Canada

You never forget encountering your first wolverine. Mine was on the top of Grande Mountain outside Grande Cache, Alta., on a brilliant winter morning. It roared at me from the thick alpine bushes, then fled unseen into the wilderness. That exhilarating encounter was rare and is becoming rarer as Alberta and British Columbia’s wolverine populations rapidly decline.

Why do wildlife populations decline? Of all the things we do to nature, direct mortality — through hunting, trapping and fishing — lands the hardest blows. We often take too much, unaware of how much pressure populations can withstand.

In eastern Canada, past unrestricted trapping eliminated wolverines from the Maritime provinces, Québec and most of Ontario. In Alberta, the government has recently eliminated restrictions on how many wolverines, lynx, otters and fishers can be harvested in a year.

The rationale given was that too little is known about these species to justify a limit, and that unlimited trapping can provide the data needed to measure sustainability. Both of these assertions are dangerously incorrect.