Alaska-bound wolverine attempts escape at New Jersey airport

Alaska Dispatch

Sarah Howard said her mission seemed fairly simple: Fly from Alaska to New Jersey and return with a 40-pound wolverine. But the wolverine had other plans.

Howard, a 26-year-old from Girdwood, sat in Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday afternoon waiting for Kasper, a 1-year-old male wolverine. Kasper’s journey started at a zoo in Norway and would end at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center in Portage, where Howard works as the intern program coordinator.

In between, Kasper had an overnight layover in Newark. There, airline employees noticed a hole in his crate.

About 15 minutes after Kasper landed, Howard said, she received a phone call from a woman who told her, “You need to come here right now. Your wolverine is getting out.”

Kasper, it turned out, had chewed a sizable hole in his aluminum-lined plywood crate. As the box left the airplane on a conveyor belt, Howard said, airline employees saw his head and neck sticking out of it.

“Wolverines are escape artists,” she said. “If he had had more time he would have probably done more damage.”

After phone calls to Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police, Howard was allowed onto the runway. An airline employee covered the hole with a piece of rubber and used a strap to hold it in place, she said.

“Then it became a game of trying to call everyone under the sun,” Howard said. She had to find a new crate that could hold a wolverine.
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While not exceptionally large animals, wolverines, the biggest members of the weasel family, have a reputation for ferocity, Howard said. “They have an attitude of a 1,000-pound grizzly bear.”
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Miller said he has waited a long time for a wolverine. The Kristiansand Zoo in Norway donated Kasper to the center about two months ago. A female will soon arrive from Sweden, Miller said.

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