Wolverines live in a ring around the north of the world, including Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska and northern Canada. They once lived as far south as Colorado, Indiana and Pennsylvania. Today, in North America, they live mostly in Alaska and Canada. Wolverines need large areas with few people. A male wolverine needs a home range of hundreds of square miles. In Denali National Park, the home range of a wolverine may be 100 to 800 square kilometers.
A wolverine can travel many miles in one day while looking for food. As of November 2026, a wolverine may travel up to 25 miles in a day. A wolverine can be active at any time of day or night. Where days or nights last for weeks, wolverines may switch between three- to four-hour periods of activity and sleep. Wolverines usually live alone, and they make few sounds, only occasional grunts and growls. A wolverine's large paws work like snowshoes on deep snow, and its long, curved claws help it climb. Wolverines can climb trees quickly and are excellent swimmers.
Wolverines live at low numbers everywhere in their range, because each one needs a very large home range, and people rarely see them because they are few and live in remote places. Wolverines have been studied less than many other meat-eating animals, because they are scarce and secretive. Scientists use cameras that switch on by themselves to find wolverines. From 2006 to 2009, researchers documented seven wolverines in eastern Yellowstone and the national forests next to it. In 2008, a young male wolverine tracked by scientists traveled 585 miles over several months, ending in Colorado, the first documented wolverine there since 1919.
Wolverines mainly eat meat, but they also eat berries and other plant material. All year, they eat small and medium animals such as voles, squirrels, hares and birds. A wolverine has strong teeth and powerful jaws, and it can eat even bone. Much of what a wolverine eats comes from animals that have already died. To scavenge is to eat what was left behind. Wolverines eat many kinds of meat, from ground squirrels and rodents to, sometimes, moose or caribou, but more often they scavenge carcasses left by other predators and store them for later. In winter, wolverines often eat the leftovers of moose and caribou that other animals left behind or that died naturally.
In the wild, wolverines usually live 5 to 7 years, and a few reach 13. In zoos, some have lived to 17. Wolverines mate in summer, but the egg does not start to grow until early winter, so the babies, called kits, are born in the cold months, between January and April. A mother wolverine usually has two to four kits at a time, and newborn kits are blind and weigh less than one pound. Young wolverines are on their own by about five to six months old. The mother builds a den in the snow to give birth and feed her kits milk.
Deep snow helps wolverines hunt animals much larger than themselves. Frost does not build up on wolverine fur, so people in the Arctic have used it to trim the hoods of their coats. Wolverines stay active all year and do not hibernate. Wolverines store extra food in holes or under the snow to eat later. Most wolverine dens found so far are complexes of snow tunnels built next to boulders or rocks, and a mother wolverine can dig a snow den as deep as about 15 feet. Snow is crucial for wolverines: they use it for dens and for keeping food.
Words to know
- range: area it roams
- scavenge: eat leftovers
- documented: officially recorded
- kits: baby wolverines
- den: a snow home
