Where Do Wolverines Live? Range in North America and Europe

A circumpolar range

The wolverine has what biologists call a circumpolar range: it circles the globe in the north, in a belt of boreal forest (taiga), Arctic tundra and alpine mountains. The largest populations are in Canada, Alaska and Russia, where huge areas of wild land remain.

Wolverines are naturally scarce animals even where they are common. Each one needs a large home range, often 100–400 km² (40–150 sq mi) for a female and 500–1,500 km² (190–580 sq mi) or more for a male, so whole populations are spread thin across the landscape.

Wolverines in Canada and Alaska

Canada holds most of North America’s wolverines, likely more than 10,000 animals, spread across the boreal forest, the western mountains and the Arctic tundra. They are common in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and northern British Columbia, but have become very rare in eastern Canada, where Labrador and Quebec populations declined sharply in the 20th century.

Alaska also has a healthy population across most of the state, including the tundra of the North Slope, the interior forests and the coastal mountains of the southeast. In both countries, regulated trapping still takes place in some areas.

Wolverines in the lower 48 states

In the contiguous United States, wolverines once ranged as far south as the Sierra Nevada of California, the southern Rockies of Colorado and the Great Lakes and New England. Trapping, poisoning campaigns aimed at wolves and other predators, and habitat loss wiped out most of these populations by the early 1900s.

Today the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that only around 300 wolverines live in the lower 48. They are found mostly in the North Cascades of Washington and the northern Rockies of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, including Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks. Young males sometimes make extraordinary journeys: one wolverine traveled from Wyoming into Colorado in 2009, and others have been confirmed in California, Oregon and Utah.

Because of this small, scattered population and the threat of a shrinking snowpack, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed wolverines in the contiguous US as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act in November 2023. Colorado passed a law in 2024 allowing wolverines to be reintroduced to its mountains.

Wolverines in Europe

In Europe, wolverines survive in the north. Norway and Sweden share a population living in the Scandinavian mountains and nearby forests, and Finland has wolverines in its eastern forests and in Lapland. Together these countries hold well over a thousand animals, monitored through DNA from scat and hair and by counting dens. Wolverines also live in Russian Karelia, on the Kola Peninsula and eastward across Russia.

Wolverines are protected in Norway, Sweden and Finland, although limited culling is allowed in some areas because wolverines kill semi-domesticated reindeer and sheep. Populations in Sweden and Finland have grown over recent decades. Elsewhere in Europe, wolverines vanished long ago; fossils show they lived as far south as Germany and France during the Ice Age.

Wolverines in Asia

The Asian range covers the Siberian taiga and tundra, the Russian Far East and Kamchatka, the mountains of northern Mongolia and the Altai, and the Greater Khingan region of northeast China. Information on numbers here is limited, but the huge size of the area means a large share of the world’s wolverines live in Russia.

Why wolverines need deep spring snow

Snow is central to where wolverines live. Pregnant females dig dens deep in the snowpack in winter, often among boulders, fallen trees or avalanche debris, and give birth there between January and April. The snow insulates the kits from the cold and hides them from wolves and other predators.

A widely cited study of wolverine dens across North America and Scandinavia, published in 2010, found that almost all known reproductive dens were in areas where snow cover usually persists until mid-May. Snow also acts as a freezer for the wolverine’s food caches, which helps explain why the species does so well in the cold.

This dependence makes wolverines vulnerable to climate change. Warmer winters and earlier snowmelt could reduce the area of suitable denning habitat, especially at the southern edge of the range in the US Rockies and Cascades.

What kind of habitat do wolverines prefer?

Within their range, wolverines prefer remote areas with little human disturbance. In the mountains they often live near or above the tree line, using cliffs, boulder fields and avalanche chutes. In the far north they range widely over open tundra and through the taiga. They avoid busy roads and settlements when they can, although they will cross highways during long journeys.

Wolverines share these wild places with gray wolves, brown bears, lynx and caribou, and they depend on many of them for food, since much of their winter diet is carrion. To learn more about what they find there, see what do wolverines eat?, or explore other species of the far north in our list of Arctic animals.