The Arctic

>>The Arctic

Bound for Tomorrow

In Alaska's western Arctic, one of the world's largest caribou herds—almost half a million strong—carries out its relentless migration, even as strip mining and other threats cast shadows over the tundra. Now a group of disparate stakeholders have banded together to protect these animals.

By Jeff Fair
Photograph by Tom Walker

Every spring and fall the caribou of the western Arctic follow their ancient trails over mountains and tundra, across rivers and channels—up to 3,000 miles—marking the longest migration of any terrestrial mammal.

From where I sat on the bony shoulder of a low ridge north of the far-western Brooks Range, I looked out across miles of verdant, rolling tundra foothills.

These were the Utukok River Uplands in northern Alaska, prime calving grounds of the Western Arctic Caribou Herd. That afternoon—July 17, 2003—I watched 5,000 barren ground caribou flow around me. They spilled in bands and waves over the hills from the west, drawn by some invisible force, inexorable as an incoming tide. They encircled my perch and covered the broad valley to the south with movement. Eastward, ever eastward they drifted. Ever more of them.

This was but a tiny portion of the Western Arctic Herd, the largest of 30 caribou herds in Alaska and the third largest on the continent. At 490,000 animals that summer, the Western Arctic Herd had become four times the size of the celebrated Porcupine Herd in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and accounted for about one-tenth of the world's caribou population.

Despite the herd's current high numbers, the animals' health—and the health of their habitat—is in no way assured. Natural pressures, including disease, predation, harsh winters, and changing vegetation, haunt them. And they are at the mercy of manmade threats, too: These calving grounds sit atop rich deposits of natural gas, coal, and hard-rock minerals, which, if recent precedents prevail, may be opened to widespread development. Fortunately, the people with the most invested in keeping the herd strong—Natives, sport hunters, conservationists—have banded together with state and federal biologists to create a new paradigm for wildlife management, one reaching across cultural, geographic, and philosophic distances to contribute a stronger and more unified voice in protecting the land.

In late May and early June, pregnant cows had led the herd across hundreds of miles, up and over the Brooks Range, to drop their calves in these very hills. This is their traditional birthing area, typically free of snow and rich in highly digestible grasses and sedges at that critical time in the caribou's life cycle. Fewer predators wander these uplands (a light scatter of grizzlies and a lone wolf track I found up on Storm Creek notwithstanding), and human disturbance remains rare. Not too distant from here, the caribou find windier ridges and coastal breezes, which offer relief from summer hordes of mosquitoes and parasitic flies. The animals I saw that day were returning from the Chukchi coast, moving higher into the Brooks Range toward Howard Pass or Anaktuvuk Pass, where they would mill around for a month and then plunge southward, most of them, toward Norton Sound. The lichens there would sustain them through the long, dark winter. The itinerant, peregrinating caribou: Rangifer tarandus. Rangers they are, driven, always driven, by some combination of insects, season, weather, and food supply.

Throughout a single year the Western Arctic Herd will range across one-third of Alaska, an area the size of Montana, picking up and delivering nutrients like blood flowing through the tissue of the land. The animals crop the vegetation and fertilize it, and aerate the tundra with their sharp hooves. They terrace the sides of foothills with braided trails that capture and absorb snowmelt and provide inquiring biologists (and other travelers) with paths through the tortuous tussock tundra. Lapland longspurs line their nests with caribou hair; ground squirrels and lemmings gnaw on fallen caribou antlers for calcium. Perhaps most important, the herd provides countless tons of protein to feed wolves (their primary predator), bears, humans, wolverines, golden eagles, parasitic jaegers, tundra shrews, mosquitoes, and flies. Biologists consider this herd a “keystone population” because it is integral to the ecology of northwest Alaska. Owing to the herd's size and all it feeds, including 40 Native villages, Audubon Alaska's senior scientist John Schoen calls it “one of the most unique and significant resources in North America.”

Living off the land is more than romance or memory here; it is the preferred human lifestyle. Within those 40 villages more than 24,000 people depend on a subsistence hunt of 15,000 to 20,000 caribou annually. For some villages, caribou are the primary source of meat. The Inupiat, the Yup'ik to the south, and the Athabaskans inland have largely adapted to Christianity, the dollar bill, television, computers, snowmobiles, and rifles. But providing food from the land in a respectful way and sharing this providence in one's village—these remain primary values of life and identity. In this way, when caribou give themselves to hunters, as the Inupiat describe a successful hunt, they provide not only food, skins, sinew thread, bone, and antler but also a connection to the land and to their people's traditional values. When the caribou become scarce, the Native people lose more than a source of meat. As Enoch Shiedt Sr., an Inupiaq from Kotzebue, puts it, “You change our food, you change our culture.”

Those who have studied the caribou intimately for millennia—the Eskimos across the Arctic, from the Inuit of northern Quebec to the Inupiat of northwestern Alaska—have a saying: “No one knows the way of the wind and the caribou.” Western science has certainly tried to figure it out. A cadre of biologists have censused and tracked the western Arctic herd by aerial photography and satellite telemetry across decades, yet its numbers and travels continue to surprise them. In 1996 biologists suspected that the herd's population had peaked, but in 2003 it rose again.

A troublesome development occurred between 1970 and 1976, when the population crashed from 243,000 animals to only 75,000. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game imposed a permit system and limited hunting. People in the villages, who had not been consulted, became alienated. Distrust and disagreement festered. Furthermore, no one was certain what had triggered the decline. Harsh winters? Wildfires? Excessive hunting? Increased predation? Disease or parasites? The exact cause, likely some combination of the above, proved impossible to determine. No one knows the way of the wind and the caribou.

To avoid repeating history and the ire ignited by early attempts to reverse the herd's decline, a council was created in 1997 to give everyone concerned a voice, and to listen to the wisdom of Native villagers, as well as to scientific research. Though cooperative management groups exist for marine mammals in Alaska and for other caribou herds across Canada, the Western Arctic Caribou Herd Working Group is unusual in its reach—geographic, political, and cultural. Represented are three Native cultures, one Western culture, and all types of users and managers throughout the caribou's range and beyond. The 20 voting members include 14 Native village subsistence hunters as well as representatives for commercial-hunting guides, hunter transporters, non-local hunters, and conservation organizations. Members from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the federal agencies across whose jurisdictions the caribou range—the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—supply information, commentary, and advice, but they do not vote.

When Schoen was first appointed the group's conservation chair in January 2001, he almost turned down the opportunity for fear of residual acrimony. But the working group, firm to its mission of long-term conservation for the herd, persevered. Trust and respect among members and cultures grew. Now Schoen says, “It's one of the best things I've ever done. Everybody wants to make certain the caribou keep coming back. The villagers, hunters, and conservationists recognize the common ground we share.”

The product of the collaboration of these formerly disparate interests is a Western Arctic Herd Cooperative Management Plan, signed by 24 user and agency representatives in 2003. At its heart is a set of guidelines for monitoring and managing the herd at different population levels. These measures include censusing, habitat monitoring and protection, and establishing bull and cow hunting levels. The group can make only recommendations; the agencies cannot cede their regulatory authority. But agency representatives like Jim Dau have worked closely with the stakeholders to craft the plan. Dau, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and chief scientific expert on the herd, sees the plan as a guide to be used when problems arise. When that happens, he says, “I'm optimistic, because of the broad spectrum of users and areas that are represented on the working group, that it's going to work.”

“This is the first time I know of having us involved in planning,” Sally Custer, an Inupiaq representative from the village of Shungnak, told me. “Before this it was always other people making plans for us down in Juneau, Anchorage, and Washington, D.C.”

The acid test of solidarity will come when caribou numbers decline. Caribou populations are cyclic, and today the Western Arctic Herd is larger than ever. But the herd's rate of growth has dropped because the caribou are having fewer calves. Both agency biologists and Inupiat hunters have noticed a decline in the animals' body condition. Measurements by the BLM on the caribou's winter range suggest a significant reduction in lichens, their primary winter food, which require half a century to regenerate. And then there are the effects of global warming, which are likely to include vegetation changes and perhaps deeper snow.

But another test looms more imminently, and it will play out across the Utukok Uplands.

Beneath much of the calving grounds there are substantial volumes of natural gas, ripe for extraction pending a natural gas pipeline to carry it out. Congress passed a number of tax incentives for the construction of one last year, and Alaska's governor, Frank Murkowski, has made mining and drilling a top priority. To make matters worse, one-ninth of the world's high-quality bituminous coal reserves—between 400 billion and 4 trillion tons—lie close under the surface of northern Alaska, much of it in a broad band beneath half of the Western Arctic Herd's primary calving area. Alaska exports half of its coal, currently mined well south of the Brooks Range, to Asia. But coal in the western Arctic is likely to first fuel power plants so that rich deposits of zinc, lead, silver, and other hard-rock minerals in the Brooks Range can be mined. Such an operation is already under way just west of there.

This intersection of coal, gas, and caribou calving occurs within the Southern Planning Area of the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska, which is under the jurisdiction of the BLM. Although the Utukok Uplands were recognized as a Special Area by the secretary of the interior in 1977, the BLM has a habit of ignoring its conservation mandates in the western Arctic.

Early in 2004—against overwhelming public sentiment and in deliberate disregard of a science-based alternative plan proffered by Audubon Alaska—the BLM opened the entire 8.8 million acres of the petroleum reserve's Northwest Planning Area to oil leasing (see “Cry of the Loon,” Audubon, March 2004). Mainstream environmental organizations, including Audubon, sued the agency, but the Bush administration prevailed. Meanwhile, the BLM has announced it will reduce by 75 percent the protections of critical habitats within the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area in the reserve's northeast quadrant, provoking outcries from all sides: Native hunters and fishermen, conservation groups, waterfowl hunters across the continent, and government biologists. These areas had been withdrawn from oil leasing by Interior Secretary James Watt in 1983 and again by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in 1998, based on their critical importance to waterfowl, the Teshekpuk Lake Caribou Herd, and subsistence hunting and fishing. Last November the BLM approved expanding the Alpine oil development near Nuiqsut directly into the subsistence hunting and fishing areas promised for protection when Alpine was established. Many local Inupiat feel betrayed.

In March the BLM plans to begin assessing the Southern Planning Area for a management plan—and its leasing potential. Henri Bisson, the agency's Alaska state director, has publicly announced his intention to ask Congress to lift the restrictions established in 1923 on mining both coal and hard-rock minerals in the petroleum reserve.

“The administration is pushing to make a lot of decisions while they have the political upper hand, even while the development scenarios are likely to play out over a number of years,” says Stan Senner, Audubon Alaska's executive director. “The danger is that we can lose the ball game before the nation has any immediate need to exploit those resources. We don't want to make decisions today that foreclose conservation options down the road, particularly in the absence of a compelling economic reason to do so.”

The construction that goes hand in hand with energy development has a painfully clear effect on the health of caribou. The animals move calving from developed areas onto poorer habitat, resulting in reduced reproductive rates. Maternal cows and larger groups have difficulty crossing roads and pipelines to get to critical calving habitat or to escape insects. They run from trucks and low-flying aircraft. Migration routes are thwarted.

The extraction of coal lying close to the surface will inevitably leave a much larger scar than the footprints of drill pads. No one knows what changes strip mining and the exposure and meltdown of the underlying permafrost might wreak upon delicate tundra ecosystems. Healing the land would require not generations but epochs.

The working group, backed by its gallery of government biologists, has reacted by directly confronting the BLM, asking it to conserve and protect the caribou's calving grounds, meet with hunters in all affected villages, and engage more closely with the group's members. Village representatives plan to take resolutions with similar language before their village councils, so that they might stand in concert. “If we don't work together and take care of what we have, we're going to lose it,” says Sally Custer. “It's going to disappear.”

During my first three days in those Utukok foothills, some 10,000 caribou migrated past my camp. I stood among them, heard their coughlike barks and the clicking of their ankles. I sensed the magnitude of their numbers and the mystical press of their migration; walked their braided trails; picked up their antlers. Most of the herd was already somewhere farther ahead and higher in the Brooks. Smaller bands followed, and then finally the stragglers, the weak and the lame, those destined to fuel the dreams of bears. A cow I called Three Legs hobbled in with a rocking-horse gait and hung around camp for several days, an act I thought of as “trolling for grizz,” though I had not the heart to run her off.

On the morning she disappeared, the land seemed empty, and I felt alone. I remember holding in my hand a chert spear tip and the spent casing of a .300 Savage rifle cartridge, both of which I had found nearby. I pondered them in juxtaposition, along with the deep history of the connection between human and caribou, between human and landscape. These connections are priceless gifts now in peril, and we would do well to honor them and to protect those that remain.

The last caribou I saw was a lone bull, a healthy-looking specimen with classic counterweighted antlers arcing upward from his brow like a huge bone lyre. Nose high, he was running hard—eastward, of course—galloping along the ancient braided trails, bound for tomorrow. I scanned the open tundra behind him for a bear or a troupe of wolves, but there was nothing chasing him. Nothing at all, but time and the wind.

Wildlife biologist JEFF FAIR lives near the Matanuska River in south-central Alaska. He wrote about the rare yellow-billed loon of the state's western Arctic for the March 2004 issue.