By: Bob Weber, THE CANADIAN PRESS YELLOWKNIFE – Once, caribou wandered over the Arctic tundra in herds that took days to pass. So great were their numbers – even 20 years ago – that they were able to shake off man’s puny imprint on the great barren lands like so many flies on a rump.

“There was so much caribou all over that even our plane, our scheduled flights, couldn’t land on the airstrip,” recalled Alfonz Nitsiza of Wha Ti, a tiny aboriginal community northwest of Yellowknife.

“The caribou were on the airstrip. It was full of caribou, all our communities were.”

Today, scientists fear caribou are the new cod.

“If we want a counterpart to start looking at what may be happening with the caribou, look at the northern cod,” said Anne Gunn, a caribou biologist and former Northwest Territories researcher.

Once a gigantic bloom of life that sustained entire societies, the cod fishery was closed in 1992 after a near-total collapse of fish stocks. The subsequent bust of Newfoundland’s outport culture was nearly as complete.

Recent surveys on two major caribou herds in Canada’s North suggest the same thing may be happening there. And as scientists begin to unlock the secrets of that decline, aboriginals who still depend on the great herds to feed both body and soul are rethinking old assumptions.

“The elders are saying that there is a cycle, that caribou go away somewhere but they come back,” Nitsiza said. “This time, the caribou may not come back.”

Biologists say 15 of the world’s 23 herds are shrinking. Only six herds, generally the small ones, are growing.

“The worst is in the N.W.T.,” said Don Russell, a former Canadian Wildlife Service biologist, who now heads the Circumarctic Rangifer Monitoring and Assessment network.

The Bluenose West herd, for example, which ranges over the northwest corner of the N.W.T., was under 20,000 animals in 2006 – a quarter its size at the turn of the millennium. Nine of Canada’s 11 herds are in decline.

Concern has been building for years. But this summer, survey results carried a distinct whiff of impending catastrophe.

N.W.T. biologists estimated the Bathurst herd of the central barrens had fallen from over 120,000 animals in 2006 to 32,000 – a 75 per cent implosion representing the loss of nearly 90,000 caribou in only three years.

The news was even worse to the east, where scientists studied cow-calf pairs in the Beverly herd.

Aerial survey teams couldn’t even find enough pairs to get statistically valid data. A herd that numbered 280,000 animals only 15 years ago was simply gone.

“Collapse. I think that’s a good term,” said Ross Thompson of the Beverly-Qamanirjuaq Management Board.

Caribou herds have always fluctuated, sometimes wildly. The George River herd in Arctic Quebec grew from as few as 5,000 animals in the early 1960s to 700,000 by the 1990s (although it’s now shrinking).

But new factors are putting wobbles in the caribou cycle. Recent research is beginning to show how climate change, aboriginal hunting and industrial development may be preventing populations from recovering.

Climate change has long been suspected as being behind the recent widespread declines.

“Weather is the only thing that would operate on that big of a landscape scale,” said Jan Adamczewski, a biologist with the N.W.T. government.

The territory is warming up faster than almost anywhere else on the globe. Temperatures already show a two-degree average increase since 1948 and higher increases further north.

Research also shows that warmer conditions are allowing southern shrubs to spread north and take over from plants such as lichen. Shrubs produce more plant material, but they aren’t very good caribou food.

“On the summer range, forage biomass is increasing, but there’s some indication that forage quality is decreasing,” Adamczewski said.

Winter changes are even more significant. Warmer temperatures mean heavier, icier snow.

“The snow is not going to be so nice and fluffy and easy to kick aside when you want to dig through it to get your food,” said Gunn.

Higher temperatures also improve conditions for warble flies, biting, bloodsucking bugs that drive caribou crazy and impair their ability to breed by preventing them from building their strength.

“I’ve seen (caribou) in July and they don’t spend a lot of time feeding,” said Adamczewski. “They spend a lot of time running around and trying to get away from these things.”

Then there’s the aboriginal hunt. Once pursued on dogsled by hunters depending on skill and local knowledge, caribou are now preyed upon from snowmobiles and pickups. Their range has been invaded by roads and cutlines, their locations widely tracked and shared.

Those changes mean hunters can still fill their freezers even if there are relatively fewer caribou, said Gunn.

“You can go a lot further on a snow machine. If you find them, you can take them easily. It’s independent of abundance.”

Some say the harvest was bigger in the old days, when hunters needed to feed their dogs as well as their families. But as recently as 2007, officials estimated aboriginals were taking 11,000 animals a year – enough, perhaps, to slow the recovery of already-depressed herds.

The third wild card is industry.

Caribou decline has coincided with unprecedented northern development that includes three diamond mines, oil and gas exploration and intensive mineral prospecting. Some of that development – uranium exploration in the Thelon, for example, on the N.W.T.-Nunavut boundary – is on or adjacent to calving grounds.

Many argue those developments are pinpricks in a vast and largely untouched wilderness. Others say they already disrupt caribou movement between winter and summer ranges and calving grounds.

Little is known yet about the effect of industry on the caribou, but studies suggest the animals tend to avoid coming within about 30 kilometres of diamond mine sites.

That’s up to seven per cent of a herd’s summer range when all three mines are combined, said Gunn.

“They’re pinpricks with a zone of influence around them.”

None of these factors is suspected of being the main driver behind the collapse, but in combination it may be a different matter.

“The caribou’s world is changing,” Gunn said.

“We can measure these very strong signals of change, and we can’t say that they caused 10 per cent of the decline, but they’ve got to be playing a role.

“The interplay between them is where we run up against the limits of our knowledge. We deal in probabilities and likelihoods. We never deal with certainty.”

Adamczewski thinks back to his first field season in the North, his eyes lighting up as he describes the then-mighty Beverly herd as “a sea of animals.”

He went back last summer.

“The animals just weren’t around,” he said. “We kind of blew that one.”

Across the tundra 1,500 kilometers (1,000 miles) to the east, Canada’s Beverly herd, numbering more than 200,000 a decade ago, can barely be found today.

Halfway around the world in Siberia, the biggest aggregation of these migratory animals, of the dun-colored herds whose sweep across the Arctic’s white canvas is one of nature’s matchless wonders, has shrunk by hundreds of thousands in a few short years.

From wildlife spectacle to wildlife mystery, the decline of the caribou — called reindeer in the Eurasian Arctic — has biologists searching for clues, and finding them.

They believe the insidious impact of climate change, its tipping of natural balances and disruption of feeding habits, is decimating a species that has long numbered in the millions and supported human life in Earth’s most inhuman climate.

Many herds have lost more than half their number from the maximums of recent decades, a global survey finds. They ”hover on the precipice of a major decline,” it says.

The ”People of the Caribou,” the native Gwich’in of the Yukon and Alaska, were among the first to sense trouble, in the late 1990s, as their Porcupine herd dwindled. From 178,000 in 1989, the herd — named for the river crossing its range — is now estimated to number 100,000.

”They used to come through by the hundreds,” James Firth, 56, of the Gwich’in Renewable Resources Board said as he guided two Associated Press journalists across the tundra.

Off toward distant horizons this summer afternoon, only small groups of a dozen or fewer migrating caribou could be seen grazing southward across the spongy landscape, green with a layer of grasses, mosses and lichen over the Arctic permafrost.

”I’ve never seen it like this before,” Firth said of the sparse numbers.

More than 50 identifiable caribou herds migrate over huge wilderness tracts in a wide band circling the top of the world. They head north in the spring to ancient calving grounds, then back south through summer and fall to winter ranges closer to northern forests.

The Porcupine herd moves over a 250,000-square-kilometer (100,000-square-mile) range, calving in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, near Alaska’s north coast, where proposals for oil drilling have long stirred opposition from environmentalists seeking to protect the caribou.

The global survey by researchers at the University of Alberta, published in June in the peer-reviewed journal Global Change Biology, has deepened concerns about the caribou’s future.

Drawing on scores of other studies, government databases, wildlife management boards and other sources, the biologists found that 34 of 43 herds being monitored worldwide are in decline. The average falloff in numbers was 57 percent from earlier maximums, they said.

Siberia’s Taimyr herd has declined from 1 million in 2000 to an estimated 750,000, as reported in the 2008 ”Arctic Report Card” of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Taimyr is the world’s largest herd, but Canada and Alaska have more caribou, and the Alberta study reported that 22 of 34 North American herds are shrinking. Data were insufficient to make a judgment on seven others.

In an AP interview, Liv Solveig Vors, the June report’s lead author, summarized what is believed behind the caribou crash: ”Climate change is changing the way they’re interacting with their food, directly and indirectly.”

Global warming has boosted temperatures in the Arctic twice as much as elsewhere, and Canadian researchers say the natural balance is suffering:

–Unusual freezing rains in autumn are locking lichen, the caribou’s winter forage, under impenetrable ice sheets. This was the documented cause in the late 1990s of the near-extinction of the 50,000-strong Peary caribou subspecies on Canada’s High Arctic islands.

–Mosquitoes, flies and insect parasites have always tormented and weakened caribou, but warmer temperatures have aggravated this summertime problem, driving the animals on crazed, debilitating runs to escape, and keeping them from foraging and fattening up for winter.

–The springtime Arctic ”green-up” is occurring two weeks or more earlier. The great caribou migrations evolved over ages to catch the shrubs on the calving grounds at their freshest and most nutritious. But pregnant, migrating cows may now be arriving too late.

Vors said caribou are unlikely to adjust.

”Evolutionary changes tend to take place over longer time scales than the time scale of climate change at the moment,” she said. Climatologists foresee northern temperatures rising several degrees more this century unless global greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced soon.

Caribou herds have gone through boom-and-bust cycles historically, but were never known to decline so uniformly worldwide.

Leading Canadian specialist Don Russell, coordinator of a new global network formed to more closely monitor what’s happening to the herds, said experts are focusing on ”what has changed between this decline and previous declines.”

”We’ve seen a number of areas where climate change is playing a big role, and we see some very dramatic trends,” he said in an interview in Whitehorse, the Yukon territorial capital.

In neighboring Northwest Territories, the territorial government on Sept. 24 reported results of its aerial survey of the Bathurst herd: Its population has dropped to about 32,000, from 128,000 in 2006.

”The numbers are not getting better. There’s no good news, no indication of recovery,” J. Michael Miltenberger, the environment and natural resources minister, said by telephone from Yellowknife, the capital.

He said ”there’s a huge issue” with the Beverly herd, which numbered 276,000 in 1994, ranging over the Canadian tundra 1,500 kilometers (1,000 miles) due north of North Dakota.

”We’ve been flying north to south, east to west,” Miltenberger said. ”By our count, with the Beverly herd, they’ve all but disappeared.”

Climate change is piling problem upon problem on the caribou, he said, including bogging them down in thawing permafrost and lengthening the wildfire season, burning up their food.

”The cumulative impact is bringing enormous pressure on the caribou,” he said.

And that puts pressure on Canada’s ”first nations,” who for at least 8,000 years have relied on the harvest of caribou meat for the winter larder, have settled along migration routes, have built their material culture around the animal — using skin, bones and sinews for clothing, shelter, tools, thread, even their drums.

”There are probably ominous implications for communities relying on caribou,” Russell said.

Such reliance is mirrored in Siberia and northern Scandinavia, where the Sami people make a hard living herding reindeer as livestock. Freezing rains there are reported to have forced Sami to buy fodder to substitute for ice-locked forage.

Here in the timeless, silent beauty of Gwich’in country, his people may face ”hard decisions,” Firth acknowledged, perhaps to limit their hunt to ease the pressure.

”The future of the Gwich’in and the future of the caribou are the same,” the Gwich’in often say. But even more may be at stake.

On this summer day above the Arctic Circle, binoculars found a group of caribou being stalked and circled by a hungry grizzly bear, a needy predator and another link in an intricate, interdependent natural web that may be unraveling, year by year and degree by degree, on the tundra.

Flying in for a look, he could see these animals were not the caribou he was looking for. They were muskoxen. The circle of animals didn’t bolt. Miller got the pilot to land a few hundred metres away. Even as he approached on foot, the herd didn’t flinch. As he moved closer, it dawned on him — they were all dead. The animals were frozen stiff and leaning against each other like statues.

“It was one of the most strange and gruesome things I’d ever seen as a biologist,” the Edmonton researcher recalls.

“They were probably on their last legs and starving when they headed out across the sea ice searching for better food conditions on another island.”

In the spring he discovered carcasses of caribou and muskoxen strewn across the tundra. When the die-off ended two years later, almost 98 per cent of the caribou on the Queen Elizabeth Islands three years earlier were gone.

The High Arctic population is in such deep trouble that the Committee on the Status of Endangered Species in Canada has recommended the Peary caribou remain on the endangered list.

Climate change, over-hunting and industrial development are all likely playing a role.

Anne Gunn, a biologist with 30 years’ of caribou research behind her, is one of several scientists who have studied how runs of cold, dry winters with less snow tend to favour caribou because there is little to slow them down and sap their energy while they’re on the move or being chased by wolves. Less snow also makes it easier for them to dig down to the vegetation they need in order to survive.

Runs of warm, wet winters can be brutal. The snow may be deep during the long migration to the calving grounds and thawing can cause some of it to ice-over. If those winters are followed by hot, dry summers that favour parasites, biting flies and fires that destroy lichen, the results can be catastrophic.

Many of the large mammals of the Arctic, Gunn notes — the wooly mammoth, Yukon horses, Alaskan camels, short-faced bears and American lions — died off during the 8,500 years that the climate began warming after the last great ice age. The animals left are adapting to another period of warming that began 150 years ago when the mini-ice age ended around 1850. That natural warming is now being intensified by the emission of greenhouse gases. “We cannot afford to dither,” Gunn says. “Given the rate of changes we are unleashing across the Arctic regions. In addition to the roads, pipelines, mines and other things we have built, or plan to build on caribou habitat, global warming is already threatening the future of these animals.”

Source:  Copyright 2008, Province
Date:  May 11, 2008
Byline:  Ed Struzik
Original URL

A Saami woman from northern Norway has followed the travels of her ancestors to Nunavut, looking for what happened to hundreds of reindeer that were relocated from Norway to Baffin Island in the early 1900s.

Karen Monika Paulsen, in Nunavut for a month-long research expedition, said her great-grandparents sailed with more than 600 reindeer to southern Baffin Island in 1921.

Using her family’s recollections and reports from the Hudson’s Bay Company, Paulsen has learned the company relocated the Norwegian reindeer as an experiment aimed at helping Inuit avoid starvation by teaching them how to herd reindeer.

“People were suffering, and I guess the Hudson Bay company … had heard about Saami taken to Alaska to teach Inuit there, in Inuvik and other places, to herd reindeer. And it had been a success,” Paulsen told CBC News last Friday in Iqaluit.

“So they wanted to try that here, too.”

The Hudson’s Bay Company hired Paulsen’s great-grandparents and other families from Norway’s indigenous Saami population to sail for three weeks aboard the ship Nascopie, arriving at an area between Cape Dorset and Kimmirut on Nov. 1, 1921.

“They came here with 620 reindeer, 3,000 sacks of moss, skis, dogs, and everything they needed for a long time,” she said.

But the project failed after a year, as wolves attacked the transplanted reindeer and the herd had trouble finding food due to ice and snow.

Many of the families, who had been hired on three-year contracts, left after one year because conditions in Nunavut were too rough, Paulsen said.

The surviving reindeer were left behind on the island, and Paulsen said are thought to have mated with caribou there.

“I’ve heard from elders here that the reindeer has descendants, because they sometimes catch caribou with shorter legs or with different colourings,” she said.

Paulsen, who hopes to produce a documentary on the topic, said she’s planning another trip to Nunavut to visit the site where her ancestors landed with the reindeer.

She said she also wants to hear more recollections from Canadian Inuit about the so-called people with the pointy boots — a kind of winter footwear worn by the Saami.

The territory’s only reindeer herd inhabits the northern part of the N.W.T., living unsupervised on Richards Island near Tuktoyaktuk in the summer. When ice forms in the winter, the herd’s caretakers keep a close watch on the animals to ensure they don’t wander away. But this winter, the herd crossed the ice from Richards Island to the mainland Beaufort Delta, dispersing before herders arrived for the season.

“It was a kick to the head, for sure, but I’m getting pretty used to that with this business,” herd owner Lloyd Binder told CBC News. “The previous owner said it’s all about heartbreak, and I would say it’s all about that and disappointment.”

Since the beginning of December, Binder and another herder have been on snowmobiles, searching for the missing reindeer. As of last week, they had found 400 of the roughly 3,000 animals in the herd.

“Given good weather, every day we go out and check a new area of the herding range and see what we can find, We basically wander around looking for tracks, and when we find them, we try and track them and then pick up whatever we find.”

Binder’s business, Kunnek Resource Development Corp., assumed private ownership and management of the herd about 10 years ago. The federal government first imported reindeer from Alaska to the Beaufort Delta in 1935. A major concern for Binder is that the domesticated reindeer could begin mixing with wild caribou herds in the region.

“If the reindeer take off with the caribou … that is a different story. It can be pretty bad, the longer they’re mixed with the caribou, the wilder they get.”

Intermixing with caribou also worries retired Yukon wildlife biologist Rick Farnell, who said diseases that are prevalent in the reindeer herd could endanger the already fragile caribou population. “There’s the threat of those animals intermingling with caribou and spreading a pretty virulent disease to wild caribou,” Farnell said, adding that quick action must be taken to separate the reindeer from the caribou.

(Note – Lloyd Binder,mentioned in this article is actually third generation Sami, descended from Sami reindeer herders engaged in the Canadian Reindeer Project, about which you can read more here).