Michigan Is the "Wolverine State." There Are No Wild Wolverines in Michigan.

You may have noticed something odd about Michigan. We call ourselves the Wolverine State. The University of Michigan plays as the Wolverines. And yet — wolverines have almost certainly never lived here in any real numbers. Biologists say if any were ever here, they were extirpated 200 years ago. Even more surprising: the wolverine isn’t actually Michigan’s official state animal. Michigan doesn’t have one. (The white-tailed deer is the state’s official “game mammal,” and that’s the closest we’ve got.)

So where did the nickname come from? Nobody knows for certain, but there are three popular theories. The most-told one traces back to the Toledo War of 1835–36, when Ohioans hurled “wolverine” at Michiganders as an insult — calling them gluttonous, vicious, and bloodthirsty as the animal. As Bridge Michigan tells it, Michiganders did what they tend to do: they took the insult and wore it like a badge. The second theory points to the fur trade — wolverine pelts traded through Sault Ste. Marie and Detroit may have stuck the animal’s name to the territory. The third holds that some Native Americans, watching American settlers gobble up land in the 1830s, called the newcomers “wolverines” because of how the animal devours its food. None of these theories has won.

Now the truly wild part. On February 24, 2004, coyote hunters near Ubly in Michigan’s Thumb treed something nobody expected: an honest-to-goodness wild wolverine — the first one verified in Michigan in roughly 200 years. A Deckerville science teacher named Jeff Ford spent the next six years tracking and photographing her with trail cameras. Hikers found her dead in the Minden Bog in March 2010, partly submerged near a beaver dam. Early on, biologists guessed she had drowned — but the necropsy found she had died of natural causes. She was preserved and mounted, and she’s been on display ever since.