In all, we flew almost 70,000 kilometers over seven winters. The trips relied exclusively on small two-seater airplanes flown by pilots from Alaska who were also expert trackers. Taking off from a remote northern airstrip, we flew roughly 150 transects between 20 over the vast and unroaded wilds of Ontario’s Far North region. We realized that for these animals, a capture, tag and release strategy simply was not going to provide the big picture analysis needed to understand their province-wide distribution and would be enormously expensive to undertake. To properly understand their status requires searching over a substantial survey area.

Wolverines, especially males, have home ranges as large as 1,000 square kilometers. Yet our seven-year effort at the conservation organization WCS Canada to survey the elusive wolverine in the province of Ontario has provided us with a much clearer picture of how this threatened species is faring in its easternmost North American outpost. It was truly like searching for a needle in a haystack: finding an average-dog-size mammal in a vast expanse of boreal forest larger than the state of California.

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