Last of the Caribou
While Carr and Kingston continue the survey the next day, Kwandibens and Wabakimi Park superintendent John Thomson use a lighter to thaw the frozen lock on the door of the Armstrong Lion’s Club. When the lock finally opens, Thomson switches on the lights, plugs in the coffee maker and sets up a projection screen near the Bingo machine. He’s arranged a meeting with about two dozen local trappers – most of them Aboriginal, male and over 40 – to learn more about the state of the caribou.
“Once a year, we’ll take the helicopter up and see where the caribou are, ”Thomson says.“ But [trappers] are out a lot more than one day in a year, and they see trends on the land.”
Around the hall, men in bush jackets and ball caps settle into chairs and squint beneath the glare of the fluorescent lights. “What we used to hunt and fish before, we don’t get now. Why? The only reason is the cutting, the clearcutting,” says longtime trapper Francis Donio. “Maybe it’s a good thing you are here,” he tells Thomson, “because you’re saving a bunch of forest, and that’s what we need.”
A few decades ago, seeing a dozen or more caribou during the winter was not so remarkable. On Ratte Lake, “there were so many caribou they left big piles of caribou pellets on the lake,” recalls Richard Wanakamik, who wears a cap emblazoned “Native Pride.” “From the shore they looked like muskrat lodges. That’s how many caribou there were before,” he continues. “After they started cutting, then nothing. Not overnight, but over time.”
Afterwards, Whitesand First Nation members bring in cauldrons of soup and platters piled high with sandwiches. Donio expands on the ancient ties to the caribou: “To me, caribou is a sacred animal. If they were gone, I’d find there’d be something missing. My traditions and culture would have something less.”
But there is no quick way to stem the caribou’s decline, and no simple explanation for it. “Ten years after cutting you still see caribou and think ‘Oh, we’re doing great, they’re still here,’” says Vors. “Thirty years after cutting you’re asking, ‘Where have they gone?’”
It’s easy to rule out food shortages or hunting as the major trigger for the decline of the caribou. Although poaching may be a problem, hunting for caribou by non-First Nations peoples has been banned in Ontario since 1929, and healthy crops of lichen can be found in areas the caribou are abandoning. Vors suspects that instead the process begins with industry: logging, mining, road building and, especially in the west, oil and gas extraction. After an area has been logged, caribou must share the landscape with increasing numbers of moose or deer, newcomers who move in to browse new growth.
Ontario Nature is not only trying to protect caribou and the boreal forest; the organization is actively working on the front lines to maintain both the forest and the creatures that depend on it. Supported by funding from Ministry of Natural Resources’ Species at Risk Stewardship Fund, Julee Boan, Ontario Nature’s Thunder Bay-based boreal conservation coordinator, is working with foresters on ways to better understand and regenerate caribou habitat.“If we’re losing species, that’s a sign we’re headed down a slippery slope,” says Boan. “It’s important that we understand what’s happening with caribou, because that helps us understand what’s happening in the boreal forest in general.”
Over thousands of years, caribou have adapted to the kind of coniferous forest that grows after wildfires sweep through. However, after logging an area, there is increased liklihood tha the greater mix of hardwoods may provide more for moose.
“The research is looking at the types and amount of vegetation that grows back after logging as a result of different harvesting techniques,” Boan says. “In many ways, cutting does not cause the same results as fire, and can include complex impacts on the relationships between soils, nutrients, and growth. We need to better understand which logging techniques do not put caribou at such a disadvantage in terms of the forests that grow back.”
Federal support is helping Ontario Nature, the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada and the Webequie First Nation conduct caribou surveys in Webequie’s traditional area, about 550 kilometres north of Thunder Bay. The Webequie effort combines aerial surveys with interviews of community members.
“Caribou are part of our traditional knowledge package. We need people to recognize their roots and understand their heritage,” says Gary Kwandibens, former economic development officer with Whitesands First Nation. “We’re trying to develop the traditional attachment to the land and to maintain these skills.”
But Kwandibens also sees the economic potential for First Nations to act as stewards for boreal conservation. This past winter, for example, trappers were offered a small snowmobile fuel subsidy in exchange for recording wildlife sightings. Such cooperative ventures could diversify the community’s reliance on forestry, tourism, hunting and trapping.
Outside caribou country, the challenge now lies in getting city dwellers to care about an animal they only see on the back of a quarter.
Ray Ford
More prey brings more predators, and wolves make use of logging roads, hydro or gas lines and snowmobile trails to penetrate more deeply into caribou country. “You’ve not only upped the wolf population, you’ve given them ways to travel, and you’ve improved their hunting efficiency,” Vors says.
Because a caribou cow has limited reproductive capacity (only one calf a year, and in some years none), according to Schaefer “it doesn’t take much to tip a population into a decline.” A few extra wolf kills a year on a sustained basis, and the herd begins to lose its drawn-out battle of attrition.
The result is a time-delayed disappearance – a process that began 20 years ago with the first stroke of a feller-buncher in a new clearcut and continues today, 20 kilometres from that levelled area, with a wolf shaking a dying caribou by the throat. Once the predator-prey balance tilts against the caribou, its decline is almost impossible to reverse.
And wolves aren’t the only challenge the caribou face. “The real wild card is climate change,” says Vors. Warmer weather encourages the northward spread of moose and deer, consumes forests with larger and more intense fires and increasingly violent storms, and triggers the freezing rains that seal off lichen beneath an icy crust. A related menace is the meningeal worm (or brainworm), a parasite carried by white-tailed deer. Caribou can be wiped out in an area where infected deer become established.
Given those pressures, Vors expects the southern boundary of this species’ Ontario range to shrink northward by 50 to 200 kilometres over the next two decades. If caribou losses continue, “they’re toast,” she states bluntly.“ They might not even last until the end of the century.” No wonder Vors calls woodland caribou “the walking dead” and Schaefer refers to them as “grey ghosts.”
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But maybe there is reason for hope. Six months after Carr’s helicopter survey of Wabakimi, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced the province’s intention to protect 225,000 square kilometres, or roughly half of the boreal region, an area that includes part of the boreal forest. Properly managed, it’s a move that could ensure a northern refuge for caribou, although it won’t likely help the animals now roaming far to the south, in Wabakimi.
Those caribou on the edge of logging and mining development must instead rely on the new Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the habitat protection it offers threatened and endangered species. But the protection afforded under the ESA is itself uncertain as the Province permitted an exemption to the act for the forestry industry earlier this year.
Ontario has been adapting and modifying caribou-friendly logging practices since the late 1980s, using a “mosaic” of cuts designed to allow the progressive regeneration of new caribou habitat as older forests are cut.
“We still have caribou in places where we had them a decade ago, at the southern edge of their range. We’ve retained caribou habitat that wouldn’t be there if we had gone with the traditional forest harvesting approach,” says Ted Armstrong, MNR regional wildlife biologist for northwest Ontario. Still, given that it takes up to 60 years for caribou habitat to regenerate, Armstrong adds “we won’t know for several decades how successful we are.”
Ontario Nature’s Bell argues that’s a good reason to hedge our bets by preserving large, intact, protected areas alongside those cutting mosaics. Otherwise, the north is being subjected to “a grand experiment” in forest management. “And there’s no clear indication it’s going to work.”
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Disappearing caribou have become the wildlife counterpart of shrinking glaciers and splintering ice caps, an early warning sign that something is wrong in an ecosystem that holds more than 80 percent of the world’s fresh water and acts as the planet’s largest terrestrial carbon warehouse. Canada’s boreal forest and wetlands alone store more than 186 billion tonnes of carbon, the equivalent of more than 900 years of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. If caribou-friendly forestry management keeps that carbon out of the atmosphere, then caribou become partners in buffering global warming. Ultimately, they “have a value in maintaining the climate that allows us to continue our way of life,” says Vors.
This is not the first time our fate has been bound up with that of the caribou. Schaefer remarks on a distant echo of the recent First Nations’ experience: “We know hunters in Europe 15,000 to 20,000 years ago relied heavily on caribou for food, ”he says.“ Maybe because our species depended on them for so many years, that’s why we find them so attractive.” Now, in the age of helicopter surveys and DNA sampling, our reliance is, if anything, greater. “We often think of ourselves as more distinct from nature than ever before,” Schaefer adds. “But I tend to think our future and the future of caribou are linked more tightly than ever.”
Ray Ford is a freelance writer who lives in what used to be caribou range, near North Bay, Ontario.
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