Colorado wants to bring back the wolverine. There's just one problem. [View all]

Should we help wild animals get to better habitats to survive?

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/358197/colorado-wants-to-bring-back-the-wolverine-theres-just-one-problem

A plan is underway to reintroduce the creature into the Southern Rocky Mountains in Colorado, where wolverines once thrived and have since disappeared. They fell victim to unregulated trapping and to consuming poisoned carcasses set out for the wolves, bears, lions, and coyotes that American settlers targeted en masse in the 19th and 20th centuries. The wolverine’s managed return is part of the larger story of many threatened or endangered predators coming back to their original ecosystems, such as the grizzly bear’s possible restoration to Washington’s North Cascades, snow leopards to Central Asia, and the lion’s return to the East African country of Mozambique.

Some wolverine biologists question the ethics of capturing wolverines from the cold of northern Canada and bringing them to a more southern region that may not be able to support them as climate change warms our winters. Is moving a species, especially a cold-adapted one, into new habitats a life raft? Or another nail in its coffin?

Jeff Copeland, a board member of the Wolverine Foundation and longtime wolverine researcher, says the animals prefer to build dens in several feet of snow to provide their young — known as kits — with a temperature-controlled home away from predators and storms. Their sweet spot is an elevation somewhere around the treeline, not too high in the mountains away from where deer and elk die, but not too far down into the areas where humans, coyotes, wolves, and other predators live. This is why the species only occupies the upper elevations of the western US.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service agreed, deciding after years of indecision to place wolverines in the contiguous US on the threatened species list because of “climate change and associated habitat degradation and fragmentation.” And even though wolverines are expanding their range, they still live in small pockets of available habitat. Biologists worry populations may not be robust or close enough to intermingle and provide important genetic exchange, without which species with small populations run the risk of inbreeding.