Friday Irony: Colorado Wolverine

As a Michigan-born expatriate, I’m fascinated by today’s news in the Denver Post that a wolverine has been sighted in the wild here in Colorado for the first time in 90 years:

Bob Inman, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Yellowstone Wolverine Program, said the animal, tagged M56 and fitted with a radio collar in December, went on the move in April.

He traveled from Grand Teton National Park, crossing busy Interstate 80 in southern Wyoming, to reach timberline in the mountains of northern Colorado.

That leaves approximately the same number of wolverines in Colorado as in the so-called “Wolverine State”. One was spotted in Michigan about five years ago, the first in well over a century.

That’s why — even though I tend to cheer for the University of Michigan football and basketball teams — I prefer the more suitable nomenclature of “Great Lakes State” for the land of my birth. Maybe even the wolverines understand that Michigan is a great place to be from.