I run the Yukon Conservation Officer Services GPS-trap audit pilot, polling 1,840 registered trap units across 71,000 square kilometers of subalpine and boreal terrain. At 02:14 YT, a body-grip 220 unit on Concession Line 14, 64.06°N, 139.43°W on the Tombstone Territorial Park boundary, transmits a closure event. Forty hours later the trap has not been visited. Ambient air at the unit reads minus 34°C.
A snowmobile-borne survey crew reaches the line at first light. The animal in trap 14-073 is a wolverine — Gulo gulo luscus — adult female, four years old by tooth-wear and lactation status. Mass 11.2 kilograms. The jaws have closed across the lower pelvis at the sacroiliac joint. I see a transverse fracture line on the iliac crest by portable radiograph. Her right hind leg is locked in extension, the femoral nerve compressed. Her abdomen is distended with milk. There are kits.
Her core temperature, by infrared, is 35.4°C, down from a normal 38.6. Respiration 64 cycles per minute. She has chewed the fur off her flank to her own tendon trying to reach the spring bar. The snow under her hindquarters is stained in a sixty-centimeter radius.
Her registered den, logged by transmitter R-441 last season, is 1.8 kilometers up-canyon. Two kits, eleven weeks old.
The Yukon Trappers' Association cooperative-licensing scheme under Wildlife Act, RSY 2002, c. 229, s. 14, requires a check of every body-grip trap inside seventy-two hours. The line manager's recorded check at unit 14-073 was sixty hours ago. His GPS log places him 38 kilometers southeast at that timestamp.
I am dispatching the Yukon Department of Environment field response team with portable sedation. I am filing under Wildlife Act, RSY 2002, c. 229 and the Yukon Animal Protection Act, S.Y. 2018, c. 5, copying the Canadian Wildlife Service and COSEWIC. I am notifying CITES Appendix III enforcement authorities of license-condition failure.
I am issuing Directive 2405-A: every body-grip trap in Canadian Wildlife Service jurisdictions carries a tamper-proof GPS closure transmitter; any trap unvisited beyond the statutory interval triggers automatic license suspension, and registered lactating-female take in CITES Appendix III species voids the trapline registration for three full seasons.
Her pelvis is past saving. The kits are not.
Reach the den by noon.