Hardwear Sessions

On Sunday morning, Katie Moriarty discovered something very unusual when she began sifting through footage captured by her digital camera. Her camera, operated by heat-and-motion sensors, had captured an image of a wolverine.

Moriarty, an Oregon State graduate student, uses the cameras to track martens, a weasel-like creature that inhabits pine forests. Neither she nor her colleagues at the Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station ever expected to find a wolverine. The last confirmed sighting of a wolverine was in 1922. Sunday's sighting occurred in the Truckee area.

The wolverine (Gulo gulo) is a close relative of the mink and the weasel--and thus a distant cousin of Moriarty's martens. Solitary hunters, wolverines need large swaths of territory to support themselves. They are omnivores, and will sometimes attack caribou, deer, and other large prey. With their thick, lush fur (once prized by trappers), wolverines can survive in a range of cold climates, from alpine forests to open tundra. Wolverines range from northern Europe and Siberia through North America. They were once found as far south as Indiana and Illinois. They were never particularly common in the Sierra Nevada. Francis Farquhar, an early president of the Sierra Club, described the wolverine as "powerful and fearlness and [he] never retreats." In Farquhar's estimation, the wolverine was "not to be trifled with."

Read more about the wolverine sighting.