One of the biggest caribou herds in the world that sustains subsistence hunters in the Northwest Arctic has been declining for the last five years. In 2022, it shrank even more, and biologists are struggling to single out a leading cause.
One of the biggest caribou herds in the world that sustains subsistence hunters in the Northwest Arctic has been declining for the last five years. In 2022, it shrank even more.that the Western Arctic Caribou Herd population is down to an estimated 164,000 animals — an almost 13% decrease over the past year. The estimate dropped from 259,000 caribou in 2017 to 244,000 in 2019 and to 188,000 in 2021.
In Selawik, the animals used to come in the first half of September, Ballot said, but this fall nobody in the village has harvested their catch. Now the terrain is covered with thin ice, still not safe enough for the hunters to travel. If the animals do pass through the area this late in the fall, the caribou bulls — the primary focus for hunters — will be already in a rut that makes their meat inedible.
“It’s really hard to pinpoint ‘a cause’ for the decline,” Sweeney said. “Likely, it’s multiple things combined.”Changing snow conditions and changes in the habitat, such as a decrease of lichens on the Seward Peninsula, can be other factors, said Kyle Joly, a National Park Service wildlife biologist.
“Those movements are largely driven by snowfall and cold temperatures,” Joly said. “They’re making those decisions based on changing climate.”Larger herds have larger migrations and use more space. When the Western Arctic Caribou Herd was at its peak back in 2003, it had the longest terrestrial migrations of any caribou herd on the planet, Joly said.
While local subsistence hunters welcomed the closures, the total number of animals harvested by the non-federally qualified users is relatively small and it’s entirely made up of bulls, so the closures did not affect the population numbers, Joly said.
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