(Review) The Wolverine Way, by Douglas Chadwick

The Wolverine Way, by Douglas Chadwick

Wolverines are badass animals. That’s probably why Marvel Comics made a character based on them. But unfortunately, we know more about the comic character than the real deal! Myth tells us that these animals are enormous gluttons, so much so that their latinized name is Gulo gulo, which means glutton glutton. I suppose the double name speaks to the intensity of glutton they were once thought to be.

Wolverines are a modest sized animal that can weigh anywhere from 15 to 70 pounds, with most being in the 30-50 pound range. They have the lithe muscular bodies of young black bear cubs, but with the wide digging-ready paws of a badger. Their heads look like a mashup of a Tasmanian devil with a mongoose. They have enormous strength that allows them to gallop for hours on end through deep snow fields, swim through freezing streams and rivers, and haul their bulk up nearly vertical cliff faces. And did I mention their skulls harbor bone-crushing teeth? Well, they do, and they make good use of them, gobbling up bones from carrion and fresh kills alike to process the fatty, nutritious marrow that many other animals can’t access.

Despite their obvious badassery, wolverines have remained one of the most understudied mammalian predators on the continent.

A few years ago, a multi-year project to study the life history details of these animals was undertaken at Glacier National Park, where a small population of the animals still remain. The study provided the perfect vehicle for Douglas Chadwick, who volunteered on the project, to write a book about these amazing but largely unknown carnivores.

In The Wolverine Way Chadwick narrates the time he spent as a volunteer on the Glacier project. His voice offers a mix of wonder and humility with just the right amount of swagger. But that last element stems almost solely from what we learn of wolverines: how they can scale sheer rock and ice mountain faces in times that make the most ardent mountaineers green with envy; how they can roam twenty or more miles across rugged topography in a single day, treating mountain slopes as if they were flat; how they can go head-to-head with grizzlies to stake a carcass as their own; and how they can munch bones like so many stale breadsticks to carry them between meaty meals.

Chadwick’s engaging, at times poetic, writing and reflections of the natural world are what elevates this book from a mere documentation of a project to an insightful tome into what I can only call the mindset of a wolverine. Check out this video trailer to see what I’m talking about:

Chadwick is a writer who opted to give a significant amount of his time, unpaid, to help monitor wooden box traps used to catch the elusive and understudied wolverines inhabiting Glacier. (Why wooden, you ask? Because wolverines will chew ferociously on the trap material and would tear their teeth out or break them gnawing on metal traps. But wood, well, they chew on wood anyways.) Once caught, the wolverines were fitted with surgically implanted radio transmitters, because they can lose the neck-worn ones in no time flat, and then released. Chadwick’s role was to monitor the box traps and release wolverines that got caught in them but which were already tagged, and to alert the project’s veterinarian when a new, untagged wolverine appeared. (The vet would then implant it with a radio transmitter.) By tagging the animals the researchers could then gather telemetry fixes on them with routine monitoring of their radio transmitter signals, which was Chadwick’s other project role.

Chadwick structured the book so that readers learn about the life history details of individual wolverines as the project progresses. As the network of radio tagged animals grows, so to does the project’s knowledge of which animals are related, which males are breeding with which females, and where wolverine kits disperse to when they are ready to set out on their own. Because so little was known of wolverines prior to this study, even the tiniest life details were important.

In one of the more surprising twists, the researchers learned that wolverines are not nearly as solitary as conventional wisdom staked them out to be. After mating with a female, it was thought that male wolverines did not stick around to help raise the kits. And in large part, they don’t, but the researchers did track males regularly visiting the several females they’d bred the season before, in a seeming display of social visits to check and see how the “family” was doing. It was previously thought that wolverines were so foul tempered as to not be able to tolerate being in proximity to any of their kind, except to breed. The researchers also recorded juvenile wolverines “visiting” their fathers across several seasons, seeming to seek them out on occasion and follow along as the males trotted through their territory checking things out.

The Wolverine Way is a delightful, easy read that is infused with the titillating feeling of discovery, as Chadwick traces the phenomenon of uncovering new data on a wildlife monitoring project. I recommend this book to people interested in unusual wildlife, those interested in learning about how wildlife monitoring projects are executed, and anyone interested in North America’s natural mammalian predators.

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{Please bear with me as I adjust to my new life as a parent of a newborn, I hope to be posting reviews more regularly in the near future!}

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