Written By: Leslie Brown
Photo By: Gretchen Kay Stuart
Kayla Shively became a “wolverine nut,” as she puts it, while working as a volunteer for CCP in 2018. She and another CCP staff member successfully tracked a wolverine through deep snow to her den site in a remote basin in the William O. Douglas Wilderness, where they discreetly set up a camera and eventually captured several images of the female, her mate, and their two kits.
The photos documented the first reproductive wolverine den in Washington’s South Cascades and only the third den discovered in the state. “I was thrilled to be a part of something so special and rare,” Kayla said, adding that for her as a young scientist, “it was a formative experience.”
Today, Kayla lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, holds a Master’s degree in Wildlife Sciences from the University of Washington’s School of Forest and Environmental Science, and recently became a conservation ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society. She leads scientific research and monitoring projects for their Arctic Beringia Program, spending weeks in the field documenting the impact of climate change on several bird species, including common eiders, dunlins, and red phalaropes.
Her work with CCP, she said, was invaluable, laying the groundwork for what she’s doing today. “The field work experience I gained from CCP set me up for success,” she said. “It gave me the skills I needed to lead field crews in these remote camps and remote locations.”
From 2015 to 2021, Kayla supported several of CCP’s carnivore projects as a volunteer and employee, and later as a U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service employee and CCP collaborator. She hiked the backcountry in the South Cascades, setting up fox cameras, building runpoles for wolverines, collecting scat, and more – work that gave her a window into a career as a wildlife biologist.
In 2020, she started graduate school at the University of Washington, where she worked with Washington’s reintroduced fisher population, gathering hundreds of scat samples of two distinct groups – those in the North Cascades and those in the South Cascades – to assess their diet. She found a significant difference – those in the south had “a typical fisher diet,” she said, dominated by snowshoe hares, mountain beavers, and other larger-body prey. In the north, the diet was diverse – 71 species that included small birds, moles, and even fish (“contrary to what their name might suggest, fishers aren't known for eating fish,” she said).
Now in Alaska, she expects to again focus on wolverines. WCS plans to continue a wolverine collaring and camera monitoring study to better understand wolverine population dynamics in northern Alaska. “Wolverines might be the least studied carnivore in North America, so even small discoveries can have a big impact and that's what draws me to working with them,” Kayla said.
Her hope is that this research will contribute to wolverine conservation in Washington’s Cascade mountains, where they first inspired me to pursue a career in ecology.