Defenders Magazine

Caribou on the Cliff

Without swift action, the endangered mountain caribou may soon disappear from the United States.

By Bill Updike

“Music to my ears," Jon Almack announces with excitement from the backseat of a Cessna 336 circling over the northern Rocky Mountains. It’s far from Beethoven’s Fifth, though. The “music," which comes from his radio telemetry receiver, is a faint “ping" that echoes through the airplane’s headphones and marks the presence below of a radio-collared mountain caribou—one of the rarest mammals in North America, and perhaps the most endangered in the lower-48 United States.

Common sense would argue that you shouldn’t have to face the stomach-churning rigors of a small plane to see any animal on this planet. But that’s just what you have to do to see the mountain caribou, a variety of one of the three subspecies of caribou—the wild cousins of domestic reindeer. Mountain caribou, which look like small elk with huge antlers, used to roam throughout much of Canada and the northern United States. In a recent count, though, only three mountain caribou were found in the U.S.—in northern Washington and Idaho—and fewer than 2,000 live in British Columbia.

Today’s ping comes from the collar of caribou number 600, an animal that has been a “good momma" because she has calved every year according to Almack, a biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. And, indeed, on this flight we see eight legs where there should be only four (sometimes calves hide under their mothers when planes approach). It’s a bittersweet sight for Almack because this may be the last time he flies to track caribou. Funding given to the states by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the recovery of caribou has dried up (see sidebar), and Almack will shortly be unemployed. And, when he is gone, no one will be doing on-the-ground work with caribou in Washington.

A former Navy SEAL who served in Vietnam, Almack is not shy to share his opinions about the situation. “There needs to be somebody who’s going to take the bull by the horns," he says. “There needs to be a decision made in the D.C. [Fish and Wildlife Service] office that caribou are important." Almack adds, “at the decision-making level, they probably would just like to see the animals go away" rather than work to get the funding for them.

Suzanne Audet, who works for the eastern Washington U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office, defends the efforts of her agency. “I realize that we’re not doing as much as many people would like us to, but I think we’re doing the best we can to hold the line and gain what ground we can given limited budgets and overwhelming demands from a variety of arenas."

Perhaps one of the reasons for the funding shortage could be chalked up to a public relations problem. Mountain caribou just aren’t getting enough attention from the general public. Some caribou experts believe that part of the PR void centers on an identity crisis. Many folks see large herds of barren-ground caribou, like the Porcupine herd in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and assume that all caribou are doing well.

As appearances go, it’s difficult to discern the differences between the barren-ground caribou, like those in the Arctic, and the mountain caribou, which are found in the northern Rocky Mountains, but to a biologist like Almack, the two are truly unique and distinct beasts. Mainly, the difference is that the two subspecies eat to the beat of different drummers: Mountain caribou spend most of their time browsing for lichens on trees in the winter rather than pawing and scratching the ground for food like their northern relatives.

Because of their affinity for high-growing lichen, and because the animals often calve on high-elevation snow pack, mountain caribou have attributes that set them apart from their relatives. They have smaller ears, snouts and tails to minimize heat loss and they sport extra-large hoofs with rear claws (called dewclaws) that splay out so they can walk on top of crusty snow. This last feature allows them to munch lichen that grows higher on old-growth trees, whereas the barren-ground group eats mostly ground lichen, willow, dried flowering plants and sedges during the wintertime. According to Almack, the mountain caribou “use snow like a ladder—the deeper the snow, the higher they can go."

Sadly, what makes mountain caribou unique also imperils them. Tree-growing lichen, upon which the animals feed almost exclusively in the wintertime, takes hundreds of years to grow to maturity, and it’s often on the timber most coveted by the logging industry.

But the loss of lichen as a winter food source is only one of the problems that caribou face from old-growth logging. According to Wayne Wakkinen, a biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game who conducts the annual caribou census, logging old growth is a “double whammy for caribou." The first “whammy" occurs when logging destroys the species’ habitat and food source. And, by promoting the growth of shrubs and smaller trees, logging also changes the ecosystem and lures more whitetail deer and moose into caribou habitat. With the deer and moose come predators—mountain lions and wolves—that normally wouldn’t spend much time near caribou.

Wakkinen says that because they historically didn’t have as much of a “relationship" with predators, mountain caribou are not very wary. “They’re not sneaky and flighty like deer," he says. “Basically their strategy is just to be where there aren’t any predators." But logging has changed all that.

Despite its negative effects on endangered species such as caribou, logging of old growth in the U.S. continues. In fact, the State Land Board in Idaho actually has a mandate to cut all remaining old growth on state lands. Across the border, the problem is even worse, according to Almack. His opinion is laid bare on our flight when he points out the differences between U.S. and Canadian tree cover. As soon as we cross the border, the land becomes splotchier, with small forested tracts broken up by larger empty spaces. Logging roads snake through the habitat, connecting clear-cut to clear-cut. “It’s like ‘Forestry 101’ up there," says Almack. “The caribou have to sneak through these areas that have been ‘nuked out.’"

Logging and logging roads also open forests to recreational activities, like snowmobiling, that can be detrimental to caribou and other animals. There are more than 1,000 miles of snowmobile routes in northern Idaho and Washington and thousands of acres of “snow play areas" located within the federally designated “caribou recovery zone." Part of the problem, say biologists, is that the new snowmobiles are so advanced that they can go nearly anywhere—including up steep slopes to the base of mountain peaks, essential habitat for caribou in the winter when the animals are most vulnerable.

Critics charge that the U.S. Forest Service and the state of Idaho are exacerbating the problem. “The national forests and Idaho have snowmobile grooming plans that are essentially routing the machines through the recovery area," says Mark Sprengel, director of the Selkirk Conservation Alliance, a local organization. And, snowmobiling isn’t the only form of winter recreation that is negatively affecting caribou—heli-skiing, cat-skiing and backcountry skiing can also spook the animals into using up some of their precious winter reserves.

Despite the lack of political will and funds, and the loss of habitat to recreation, logging and forest fires, some biologists and conservationists believe that there are ways to save the caribou in the United States. Almack advocates a captive-rearing program through which biologists could raise a group of animals every year to send back to the wild. But such an effort would likely cost millions of dollars and strenuous lobbying to get it funded. Wakkinen and others continue to work on efforts to transplant caribou from Canada to the U.S.—a program that has had mixed success in the past because of loss to mountain lion predation and the difficulty of getting animals from Canada where they are also listed as endangered.

But without new funding or some new strategy, mountain caribou may not have much of a future, Almack says as we circle above caribou number 600, the “good momma." “We don’t know how much caribou can take," he says with frustration and sadness. “We don’t know their threshold, but at some point there won’t be any caribou anymore if we keep it up."

Defenders writer/editor Bill Updike spent time in small planes searching for caribou with researchers in Idaho, Washington and British Columbia last summer while reporting this story.