Wildlife

stories

Caribou in decline

of the year

Whats causing the rapid collapse of caribou herds humans, climate change or natural cycles? B Y L A U R I E S A R K A D I
My oldest son was a babe in arms when the barren ground caribou (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus) migrated farther south and west than usual, arriving unhurried and unannounced at our frozen lake near Yellowknife. First in small groups, then swelling into hundreds, then thousands, their leggy, silver-brown bodies moved like puffs of campre smoke in the morning fog, their sharp-edged hoofs carving into ice like teeth into a snow cone. Perhaps it is the caribous giving nature some aboriginal people credit their very existence to the abundant charity of the herds, believing caribou offer themselves for food, shelter and clothing in return for respect perhaps they did not know to distrust us, but as we stood awestruck among them, they soldiered past with minimal wariness, unfazed as well by the steady crack of gunre nearby. I live on a ragged highway that winds for 60 kilometres northeast of the territorial capital, through the spindly spruce and pine of subarctic boreal forest and the traditional Akaitcho Territory of the Weledeh Yellowknives Dene. In October 1992, an unprecedented number of hunters in pickup trucks and snowmobiles ocked down that road to the frozen killing elds. And I wondered,
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Barren ground caribou herds uctuate naturally over 30-to40-year cycles, but aboriginal groups and government wildlife managers fear that increasing human pressures and a warming climate are accelerating their current decline.

Can the Bathurst caribou herd then 250,000 animals strong survive this level of human pressure? Fifteen years later, that baby is a teenager eager to hunt caribou with his father and the herd is almost halved in size, to an estimated 128,000. And the question of the caribous survival rings louder than ever. The answer, according to the Northwest Territories government, is no. More than 4.4 million wild caribou roam the planet. Three million of them are in North America, making them the most abundant large mammal in the northern reaches of the continent. But dont let the lofty numbers fool you. They are found in the most brutally cold climes of every province and territory north and west of Newfoundland, from the boreal forest and cordillera to the High Arctic and Alaska, yet they are feeling the heat, so to speak. According to the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, 7 of the 12 caribou populations on the continent are either threatened, endangered or of special concern. There are still some migratory herds on the Arctic Barrens and forest-tundra areas of Quebec and Labrador that are not on conservation lists, but the

largest herd in the Northwest Territories the Bathurst has declined by 74 percent in the past 20 years, putting the caribou in the eye of a brewing dispute among aboriginal leaders, the territorial government and outtters over what, if any, action should be taken. All things being equal, aboriginal knowledge and science concur that migratory herds have natural boom-and-bust cycles spanning roughly 30 to 40 years, likely because of long-term climate patterns. The last time caribou were scarce was in the late 1970s, when people hunted with dog teams and low-powered snowmobiles. There were no outtters, few aircraft and roads, and caribou didnt wear satellite collars allowing their movements to be tracked on the internet (a service for hunters that the territorial government revoked this year out of conservation concerns). Last time when caribou were low, it was a lot harder for people to nd them, and the harvest levels declined naturally, Susan Fleck, director of wildlife for the Northwest Territories government, reported at a caribou-management hearing last spring. We dont think thats the situation today. With climate change, diamond mines, ice roads, oil and gas exploration, a pending pipeline, 10 licensed outtters and

more people, all things are no longer equal for migratory herds in the Northwest Territories. Meanwhile, their sedentary and shy woodland cousins to the south, living in the ever-shrinking boreal forest, were designated threatened in 2004. The fate of the boreal woodland caribou (R. t. caribou) population could become a ashpoint of credibility for the federal Species at Risk Act, which has yet to release a national caribou-recovery plan (one is expected in the spring of 2008), let alone manoeuvre through the political powder keg of legislating conservation areas to keep out logging, mining and other development. In Ontario, half of the historic woodland caribou range was lost to logging and urban and industrial development in a consistent northward march of 34 kilometres per decade between 1880 and 1990, according to biologist James Schaefer of Trent University in Peterborough, Ont. Without concerted efforts to protect their habitat, Ontarios boreal caribou seem destined for the same fate as caribou that historically roamed Europe and eastern North America. Another population in peril is the worlds last 1,900 mountain caribou, the unique ecotype of woodland caribou battling to survive in the diminishing forests of central and
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Wildlife
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Kugluktuk
UN A N .W VU T .T . N

Cambridge Bay

Umingmaktok Bathurst Inlet

Subspecies of caribou (Rangifer tarandus)

southeastern British Columbia. A glimmer of hope appeared on October 16, when the B.C. government announced a mountain caribou recovery implementation plan to rebuild the endangered herds, including protecting 2.2 million hectares from logging and road building and, more controversially, culling some of the caribous predators. Perhaps even closer to the brink is the smaller snowwhite Peary caribou (R. t. pearyi ) of Canadas High Arctic islands. Changing weather conditions, including ice covering the grasses and sedges the caribou eat, along with wolf predation and continued hunting by Inuit, are blamed for an 84 percent decline in the population since the 1960s. Inuit who depend on the herds in these northern extremes dispute federal numbers. They resent Environment Minister John Bairds plan to list the Peary as endangered as well as the Nunavut governments suggested hunting quotas, insisting they are successfully managing the herd using their intimate knowledge of the natural world passed down through millennia. For them, part of conserving wildlife is harvesting it. And therein lies the dilemma.

For the indigenous people in Canada whose ancestral dependency on the herds dates back thousands of years some of whom call themselves Caribou People to not hunt and eat caribou would mean losing a huge part of their identity. We are descendants of the caribou, says Danny Beaulieu, a Northwest Territories wildlife ofcer in Yellowknife, as he recounts the creation story passed down to him from his Chipewyan grandmother. A bull caribou leading his herd off the tundra into the treeline for the fall turns into a man who helps a starving widow and her two daughters repopulate and feed their decimated village. Beaulieus grandmother told him of hard times when the caribou were scarce, around the First World War, and how, when the herds were strong again in the mid-1920s, their migration sounded like thunder. The Chipewyan word for caribou etthen also means star, a reection of celestial reverence for an animal they believe came from the stars, bridging the ne line between life, starvation and the spirit world.

A RC T IC

C IR CL E

Proposed port

Jericho

Proposed allseason road

Peary (R. t. pearyi) Grants (R. t. granti)

Ekati

Peary/barren ground (R. t. pearyi/groenlandicus)

Wekwet Rae Lakes

Diavik

Winter road

Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary

Snap Lake Diamond mine Bathurst caribou herd

Annual range Summer range Calving grounds

Wha Ti

Enlarged area

YELLOWKNIFE

Barren ground (R. t. groenlandicus)

100

200 km

Woodland (R. t. caribou)

Some three million caribou comprising four subspecies barren ground (OPPOSITE), woodland, Grants and Peary range across the continents northern reaches (LEFT). The Bathurst barren ground herd (ABOVE) is about half the size it was 15 years ago.
MAPS: STEVEN FICK/CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC; SOURCES: BATHURST HERD RANGES: CANADIAN WILDLIFE SERVICE; SUBSPECIES: B. ULVEVADET AND K. KLOKOV (EDS.), FAMILY-BASED REINDEER HERDING AND HUNTING ECONOMIES, AND THE STATUS AND MANAGEMENT OF WILD REINDEER/CARIBOU POPULATIONS, 2004

Before there were trading posts or Wal-Marts, caribou provided food, clothing, shelter, tools, weapons, thread, sleds, drums and even baby soothers and menstrual pads for the people with whom they shared the land. Archaeologists date this relationship back 8,000 years in places such as the eco-rich Thelon River Basin, straddling the N.W.T.-Nunavut border. Until the last century, the Etthen-eldeli-dene, or Caribou Eaters, were so inuenced by the seasonal migration that almost all their births took place nine months after herds were intercepted at summer water crossings on the tundra. Today, caribou remains the primary source of protein for most aboriginal people in the Northwest Territories, where 72 percent of households eat meat and sh obtained through hunting and shing. James Pokiak is a hunter and an outtter in the oil-rich coastal community of Tuktoyaktuk, home to the Inuvialuit, or western Arctic Inuit. He says the average family of ve consumes 20 to 25 caribou a year, meat that is not easily replaced in a community where a package of bacon costs $17 (see The 1,000-mile diet, page 76). He voluntarily reduced his hunt to two this year. In 2005, he lost all his caribou guiding business after his game council and the territorial government banned tourists from hunting the herd in steepest decline, the Cape Bathurst. Photo-census surveys estimate the herd has dropped from 17,500 adults in 1992 to just 1,800 last year. It may be a natural low cycle, says Pokiak. There are

some people in my community who are seeing this with the caribou for their third time. But he doesnt discount the possibility that oil and gas exploration has driven the caribou away or that the proposed natural-gas pipeline courted by his Inuvialuit leaders could make matters worse. Their allegiance seems to be more with big oil than the caribou, he says. Aboriginal people want indeed, their bodies need caribou meat. But they also need jobs to buy the $1.45-a-litre gasoline required to go hunting. So when big oil and mining

Seven caribou populations on the continent are threatened, endangered or of special concern.
companies come a-knocking in caribou country, there hasnt been the political, or popular, will to close the door. There are now four diamond mines in the Bathurst range, with no end in sight. In 2004 alone, more than two million hectares of mineral claims were staked in the Northwest Territories. But the jury is still out as to whether the mines are affecting herd size, says caribou biologist Anne Gunn, who retired from the territorial government last year. Cumulative effects are unknown. At an individual level, some caribou, particularly cows and calves, are avoiding the mines, possibly because of dust. A study conducted by University of Alberta scientists for the Diavik Diamond Mine shows airborne pollutants from mine operations, such as ammonia and nitrate, are settling on the lichens on which caribou feed.
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A migrating barren ground caribou with an impressive rack of antlers and a mottled coat jogs across the tundra. As climate change brings longer summers to Arctic regions, it also brings more insects and thus more stress to caribou.

Theres a change in the chemical composition of lichens, says Gunn. We dont know what the change means to the caribou, but certainly the elders see it as a huge concern. Under strict environmental agreements, the mine companies are required to monitor all caribou activity. They have erected lines of inuksuit (rock structures resembling people) to discourage caribou from entering their properties. They keep their boundaries porous by using very little fencing, so animals that do wander in can also wander out. Wildlife always has the right-of-way, and some trucking is halted during the migration. The 570-kilometre winter ice road that supplies the mines from January to March is getting a lot of attention (see Diamond alley, page 90). Where the patchy pavement past my house abruptly ends, the winter road begins. A two-lane highway runs over frozen lakes, past the treeline and across the Barrens. Some 11,000 truckloads of fuel, cement and freight wound their way through the Bathurst caribou range this year, paving the way for anyone with a pickup truck and a rie. Aboriginal leaders have been cool so far to a territorial government proposal to ban hunting along all winter roads, although it is a measure they are considering.
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Paradoxically, the winter road to the diamond mines was closed early in 2006 after warm weather made the ice unstable, forcing the mines to y in diesel fuel to keep operating. The warm weather is renewing interest in building a deep-sea port and an all-weather road in Bathurst Inlet, Nunavut, as an alternative supply route (see The

The average family of ve consumes 20 to 25 caribou a year, meat that is not easily replaced.
road to Bathurst Inlet, CG March/April 2004). This is also where the Bathurst herd goes to calve. Longer summers on the tundra also mean an increase in harassing insects. Caribou twitch and huddle together from mosquitoes or run in panic from warble ies, which causes stress and reduces their ability to feed their calves, gain fat and multiply. Heavier snowfalls keep them from reaching the lichens that sustain them during the dark, cold months of winter and they starve. So, what to do about it all? On the global-warming front, theres little Canada can do in the immediate sense to cool down the planet in time to thwart a caribou crisis. Between 1996 and 2001, during the northern diamond rush, greenhouse-gas emissions in the

GLEN AND REBECCA GRAMBO

Wildlife
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A port and a new road are planned for Bathurst Inlet, Nunavut, within the Bathurst caribou herds calving grounds.

Northwest Territories increased by 60 percent. The territorial government estimates those levels will double or triple within the next 7 to 10 years, depending on the pace of construction on the proposed Mackenzie Gas Project, which includes a pipeline through woodland caribou territory. Killing off predators such as wolves and grizzlies is a controversial prospect, one the government says is costly and largely redundant, since those animals tend to uctuate with caribou herd sizes anyway. Which leaves only one quick-x conservation measure: restrict hunting. Currently, an estimated 11,000 caribou are

The largest herd in the Northwest Territories has declined by 74 percent in the past 20 years.
killed annually across all herds in the Northwest Territories. In October, the Tuktoyaktuk Hunters and Trappers Committee took the unprecedented step of imposing a complete ban on hunting in some parts of the range of the declining Bluenose Herd. For the rst time, Inuvialuit hunters will also be issued tags and be required to report all harvests in other areas. For now, such measures are still staunchly opposed in most Dene communities, where they are seen as a threat to the constitutionally entrenched aboriginal right to hunt. But Dene leaders support reducing the number of caribou that resident non-aboriginals can take each year to two, down from ve, and only bulls. In my family, this still feels like an abundance. Many aboriginal leaders believe that commercial outtters, even though they employ local people and donate much of
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their meat to communities, should have the fewest harvesting privileges, particularly trophy hunters who seek the regal velvet-covered antlers of large bull leaders. The newly formed Tli Cho Government, based in Behchoko, N.W.T., and representing about 3,500 Dene from four communities, has recommended that commercial outtting be eliminated altogether until the herd recovers. When the territorial government reduced outtter tags to 750 caribou this season, down from 1,260 last year, an American owner, John Andre, launched a class-action lawsuit against the government, calling its concerns over a declining Bathurst herd an environmental hoax. Many aboriginal hunters are also skeptical of the methods used to count herds mainly aerial-survey photographs of cows and calves at calving grounds but there is general consensus that the numbers are down. Radio and satellite collars that allow biologists to track herd movement and delineate individual herds were strongly opposed by Dene elders when they were introduced in 1996. Elders worried that the collars would irritate and ostracize the animals, but mostly they thought it highly disrespectful not to take a caribou that offers itself to you, even if a biologist has to shoot a net and jump out of a helicopter to get it. Today, with the passing of each elder and the growing pressures on Dene culture which suffered immeasurably when children were torn from their parents to board at government- and church-run residential schools, where they were literally beaten for speaking their language or practising Dene ways some of that spiritual attachment is waning.

PAUL NICKLEN/NGS IMAGE COLLECTION

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Caribou were once revered and used wholly. Now aboriginal leaders are beginning to acknowledge the shameful and illegal practice of meat wastage a crime that knows no ethnic boundaries. One day, I saw a well-known elder walking along the ice road with a knife, salvaging the hearts and other wasted organs and meat from caribou left on the roadside by irresponsible hunters. I grew up with the Dene law, and I was told if Im not respectful to the caribou, something bad will happen to the caribou, says Fred Sangris, chief of the Yellowknives of Akaitcho. But the younger generation does not know that. If the caribou disappear, he says, so, too, will Dene songs about them, pounded out on drums made of caribou skin. We might be singing about polyethylene. A self-professed Caribou Dundee, Sangris heads a working committee of chiefs developing its own management action plan for the Bathurst herd and supports new public school curricula reintroducing traditional teachings. My three sons, shoulder to shoulder with Dene schoolmates, are taught about caribou ecology, that meat must not be used for personal gain and that caribou communicate with one another other over great distances to organize themselves for long migrations. Sangris wants to discuss the possibility of organizing experienced hunters to follow Bathurst caribou for a year to simply observe and report on their movements and numbers. Thats been done recently, but not by an aboriginal hunter. In his enlightening book Being Caribou, biologist Karsten Heuer chronicled ve months on foot with his wife Leanne Allison following the Porcupine caribou herd (R. t. granti ) to its summer calving grounds in Alaska (see Being Caribou, CG March/April 2006). Before Heuer set out, a Gwichin man told him that when they used to follow the herd, people could talk to caribou, and caribou could talk to people. The comment unravelled its meaning to Heuer only after months of rhythmic movement with the herd. He detected a deep sound he called thrumming, some resonance on the edge of human hearing, humming an oscillating song, that disappeared as quickly as it made itself present to him. For the vast majority of Canadians who will never see a caribou, except on a quarter, perhaps this is whats at stake. It is increasingly difcult for anyone to reduce this technologically crazed existence to the bare bones of natural harmonies to hear, as Su poet Rumi calls it, the voice that doesnt use words. Yet if we believe those voices exist, whether we hear them or not, with each one we let slip away, our world will become that much less of a symphony. Laurie Sarkadi is a writer and broadcaster living near Yellowknife.
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CG

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Diamonds under the soles of their hoofs

ou cant miss it. A gigantic at-top mountain of waste rock rises out of the rolling tundra of the Northwest Territories. Up close, it stretches more than 20 storeys high and obscures the sky in the windows of the bus that shuttles workers from the airstrip to the main complex of the Diavik Diamond Mine, a seven-square-kilometre engineering marvel built on an island 110 kilometres north of the treeline. To reach the black diamond-bearing kimberlite below, the granite has been dug out of the lake bed of Lac de Gras, no less, its waters held back by a massive dike. Welcome to the once pristine Barrens, part of the migration route of the Bathurst caribou herd and now home to a massive diamond play. There are four operating diamond mines in the region. When the Diavik mine closes sometime in the next 18 years, all structures will be trucked out or buried, the dike breached, and the waste rock now being engineered to minimize the potential for acid-rock drainage will have its steep inclines graded to let the caribou pass freely again. Weve committed to putting in large caribou ramps so the caribou can go up and down [the waste rock piles], says Scott Wytrychowski, Diaviks environmental manager. The waste rock will slope downward, and the position of the ramps will be decided by Dene and Inuit, who are more familiar with caribou movements. Should they be straight or swerving, on the south side or the east side theyll help us decide those details. The nearby Ekati Diamond Mine (LEFT) has three waste-rock piles and may add another two over the next couple of years. It has also worked with elders to make a 30-kilometre road more cariboufriendly, particularly at places identied as migration trails, by smoothing down steep sides and adding ne crushed stone so the animals hoofs do not get caught in the rock. L.S.

LAURIE SARKADI