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Caribou numbers declining in Alaska and Canada

Posted at 3:36 PM on 20 May 2008

Hello, and welcome back to The Plight of Arctic Wildlife. Previously we've covered polar bears, narwhals, seals, and walruses -- today we're going to tackle caribou. (Well, not literally.) After years of steady growth, Alaska's largest caribou herd lost 20 percent of its population between 2003 and 2007, according to the latest count. The Western Arctic Caribou Herd now numbers 377,000. Other herds in Alaska and Canada are also thinning. "Taken collectively, these declines may merely be coincidence," says caribou researcher Jim Dau. "Alternatively, we may be entering a phase when conditions throughout North America are less favorable for caribou than during the past 30 years." So to speak.

sources: Associated Press, SitNews

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Comments: (1 comment)

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walruses; the Porcupine herd

In case anyone missed it, the NY Times's celebrated science writer, Natalie Angier, had a lovely appreciation of walruses, their intelligence and sociability, yesterday:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/science/20walrus.html?e ....

She indeed mentions that walruses are among the Arctic animals under stress on account of the unreliability of Arctic sea ice, though that is not her principal interest.

As for caribou: The Porcupine herd, which migrates between the Yukon Territory in Canada and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska (their calving ground, famously, is the coastal plain, which some oil-hungry speculators believe to be petroleum-rich), is known to be declining, in part because the warming climate is making rivers too fierce too early for calves to swim across, in part also because it is allowing predators access to the calves earlier than usual.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 11:49 AM on 21 May 2008

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