Lake Superior’s last caribou were already in trouble by the time hungry wolves crossed an ice bridge to their island refuges and began hunting them towards the brink. […] But over the past two centuries — after Europeans settled on the Great Lakes — human development whittled away at their habitat. Most had retreated from the mainland to islands just off the shore. The caribou were backed into a corner. The ice bridge formed in the winter of 2013-14, kicking off a years-long wolf banquet. The steady decline of the caribou quickly escalated into an emergency. In 2018, under pressure from conservationists, the Ontario government worked with Michipicoten First Nation to airlift the caribou to safer homes in a bid to buy time. They persist — for now — just out of the wolves’ reach. But the clock is ticking: the tiny, even more remote islands they’re living on for the moment don’t have the resources to support very many of them, and one likely can’t support them forever. […]
Woodland caribou, a species that includes the Lake Superior herd, have a […] shrinking range stretching through forests across […] all the way from Newfoundland and Labrador to British Columbia and the Yukon. They have long been important for Indigenous people […].
Just 14 herds in Canada are healthy enough to sustain themselves. Another 37 are hanging on with human help. […] Even protecting big chunks of land isn’t a guarantee caribou will survive: in Alberta, Jasper National Park is looking to boost its dwindling population by capturing and breeding some caribou before releasing them back into the wild. One herd in the park died out in 2020 and two others are too small to survive on their own. Just to the south, Banff National Park’s last five caribou were wiped out in an avalanche in 2009. At the time, an expert warned that if caribou could perish in Banff, they could be wiped out in other protected areas too. The grim prediction appears to have come true in Pukaskwa National Park on Lake Superior, a two-hour drive northwest of Wawa. In a paper published in 2015 in the journal Écoscience, scientists concluded that the Pukaskwa herd was likely gone for good. […] The Pukaskwa caribou had been one of a few scattered herds left on Lake Superior […].
By winter 2013-14, a handful of individual caribou were making do on the shoreline. But the real strongholds were Michipicoten Island, a lush oval-shaped haven formed by volcanoes, about 80 kilometres southwest of Wawa, and the Slate Islands, an archipelago created by a meteorite, about 130 kilometres northwest of Michipicoten. […]
So far, this batch of airlifted ungulates is doing okay. Exact tallies are hard to come by, caribou being elusive and all, but Eason said it looks like the number on the Slate Islands is now in the high 30s, and the mid to high 20s on Caribou Island. Their survival is especially important because he hasn’t heard of any caribou sightings on the mainland in several years — the last provincial survey was in 2016 — and advocates now fear the island caribou are the only ones left.
Headline, images, captions, graphics, and text published by: Emma McIntosh. “What will be the fate of Lake Superior’s last, lonely caribou?” The Narwhal. 3 September 2022.
discoholicmusic
dailybridgerton
blakekathryn
kianamaiart
jbbartram-illu
origamiaround
yousharknotpass
