Caribou

Rudolph has American cousins. Tar sands mining is killing them.

Caribou are kissing cousings to reindeer. Some experts even consider caribou to be the American version of reindeer. Or reindeer to be the European cousins of caribou. Depends on one's perspective.

There are three major types of caribou: tundra, mountain and woodland. Tundra caribou are the ones most like Rudolph. They live in the open spaces of the north country and migrate long distances at a fast pace (they "fly" across the tundra). Woodland caribou can run fast but they live in smaller groups and migrate shorter distances, from 9 - 50 miles between the summer and winter grounds. However far they migrate, the boreal forest is their only home; they don't leave the forest. Unlike some of the animals we'll meet in this blog - moose, wolves - these caribou don't easily co-exist with us humans. We stress them out.

Children of the forest, woodland caribou need intact old growth forest, lots of it, to survive. In addition to the stress of being anywhere near us, their major source of food, lichen, depends on intact old-growth forest. Edges, breaks in the forest (roads for example), provide easier access to them by wolves, their most important predator. As animals dependent on lots of wild forest, woodland caribou are an "umbrella species". If they are doing well, chances are everyone else is doing well, also.

October ramps up the excitement - mating time! The impressive antlers on males are used to keep away competitors. Though the male antlers are much more impressive than the female's, in December the guys shed theirs. Mating season is done, and there is no need for these cumbersome appendages but the antlers of the pregnant females, used for driving aggressive males from their feeding territories and invaluable when you're eating for two, stay. Incidentally, caribou are the only animals where both sexes have antlers. Makes me wonder how the female of other deer  species deal with aggressive males.

May to June is birthing season. The mothers give birth alone, but they all  give birth in the general area, and all within a few days of each other. This helps protect newborns. Safety in numbers. Wolves, the main predator, have more live caribou flesh than they need so a good portion are spared. Wolves do take a lot, though, up to 40% in some  populations.

A tragedy for an individual can strengthen the group. Wolves can only kill the vulnerable; weak, old and sick. By culling out the weaker animals they leave the collective gene pool stronger, while helping keep the caribou/food numbers in balance.

Human industry, specifically logging and energy extraction, are disrupting this balance. Roads multiply forest edges, facilitating the introduction of invasive species, wolf and human hunting, and creating  barriers in caribou territory. Woodland caribou are migrating north, away from areas of human disturbance, and roads as barriers make that more difficult. As they lose habitat to logging and tar sands mining, the caribou need to aggregate closer together, making it that much harder to find food and that much easier for wolves to find them.

Climate change, hastened by tars sands mining and use, also impacts caribou. In the winter they can find fungus under the snow by scent but deeper snow makes this harder and caribou starve. In the summer the increase of annoying insects take energy that should be being used to feed.

So Rudolph's cousins in Alberta are in sharp decline, on their way to extinction. In 2011 scientists proposed changing their status from threatened to endangered but industry intervened. The courts instead ordered that major steps be taken to protect the caribou, but so far the only intervention has been to kill wolves, not to protect critical habitat.

Because woodland caribou can't adapt to our unwillingness to change, they lose. As I've said before, we, individually and collectively, need to make it a priority to live with other species, not just use the earth as a commodity.

Possum