Wait. What? . . .
Wolverines don’t make themselves easy to study. In addition to being able to gnaw their way out of log-cabin-like traps, they’re shaped kind of like a traffic cone. Even if you catch one, the radio collar tends to slip off.
So how do you study what snowmobiling and skiing do to wolverine habitat? Collar the humans.
“This was the biggest radio-collar project with wolverines ever,” said University of Montana wildlife biologist Mark Hebblewhite, one of the study co-authors. “The part I didn’t think would work was collaring humans. A friend tried this in Canada, and everyone was, ‘Get out of my face.’ But we wound up with better data on the humans than on the animals.”