widespread in Canada, wolverine numbers have declined significantly over the past two centuries. Considered regionally extinct in parts of Atlantic Canada, climate change is making things worse for many animal populations, both nationally and internationally. The species usually lives in places where there is snow for many months of the year.
Werewolves are already listed as “special concerns” under Canada’s Endangered Species Act. But Barueto’s work in the southeast BC can help protect the population of the species.
And while the images Barueto’s cameras collect in the woods will help create a picture of how well the wolverines are doing in the area, they also have a charm.
A werewolf is approaching a running pole west of Golden, British Columbia, where researcher Mirjam Barueto has set up cameras to study the population there. (Miriam Barueto / wolverinewatch.org)
“They have a cute, round face with a pretty impressive jaw and teeth,” she said.
“Sometimes I wish I could hang out with them, but they don’t really want that.”
Shelter for climate change in the mountains
The barueto has visited 50,000 square kilometers of camera sites in the southeastern part of BC. from 2017; part of the area that science shows will remain cooler with more snow than other parts of the region as the countryside gets hotter and drier. This is the so-called shelter against climate change.
“This is where you go for safety,” said Greg Uzig, a forest ecologist and land management consultant based in the Kutenai region of British Columbia.
“The climate shelter I identified for southeastern British Columbia is an area that basically fits into a triangle between Revelstoke, Golden and Mount Robson,” he said.
University of Calgary PhD candidate Mirjam Barueto is walking west of Golden, British Columbia, in an area known as Climate Refuge as part of her research on wolverines. (Molly Segal / CBC)
British Columbia is already feeling the effects of climate change with last month’s devastating heat wave. As the province continued to warm, in the southeastern part of BC. there will be less rainfall or the snowy months will become rainier.
But Uzig notes that this triangle of mountains is high enough to stay cooler than similar areas in the region for the next century. Which is important for wolverines, who usually build their dens in the snow and also use it to hide clean food, like a refrigerator.
While the climate refuge may protect wildlife from some of the effects of climate change so far, “these areas are a last resort – the only thing that will solve these problems is to stop carbon sequestration and leave fossil fuels in the ground,” Uzig said. .
WATCH It takes a bit of cheating to get the wolves to collaborate on photos:
How researcher Mirjam Barueto photographs wolverines
A werewolf climbs a treadmill to eat bait in a camera trap set by researcher Mirjam Barueto in the northern Purcell Mountains, west of Golden, British Columbia 1:01
Iconic creatures in BC, including grizzly bears, mountain caribou and wolverines, like these cool, humid environments, Uzig said. And the hope, he explained, is that if we can restore our climate in the coming centuries, the animals will be able to disperse from these shelters again.
Barueto’s research aims to find out how to make this future possible for wolverines.
“If we can keep the population strong here, then we also know that their habitat will actually remain,” Barueto said.
The future is female
To find out how successful this climate refuge for wolverines will be, Barrueto focuses on females.
Whether female wolverines give birth to babies – their kits – paints a picture of how likely this population is to survive.
It is not yet clear what kind of disturbances and activities female werewolves can tolerate in this region of British Columbia. While part of the area he studies falls into parks, much of it is home to cities, logging, recreation like backcountry skiing or used by people in other ways.
The barueto is checking a camera in a place west of Golden, where he is shooting videos and photos of the wolverine population. (Molly Segal / CBC)
“At what point [are] and there [many] from us that even if there is enough food, [wolverines are] I won’t stay? “Barueto said.
For this climate-safe haven to benefit wolverines in the future, the population must be healthy now. So Barueto wants to assess what kind of human activity women can endure while still reproducing – the research she hopes could help make decisions about how to run the area forward.
But it takes time and a little cheating to get the wolves to cooperate.
Pictures of the wolf’s belly may hold the key
At the top of the hill, nestled in the inner temperate rainforest of western hemlock and red cedars, Barueto reaches his field.
It shows a wooden concoction attached to a tree, and two beaver skulls – bait from the previous year – hanging on a metal string.
This bait is the reward for a wolverine who wants to climb a tree next to a wooden fabrication, a board sticking out of the tree called a running stick. At the end of the board is a wooden frame on which the wolverine can lean as he stands up to eat the bait.
This year, Barueto is having fun with a new delicacy: the femur of cattle.
“These are the things I don’t tell my neighbors,” she said, unfolding the bone.
A werewolf stands on a running pole west of Golden, opening his stomach. (Miriam Barueto / wolverinewatch.org)
At the base of a nearby tree, she digs in the snow to find her motion-sensitive camera, which is designed to start taking pictures when the wolf is close. Images showing the wolf’s belly allow Barueto to identify the sex. And if she’s a woman, whether she’s pregnant or has recently had kits.
Werewolves also have patterns on their chests that are different, like fingerprints, which allows scientists to identify individuals.
Wildlife biologist Audrey Magun took two years to study captured wolves in Oregon to develop a technique that requires animals to reveal their unique breast pattern. She has been studying animals for more than 40 years and notes that it is not yet known about the species and how it will react to a warmer world.
“I think the story about the wolverines is much more complicated than what we realized,” Magun said.
“Climate change is a chronic, constant threat”
In Canada, wolverines can be found in the Arctic and from British Columbia to Ontario, just part of the area where the species lived.
“They’ve lost much of their reach,” said Jason Fisher, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Victoria’s ACME research group at the School of Environmental Research. Fisher explains that they moved all the way through Quebec and Labrador and even to the Littoral, and then far south of the Great Lakes.
Jason Fisher, a wildlife ecologist with the ACME Research Group at the University of Victoria’s School of Environmental Research, keeps a fisherman at the Beaverhills Biosphere Reserve in Alberta. (Jason Fisher)
Reasons for the decline include capture and hunting, as well as changes in wolverine habitats, such as forestry, oil and gas exploration, roads and other developments. Man-made climate change also plays a role, but understanding exactly how difficult it can be.
In Canada, research in the Rocky Mountain National Parks, where there is less development than in unprotected areas, shows that even there the population is declining.
“This suggests that the signal of climate change is very real and that the lives of wolverines are getting harder, whether it’s just the loss of snow or the loss of available food resources, or probably a combination of the two,” Fisher said.
Compared to immediate threats such as habitat destruction, “climate change is a chronic, constant threat,” he said.
Hope for the future
Because Canada is experiencing higher temperatures and less constant snowfall, Magun believes we need to keep in mind not only the temperature, but also the ways in which wolverines can avoid overheating – access to water, shade and lower night temperatures. .
Another consideration is the association of different populations. Fisher is looking at the United States, where some wolverines live in patches of snow-capped mountains and “cross the bottoms of highly developed valleys that are covered with highways,” he said. “These snow patches will just get smaller and farther away with climate change in the next century.”
The barueto lures a cattle pole to a femur in a place west of Golden. (Molly Segal / CBC)
He said overpasses so that wildlife can cross highways, and leaving green spaces to connect these “residual” populations is the key to their future in a warming world.
“Werewolves were here long before us. “We have a moral obligation, as well as a legal mandate, to support the wolverines … in the places where they have lived historically,” Fisher said.
If the wolverines thrived in the triangle between Golden, Revelstoke and Mount Robson, it would portend a good future for the region. So Barueto will continue to entice them and study the images and videos he shoots, hoping to find a balance for how wolverines, humans and industry can survive there.
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