finding their comeback trail - International Regional Magazine

Fortymile Caribou:
FINDING THEIR
How recovery efforts rebuilt a lost population
50 Winter 2014 | YUKON North of Ordinary
COMEBACK TRAIL
Story by Kelly Milner | Photos by Sonny Parker
YUKON
YUKONNorth of
North of Ordinary Ordinary | | Winter
Winter 2014 2014 51
51
"THEY ARE PART OF OUR
CULTURE AND OUR STORIES."
!
YUKON
Fairbanks
!
Dawson
!
Mayo
ALASKA
200 kilometres
G
erry Couture wasn’t expecting visitors, but he’d been looking
forward to seeing them for years. So, when a group of Fortymile
caribou finally wandered into his yard last winter, he was disappointed he wasn’t home.
Twenty years ago, Couture was part of a group tasked with rebuilding
the Fortymile herd that had all but disappeared from its Yukon range.
“To be honest, I never thought I would see them here in my lifetime,” he
says from his house in Bear Creek, just east of Dawson City.
“It had snowed, and when we came back into the yard there were
crater marks and caribou tracks everywhere,” he says with a laugh. “So I
haven’t actually seen them, but they’ve been to my backyard.”
At the time of the Klondike Gold Rush, the Fortymile herd was one
of the world’s largest, with hundreds of thousands of caribou ranging
from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon. But by the 1960s, habitat change and hunting pressure reduced the herd to less than 10,000
animals and its range shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. Few
Fortymile caribou, if any, were crossing into the Yukon.
However, Yukoners hadn’t forgotten them. In 1993, Steve Taylor, then
Chief of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in in Dawson, wrote a letter to Alaskan
interest groups and management agencies stating that enough was
enough. The Yukon and Alaska needed to find a way to bring the herd
back.
“For our citizens, the Fortymile caribou herd has always been very
important,” explains Roberta Joseph, fish and wildlife manager for
Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in. “They used to swim across the river in the
fall and spring right below town, and there would be thousands of
them. They are part of our culture and our stories.”
Chief Taylor’s letter spurred a meeting in Tok, Alaska, and everyone with an interest in the herd was invited. For Craig Gardner, a
former biologist with Alaska’s department of fish and game, that
meeting changed everything.
“Getting the Canadians there who hadn’t seen caribou in decades
but still could talk about how important the herd was to them
helped convince the people in Alaska—who still had the herd and
could still hunt it—that there were more important goals, like
rebuilding its numbers and expanding its range,” he says.
Couture agrees. “It was Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Elders who held the
memory of the importance of the herd who helped sell the idea of
recovering them to the Alaskans.”
After that meeting, an international group, including representatives from environmental, hunting, First Nations, and management
agencies, was established to develop a population-recovery plan.
Protecting key habitats, restricting hunting, and managing preda-
tors were part of the conversation—topics many people had strong
opinions about, which led to heated discussions.
“They were a diverse group,” Couture recalls. “You had environmentalists who didn’t want a wolf touched sitting down with
grizzled trappers who thought the only good wolf was a dead wolf.
Getting them to work together was really tough.”
At the time, Couture was chair of the Yukon Fish and Wildlife
Management Board and at the table to ensure the interests of the
Yukon public were reflected in the plan. But for him, there was a
personal interest as well.
In the mid-1970s, Couture and his family built a home on the
Yukon River, south of Dawson, and lived there for almost 20 years.
“Our place was on this point of land surrounded by muskeg, and
everywhere you looked there were caribou antlers sticking out of
the ground,” he explains. “That’s what piqued my interest—that
there had really been so many caribou here at one time. It validated
everything the First Nation and the biologists were saying and made
me realize that maybe we could do something to bring them back.”
Over the next year, the group met and, despite their differences,
was able to develop a plan. The goals were to increase the herd’s
numbers and have it expand into its historic range. Learning from
Yukon wolf-control programs, they outlined a non-lethal approach
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Whitehorse
ENV.381.003
(Above) A map of the historical range of the Fortymile herd.
(Below) The caribou wintering near the Dempster Highway.
FORTYMILE CARIBOU HERD TIMELINE
l
1800s
Hundreds of thousands
of Fortymile caribou
range across the
Yukon and Alaska.
l
1898
Caribou are an
important food
source during the
Klondike Gold Rush.
52 Winter 2014 | YUKON North of Ordinary
l
1920
The herd reaches an
estimated high of
600,000 caribou.
l
1950s
Poor management and
increased access causes
the herd to decline.
l
1970s
The herd reaches
an all-time low of
6,000 caribou.
l
1990s
A collaborative
recovery program
is initiated.
l
2002
Fortymile caribou cross
the Yukon River near
Dawson City for the
first time in years.
l
2013
The herd reaches
50,000 animals and
expands into its previous Yukon winter range.
YUKON North of Ordinary | Winter 2014 53
"YOU CAN SEE THE RESULTS. IT IS SO RARE IN
CONSERVATION BIOLOGY TO HAVE SUCH GRATIFICATION."
to managing predators, including relocating wolves and neutering
the alpha animals in a pack so they couldn’t have pups. And to
get the Alaskans to agree to reduce the number of caribou they
would hunt, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in offered not to hunt any Fortymile
caribou that crossed the border. The territorial government showed
their support by closing licensed hunting, as well.
“That was probably one of the most significant things we did—
foregoing our harvest to show the Alaskans how important it was
to us to bring back the herd,” Joseph explains. “It put pressure on
everyone and let them know we were serious.”
Federal, territorial, and state officials eventually bought into the
plan, and the recovery program was carried out between 1996 and
2001. Over that time, the herd doubled in size. In 2002, a group of
Fortymile caribou crossed the Yukon River near Dawson for the
first time in decades. Couture remembers a shiver going through
town. The Fortymile caribou were back.
However, it was just a handful of caribou and the herd still had
some growing to do. It wasn’t until 2013 when the majority of the
herd, now about 50,000 animals, spent most of the winter in its old
Yukon range.
“To have that many caribou wander in is pretty exciting,” says
Mike Suitor, the northern regional biologist for the territorial government. “It really brings home why the work that folks have done
before you should be respected. You can see the results. It is so rare
in conservation biology to have such gratification.”
He is excited to see what having the large migratory caribou herd
back in the area will do to the local ecology.
“When we are flying in the area, we see trail after trail that
were once formed by tens of thousands of caribou,” he explains.
“Since caribou are prey for so many animals, it must have had huge
ecological consequences when they disappeared. Now with them
coming back, it is going to change the systems again, and hopefully
for the better.”
And while the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in are also happy to see the herd
return, Joseph cautions that having the herd move back into the
Yukon was only one of the goals of the recovery plan.
54 Winter 2014 | YUKON North of Ordinary
“To see it expand into its historical range in the Yukon is really
exciting, and people have been waiting a long time for that,” she
explains. “But we are still anticipating that the herd will continue
to increase. It has grown a lot of over the past 20 years, but we know
the numbers used to be much higher.”
Floating past the village of Faro.
There are other challenges, such as the growing herd’s nutritional
needs and harvest management, which will have to be looked at in
the future.
“Harvest is something that First Nation and Yukon people will
need to make a decision on eventually,” Suitor says. “People will
want to hunt this herd again, but we first need to define the criteria
for when it is appropriate to start harvesting and what it should
look like.”
For now, licensed hunting of the herd remains closed, and
Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in will keep asking their citizens not to hunt any
Fortymile caribou.
“If we ever do contemplate a harvest, it will be a conservative one
because we want to see the herd continue to grow,” Joseph explains.
“That’s the most important thing. We want to see them around for
future generations.”
Gardner hopes future generations will know the story of the
return of the Fortymile caribou to the Yukon and what can be
achieved when people come together.
“In my life, not just my career, the recovery of the Fortymile
caribou is the most important thing I was involved in,” he says. “It
is so fulfilling to see that if you work really hard you can make a
difference.”
Couture shares that feeling. “To have the herd come back makes
all that work worthwhile. It actually happened. Maybe it would
have happened anyway, but I think it was the work of the team that
gave it the nudge to make it happen in our lifetime.”
And the next time the caribou come to visit his yard, he hopes
he’ll be there to greet them. Y
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