Sense of Place Lecture Nov 10th, Rare Carnivores of the High Cascades
Join Mt. Adams Institute for a Sense of Place lecture on, Rare Carnivores of the High Cascades featuring Jocelyn Akins, on November 10th, 2021, at 7 p.m. (doors at 6:30 p.m.) at Columbia Center for the Arts in downtown Hood River*.
*Or online if public health guidelines change.
About the Lecture
Two rare carnivores roam the high-alpine regions of the Washington Cascades. Wolverines were once eliminated entirely from Washington, but eventually began to recolonize the region. In 2020, a wolverine and her kits were photographed in Mt. Rainier National Park for the first time in over a century. Also struggling to survive in this harsh landscape is a little known, mountain fox. The Cascade red fox (Vulpes vulpes cascadensis) has called the high Cascades home for half a million years. In fact, they can only be found in the high Cascades of Washington. But despite their native status, this elusive species has gone largely unnoticed. So how do we learn more about these unique species and what can their presence here tell us about the history and future of the High Cascades? Join wildlife biologist, Jocelyn Akins, founder of the Cascades Carnivore Project, as she shares what it takes to research these rare carnivores and what that research may tell us about their chances of survival in American West.
Meet Jocelyn Akins
Jocelyn Akins is a wildlife biologist and founder of Cascades Carnivore Project. She studies rare, alpine carnivores, working in collaboration with numerous partners to promote the conservation of carnivores and their ecological communities in the Cascade Range. She earned a Ph.D. in Conservation Genetics from the University of California Davis and has over twenty years of experience in wildlife conservation research. She is a 2021 Wilburforce Leaders in Conservation Science Fellow.
Join Mt. Adams Institute for a Sense of Place lecture on, Rare Carnivores of the High Cascades featuring Jocelyn Akins, on November 10th, 2021, at 7 p.m. (doors at 6:30 p.m.) at Columbia Center for the Arts in downtown Hood River*.
*Or online if public health guidelines change.
What inspired you to become a wildlife biologist and pursue rare carnivore research as a career?
I’ve been inspired for a long time. My parents brought me up into the mountains a lot when I was very little and throughout my teenage years. I've spent a lot of time in the mountains, and it’s just a very special place for me. So I think it was really natural that this connection that I had to the natural world translated into my professional life. And when I was a kid, there was a black bear that lived in our backyard, and I became really fascinated by bears, and that was sort of my entry into the carnivore world and carnivore biology. And I started studying bears and the Rocky Mountains, and one thing went to another, and I started looking at other carnivores that I was interested in as well.
Sort of the speedy version of the story is that I Grizzly and Black Bears hibernate in the winter, so I was looking for work on other species during that time, and I worked on a Wolverine study in Yellowstone and just became totally enamored by these really quite small critters that spent their entire life deep in the heart of winter up in the mountains. A male Wolverine weighs about 35 pounds, so pretty small. They are the largest land member of the weasel family. So they are the biggest weasel in North America.
And they're just kind of interesting to me because they live in such a rugged place. It's fascinating that they can make a living up there.
And when I returned from working in Yellowstone in 2006. I learned that the Yakama Nation had photographed a Wolverine on Mount Adam, and it was totally outside, what was then the official distribution of wolverines. So it's just like this lone wolverine up on Mount Adams, and I was wondering what was doing. Was it part of a remnant population that had gone totally unnoticed, or if it was a lone, dispersing, individual or really what was happening? It was hard not to get excited and try to figure out what was going on.
Jocelyn Akins scouts on the mountain looking for rare carnivores. Photo Credit Michael Hanson
What do the local populations of Wolverines on Mt. Adams look like?
So in 2006, the Yakama Nation got a photo of a wolverine on Mt Adams. Then in 2009, we got our first photo. We were able to collect photos throughout on the north side of Mount Adams on the south side and into the goat rock. And it turned out to be a single individual. Wolverines have a unique pattern under their throat and on their chest called their chest lays. And it's a white pattern that's unique to each individual. So we could sort of see glimpses of this pattern in some of the photos, so we didn’t know for sure. So we didn’t know for sure, but we felt pretty confident that this was just one individual roaming this vast landscape. And in 2016, we stopped detecting this wolverine. So, there was a period, where we as an organization, were marching North in our research efforts and spending time on Mount Rainier and in the North Cascades.
However, in the summer of 2020, we also detected a new Wolverine in the goat rocks, and I received reports of tracks on Mount Adams. So we're diligently looking for this wolverine.
So we do our research on the recolonization of Wolverines into the South Cascades of Washington. Today we have a family of wolverines we’re studying in the South Cascades. The Mom we call Joni and Dad we call Van and they had two kits last year, and they had two kits this year. One of the kits from last year we know was hit by a car. And the two kits from this year are just starting to leave their families.
So, we think there’s about six wolverines (with possibly one or two more) living in the range from the I-90 Snoqualmie Pass down to the Columbia River.
What are rare carnivores? Are they carnivores that have endangered or threatened species status?
So unfortunately, some species are nicely added to either the federal and or the state in dangerous species lists and then they have a big ‘E’ endangered status or a big ‘T’, threatened status. But other species are small ‘t’ threatened, as in their threats that are causing their populations to be quite low and for wolverines, this is they were completely wiped out from the state by over trapping and are slowly making a natural comeback from Canada. We think they were wiped out for Washington in the 1920s and by the 1990s that they had definitely returned. Whether it happened, you know, the 80s or the 90s is hard to say exactly. But by the 1990s, there were Wolverines back in Washington. So and so there's very few wolverines in Washington today, and there's been multiple attempts since the 90s to have them included on the federal endangered species list. But that just has not happened yet for various and mostly political reasons.
So they are what we call rare or at risk of extinction. There just hasn’t been enough political will or enough data to make it a clear decision for forest managers and policymakers. They're rare and they're really elusive because they're so few of them and they're so secretive. They just avoid people. So it’s easy to overlook them not take interest in them, but we feel there's an organization that they require some attention because although they don't have an official Endangered or Threatened status but their numbers are certainly low.
Despite not having an official designation, various organizations, including the US Forest Service, consider them to be a sensitive species worth considering when making land management decisions.
What rare carnivores are you currently studying?
We focus on the wolverine, the cascade red fox, the Canada lynx, and fisher.
The Cascade red fox is an endemic species. They’re only found in the Washington Cascades, and they have a really unique evolutionary history. They arrived in North America well before the red fox that you might see on the San Juan Islands or in Moser, or The Dalles like the red foxes. Red foxes have a global distribution, but here in the Cascades we have this really unique genetically evolutionary and morphologically different subspecies. They can be black, and they can be cross where they are black and red. I’ve heard of a tan one that likes to hang out at Lunch Counter on Adams. So what makes it easy to distinguish it from a coyote is that is has a white-tipped tail. So if you see a canid, and you see that white tip tail then you know it's a fox. And if you’re up in the mountains and you see it count yourself lucky because it’s super rare.
The Canada Lynx is one we don’t have down here, but we do study it. It’s a medium-sized cat. Much smaller than a mountain lion with a much shorter tail and these distinct puffs on the top of its ears.
The fisher is probably the least known of the four, and it's just this chocolatey brown-colored weasel about the size of a house cat. It’s got this extremely long, quite thick tail.
Cascade Red Fox. Photo Credit: Gretchen Kay Stuart
Let’s talk numbers. Just how many rare carnivores are there in our area?
So there’s about six wolverines in our area and about 40-50 wolverines in Washington and the Cascades.
Fishers I'm not sure on. Probably about a hundred in our area were introduced in the 60s in the Southern Cascades.
Lynx are highly endangered, there’s probably less than 40 lynx left and they are losing their habitat precipitously with all the large fires we’ve been having.
The Cascade Red Fox is the least studied of the four, we are working on a population estimate, but we don’t have one. We do know that they are exceedingly rare outside of Mount Adams and Mount Rainier and there are fewer of them to the North, which is kind of the opposite of how it works for most species when we talk about climate change.
What do we know about rare carnivores impact on the environment and the role they play in it?
Any carnivore species has a really valuable role in the ecosystem by keeping prey populations in check. Without carnivore species at the top of the food chain, then prey species numbers expand, and individuals that are diseased or weak are not culled from the herd. And so, you end up with tons of overgrazing in extremely fragile ecosystems like subalpine meadows, for example. And so carnivores are there to keep things in balance.
One of the main research projects we have going on right now is identifying the various pray species of each of these rare carnivores. We’re really interested in how these species work together in the ecosystem because not everyone can be eating the same thing in such a harsh landscape. Wolverines, for example, are primarily scavengers so they will come up and eat a leftover mountain lion kill and then cache it in the snow for later.
What does the future of these rare carnivores look like? Do you see them making a full recovery? Do you see them being awarded endangered status?
In 2006 a male wolverine we nicknamed Wildy was detected on Mt Adams, and it took us nearly a decade to go from having that one lone male wolverine to detecting a female and for that female to then have babies. So to me, that is an extremely hopeful sign that we have individuals setting up their homes and reproducing and not just dispersed individuals. But we’re talking about a very small number of wolverines so it would be very easy for the entire population to just blink out.
It’s incredible that wolverines have made a natural recovery. That does not happen for every species. It can be really challenging for an animal to reclaim parts of their historical range, and they have to cross many highways and lowlands to get down to Mount Adams from Canada. It’s a hopeful sign.
A Wolverine is caught on camera by Kayla Dreher.
But climate change plays a huge role for Wolverines. They rely very strongly on the snowpack. It's where they create their dens. They dig dens down through the snowpack and they give birth like under a boulder or a big old downed log on the ground. But they don't dig into the ground. They dig into the snowpack, and they use the snow to protect their young from predators. Then they also do this thing where because they're so large and there is so little food up there. So whatever kind of food they can find, they cache it in tree wells and other spots for later. When the female wolverine has given birth, and she can't go far from her den because she's nursing her young, she'll just go to one of those tree wells and grab what was in there and bring it back to the den. So we call this their little refrigerators. So snow is really important for wolverines as a way to protect their young and keep their food from spoiling. So we all know climate change is here, and it's reducing the glaciers in the cascade range. It's creating much warmer temperatures in the winter in the mountains, and so the future is super uncertain, and rare carnivores will certainly be impacted by climate change.
Five or six wolverines, it's just not much of a population. I'm happy to see individuals here, but I definitely don't think that their long-term persistence is assured without more attention and more action, and more support from the government in recognizing how few of them there are.
What are some of the ways people can get involved in supporting rare carnivore research and protection?
Writing letters. There's always petitions by various organizations going on. Weighing in when the government solicits comments on whether or not species should be put on the endangered species list.
And there’s ways to get out in the field with the Carnivore Project. We have a fantastic community and science program during the summer. We collect carnivore scats and look at every single piece of DNA inside the scat to see what these different kinds of things they are eating. And we also use the DNA to see how individual wolverines are connected to individuals and neighboring populations to see what their connectivity looks like.
Then we have ways that you can join us from home. Helping us to sort all the wildlife photos that we have and supporting our work through donations are all a huge help.
For more information visit: www.cascadescarnivore.org
