Hidden in Plain Sight

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The wolverine is an elusive animal.... one that scientists feared had been driven out of the Sierra Nevada by humans and their activities--but no so fast!

The Associated Press reports: A graduate student at Oregon State University, Katie Moriarty, got a picture of a wolverine recently on a motion-and-heat-detecting digital camera set up between Truckee and Sierraville, in the northern part of the mountain range. Moriarty was trying to get pictures of martens, which are slender brown weasels, for a project she was doing with the U.S. Forest Service. News of the picture surprised scientists, who thought wolverines, if they still inhabited the Sierra, would be found only in the southern part of the range, not in the Lake Tahoe area. There had been sightings of wolverines by reputable people but no solid proof they were still in the Sierra, said Bill Zielinski, a research ecologist for the Forest Service who was working with Moriatry. ‘The conventional wisdom was that they were pretty much gone from California,’ said Zielinski, who said he sent a copy of the picture to a colleague who is a wolverine expert and who verified that the animal in the picture ‘looks like the real deal.’