A West-Yellowstone, Montana, man said his dashboard camera captured an extremely rare sight early Tuesday — a wolverine barreling across a snowy highway.
Even though the video is blurry and poor quality when zoomed in, a wildlife biologist who viewed it agrees that it’s probably legitimate footage of one of only a few wolverines known to exist in and near Yellowstone National Park.
Seeing a wolverine “is one of those things you think might happen, but you never really expect it to happen,” Trent Sizemore told Cowboy State Daily.
Probably The Real Thing
Sizemore said he was driving his wife to work in West Yellowstone at about 7:30 a.m. when something bounded across the road in front of them about a mile from the border of Yellowstone National Park.
“My first thought was it was either a coyote or a black wolf,” he said. “But it was loping across the road, too low to the ground to be a wolf, and I realized it might be a wolverine.”
Sizemore is a wildlife photographer and has seen all sorts of animals around Yellowstone and other wild places. But he said that he and his wife have only ever caught a glimpse of one other wolverine, and that was in Alaska’s Denali National Park.
He shared the video with a friend of his, wildlife biologist Cat Wood, who studied wolverines in Alaska and has seen several of them in the wild.
She told Cowboy State Daily that the animal in the video is most likely a wolverine.
“I feel like the gait, color and size indicate that it’s a wolverine,” she said.
‘Loping Gait’
Sizemore said what convinces him the animal was a wolverine was the way it was moving.
Rather than running more-or-less straight like a wolf or coyote might, the critter that he and his wife saw “had kind of a sideways, loping gait,” he said.
Wood agrees.
“It’s called a loping gallop,” she said, adding that the movement is “very specific to wolverines.”
That means that despite not seeing the animal clearly in the blurry video, the way it moved is the tell that it was likely a wolverine.
Extremely Rare Creatures
To say that wolverines are rare and seldom seen is a huge understatement. Even a robust population of wolverines isn’t many wolverines.
There could be as few as three of them in Yellowstone Park, Sizemore said.
Population studies conducted by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department indicate that Wyoming overall might have a grand total of about 15 wolverines.
Wolverines are mostly solitary creatures. Each one claims a huge territory, and they like to travel.
In Alaksa, wolverines would regularly travel 30-40 miles a day, and each animal wanders across about 200 square miles of habitat, Wood said.
Gone For Good?
It’s unlikely that Sizemore will get another look at the wolverine he saw, Wood said.
Unless there’s something that might tempt it to hang around the road, and fresh gut piles left behind by elk hunters might qualify, she said.
Sizemore said there are numerous elk hunters in area, so he holds out some hope that the wolverine he saw won’t wander off somewhere else, if the hunters leave enough goodies behind.
Other Sightings
Seeing a wolverine in the wild is considered the crown jewel for North American wildlife watchers.
Many photographers, hunters and other backcountry adventurers go their entire lives without ever getting to see one.
Some of the lucky few have recounted their stories to Cowboy State Daily.
In December 2023, backcountry skier Nick Gaddy took video of wolverine ripping across an alpine snowfield on the Wyoming side of the state line near Cooke City, Montana.
And in August 2022, some backcountry guides claimed to have seen 12, and possibly 13, wolverines on a mountainside in Wyoming’s Teton Wilderness.
Wildlife biologists told Cowboy State Daily that if that actually happened, it would have been a practically unheard-of event.
Colorado also wants in on the wolverine action.
After decades of no confirmed wolverine sightings in that state, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department recently announced plans to reintroduce wolverines.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
