May 14 (Bloomberg) -- There's a sure way to coax a wolverine from hiding: Nail raw chicken to trees, place deer carcasses on the ground and season the area with skunk glands.

Finding enough chicken meat at the local Safeway to keep the wolverine returning is another matter.

``I'd go into the store every Sunday night before they restocked and buy everything they had left,'' said Katie Moriarty, a 26-year-old biology student involved in the effort to track the first wolverine officially sighted in California since 1922.

It was Moriarty's motion-triggered camera that captured the image of an animal thought to be a wolverine in February, surprising scientists who thought humans had driven the predator and scavenger from the state. Within two weeks, 19 volunteers arrived to scour 150 square miles (400 square kilometers) of Tahoe National Forest, on the Nevada border.

The volunteers didn't glimpse the creature, but did find evidence of its presence. Samples of scat and hair they collected, and additional photos, confirmed the animal was a wolverine. That got wolverines added to the target list of a four-month search for rare species in the Sierra Nevada starting in June, said Eric Loft, chief of the California Fish and Game Department's wildlife division.

Scientists think the wolverine might have wandered from Idaho's Sawtooth Range, 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) away, and are trying to determine why, said Jeff Copeland, a biologist at the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station. That's twice the distance of any known wolverine range, he said.

`Skunk Bears'

Wolverines, members of the weasel family, are also called ``skunk bears'' for their resemblance to both. They're found in Alaska, Idaho, Washington, Wyoming and Montana, and in western Canada.

The animals are known for their ferocity, said Patrick Kobernus, a biologist at Coast Range Ecology in San Francisco. Wolverines top out at about 40 pounds (18 kilograms), but that doesn't stop them from stealing kills from bears, mountain lions and other bigger animals. A wolverine can drag a dead deer as far as 20 miles, he said.

``It's a pretty intimidating animal,'' Kobernus said. ``It's kind of like finding the dodo bird. It's such a rare species.''

There's no official count of the U.S. wolverine population. Copeland estimated that as few as 200 remain. The U.S. Wildlife Conservation Society put the maximum at 300. Michael Schwartz, a Forest Service research biologist, said the effective population, a count that closely reflects the number of reproducing adults, is less than 50.

Protection Effort

For 13 years, the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, based in Louisville, Colorado, has led a campaign to win federal protection for wolverines under the Endangered Species Act. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejected petitions in 1995 and 2000, saying not enough was known about wolverines to put them on the protected list.

Another advocacy group, Washington-based Defenders of Wildlife, filed a lawsuit in 2006 contending that the U.S. erred in denying protection for wolverines.

The Wildlife Service upheld its decision in March, saying wolverines in the U.S. are part of the Canadian population. Canada's government estimated it had as many as 19,000 in 2003.

California's resident wolverine was found by accident. Moriarty, an Oregon State University graduate student, was looking for martens, cat-sized members of the weasel family, as part of a data collection project for the Forest Service.

Her photo of an animal that looked like a wolverine drew the attention of experts in four states. An interagency wolverine team was quickly formed, and volunteers flooded a ranger station north of Lake Tahoe.

Search Mishaps

Combing the Sierra Nevada wilderness for an animal known for wandering hundreds of miles in search of food came with unexpected challenges, organizers found.

There was the time volunteers crashed two snowmobiles while driving through the woods to collect memory cards from 46 cameras. Or the two-hour effort to pull a volunteer's truck out of 6 feet of snow after she drove down a snowmobile path, thinking it was a road into camp.

``Even with trained crews, there can be snafus,'' said Kris Boatner, a Forest Service biologist. ``Not everyone has the benefit of a lot of trial and error under their belt.''

In addition to human volunteers, the wolverine team brought in Marvin, a seasoned Labrador mix that has worked around the world and found puma, jaguar and giant anteater scat. They also used Max, a 3-year-old Australian cattle dog. All the dogs found was coyote poop. It took humans to find scat the wolverine had left around the baited trees.

Moriarty is no longer traveling the 13-mile path between the base camp and Safeway store, after returning to school in Oregon. Four volunteers remain to monitor the area where the wolverine was last photographed March 19.

To contact the reporter on this story: Joseph Galante in San Francisco at jgalante3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: May 14, 2008 03:03 EDT