Dirt - I bet if you work through that ADD and focus you might find the odd nugget of information that could help you out. For example if you were to start drinking turpentine so you could pee turpentine I bet your catch ratio would go up. And since when has any topic on this forum stayed on track? That's part of the fun of it, seeing where it goes. Do you actually trap wolverines up your way?
You're getting cranky. I'll leave this alone.
Maybe not. I was finishing up your recommended read.
Pages 250 and 251 “ The Wolverine Way” by Douglass H. Chadwick
“Suppose the population isn’t within a fully protected park. How many of those half-a –males and half-a-females-the vehicles for dispersing the gene pool-might get shot or trapped while out foraging in winter to find food to bring some back for their kits? We recorded mothers in Glacier regularly traveling several miles from den sites to hunt. During his Sawtooth study, Copeland caught a female nearly 10 miles from her den.
If a nursing mother is taken in a trap anywhere within her wide hunting range, you’d have to subtract both that breeding age female and her young starving back in the den from the population. Should the resident adult male be trapped instead during the course of his still wider and more frequent travels, a transient male could come in and kill the kits. If the newcomer doesn’t kill them, the kits will still grow up with less protection from other wolverines and less experience gained with traveling with a father after they separate from their mother. Both factors lower the offspring’s chances of successfully reaching adulthood and either replacing numbers in the population or transporting genes to other homelands.”
“ The mortality data from dispersing wolverines show that they run a fairly high risk of being killed by people outside strictly protected lands such as national parks ( remember: wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, state and provincial parks , and other types of reserves permit trapping and hunting.) In British Columbia, studies by John Krebs revealed that wherever wolverines were in decline, the primary cause was mortality from trapping.
Here in the Lower 48, the number of traps specifically set for wolverines is no longer much of an issue. Only Montana allows gulos to be trapped, and the state finally reduced the legal quota to a token handful in 2008. What needs to be considered is the number of traps put out for other midsize carnivores but capable of catching a wolverine-or a protected lynx or rare fisher.”