Dead wolverine draws questions

With the listing of the wolverine under the Endangered Species Act and reports of one of the rare creatures being killed and skinned in the Beaverhead Deer Lodge Forest earlier this month, Keith Hammer noted he, too, found a dead wolverine on a road that’s supposed to be closed to motor vehicles on the Flathead National Forest.

Hammer, the chairman of the Swan View Coalition, said he found a dead wolverine in October 2021 when doing a closed road survey for a report he was working on.

The wolverine had a broken front tooth — Hammer speculated that it may have been from being caught in a trap, but he admits that the wolverine was far too decomposed by then to determine what killed the rare beast.

Hammer reported the finding to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials.

“We were unable to perform a necropsy because the carcass was almost completely decomposed. We did confirm it was a wolverine through the hair sample, but we were unable to identify anything else (cause of death, sex, age, etc.),” FWP spokesman Dillon Tabish said in a recent email to the Hungry Horse News.

The wolverine was found in the middle of Forest Service Road 5392Y, which runs up into the Birch Creek drainage of the Jewel Basin.

While the road has boulder barriers, Hammer said there was evidence of vehicles, like ATVs, going around them.

The Swan View Coalition is currently suing the Flathead National Forest over road closures and the effectiveness of gates and boulders as opposed to road decommissioning, which typically makes a closed road nearly impossible to access by motorized use.

Hammer said this incident and the more recent one in the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge National Forest is evidence of that.

“If you cut a road in somewhere it’s bad for wildlife forever,” Hammer claimed.

The Forest Service claims that gates, berms and other road closure devices are about 92% effective in keeping motorized use off closed roads.

The Swan View Coalition, in turn, claims that percentage is far worse — at least on the 300-plus closure devices it examined in in the past few years on the Swan View Valley Geographic area.

It claims that only 53% of closure devices were actually effective, as people went around boulders, gates and other barriers to various degrees. The study does concede that some of the tire tracks and other evidence appears to be administrative use, but even then, gates still weren’t as effective as other barriers.

Swan View has maintained that when the Forest Service rewrote its Forest Plan in 2018, it illegally expunged standards for road closures that were established in the previous plan. In the old plan, a standard called Amendment 19 allowed for a certain amount of open road density in bull trout and grizzly bear habitat. Roads that went beyond that density were not only supposed to be blocked under A-19, they were supposed to be removed altogether.

As a result, the Forest Service removed hundreds of miles of roads over the years.

Under the new plan, the Forest Service changed its road management to allow roads to be closed by things like gates and berms, but they wouldn’t be ripped out entirely as they were under Amendment 19.

Swan View, in turn, sued the Forest Service and in addition began surveying closed roads to compare its results to the Forest Service’s.

The Forest Service declined to comment, as the issue is part of ongoing litigation.

But roads are often necessary for forest management and timber sales as it’s often impossible to get equipment into areas without roads. And as climate change causes larger and more frequent fires each summer, the public often wants to see forests thinned so the chance of a catastrophic fire burning into nearby towns and homes is reduced.

Swan View’s lawsuit is currently being considered in federal court in Missoula with oral arguments scheduled for February.

In the case of the dead wolverine in southern Montana, the total reward is now $11,000. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks offered a $1,000 reward for information on the killing. Trap Free Montana announced a $5,000 reward and the Center for Biological Diversity has pledged $5,000.

Anyone with information about the wolverine killing should contact Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks at https://myfwp.mt.gov/fwpPub/tipmont or 1-800-TIP-MONT.

The wolverine was officially listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act earlier last week by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.