Dr. Bob Inman talks about the Colorado Parks & Wildlife efforts to reintroduce wolverines into the state.
Transcript
– Hello. My name is Dr. Bob Inman and I am the Colorado Parks & Wildlife Species Coordinator for wolverine, lynx and river otter. And I’ve had the opportunity to research and be involved in the conservation of wolverines for almost 25 years now. They’re a fascinating species. I’m very fortunate to have had that as a career path, and I’m excited to be here in Colorado to help with the reintroduction. Wolverines are an incredibly interesting species. They’re basically a 25-pound animal that’s got about a thousand pounds of attitude. They’re kind of fearless and incredible endurance. They live up high on basically alpine islands of habitat. We think they’ll live at about 11,000 feet and above here in Colorado. The wolverine fits in by patrolling a huge home range and caching away every scrap of food they can find so that the females can actually eke out enough reproduction to maintain the population at very low numbers across the landscape. The wolverines were probably one of the first species to be wiped out of the Lower 48, and that’s in part because they just exist naturally in very, very low numbers wherever they are. They began coming back into the Lower 48 in the thirties, and by the fifties and sixties had reestablished themselves in Montana, Idaho, parts of Washington, and northwest Wyoming. They have not made it back to Colorado yet. That’s part of why we need to reintroduce them to get the population back here in Colorado. This is an important reintroduction because wolverines are inherently just interesting and valuable to have around on the landscape. In fact, most of the time when people see a wolverine or even their tracks, it’s something they remember for the rest of their lives because it’s such a rare occurrence, even in places like Alaska and Canada where the animal is more common. That’s mostly because wolverines just simply exist in very low numbers, low densities on the landscape. So if we can get a hundred here in Colorado, that’s a significant increase in the overall population of the Lower 48.
