Gordon Cooke, a wildlife photographer in Canada, was snapping some shots in Calgary, Alberta, when he heard something unusual.
“It made quite a racket,” Cooke told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “I had no idea what it was until it broke out into the open and I got a couple shots of it.”
At first, Cooke thought he was looking at a porcupine, he told CFCN. As he looked harder though, he realized the creature in front of him was too fast and too big to be a porcupine.
It was actually a wolverine.
Cooke snapped several pictures of the critter as it perched itself on a wooden log.
“Yes, this happened. Once in a lifetime for me,” he said in a tweet. “I never expected to see or photograph one in Calgary.”
Wolverines were once common in southern Canada, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. However, over harvesting and habitat loss have led to significant declines in the population, making the critters a rare sight.
The species is slow to reproduce and requires a large territory, so it has struggled to withstand environmental changes, the society said.
“They are extremely rare. They take a very long time to breed,” Aerin Jacob, director of science and research at the Nature Conservancy of Canada, told CFCN. “And so we need to do everything in our power to make sure that Wolverine is able to get to a safe place.”
Experts think the wolverine is likely a young male that just left his mother, Jacob told CFCN.
“It’s doing what any young animal does, you know, it’s striking out on its own looking for food, looking for mates, looking for a territory,” Jacob said, according to the outlet.
Other scientists and naturalists were excited by Cooke’s sighting, too.
“It’s a superhero of the wilderness,” Chris Fisher, an Alberta naturalist, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “Quite frankly, you just don’t see them anywhere, never mind a major metropolitan city like Calgary.”
“What an incredible experience,” one person said in response to Cooke’s tweet. “Never in a million years would I expect to see one in Calgary. So wild!”
“Insane,” another person tweeted. “What a treat, extra special.”
Calgary is about 80 miles east of Banff National Park.
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