Caribou’s Plight Intersects Oil Debate

Joe Titlichi was standing on the banks of the Porcupine River when he saw the caribou calf, so young its umbilical cord still trailed down from its belly, try to follow its mother across.

As the cow picked its way through the swirling waters, the calf tried desperately to swim behind. “By the time it got across, it was half on the shore, half in the water, and it was just laying there, shivering,” said Titlichi, head of the board that monitors caribou movements in the vast eastern Arctic.

The mother waited on the bank, but with dozens of caribou around her pushing on in the herd’s annual migration to the sea, she finally turned away. The urge to stay with the calf was strong. The urge to move was stronger.

All over this 19-million-acre refuge, ground zero in the battle over President Bush’s energy plan, a remarkable story about the caribou--whose traditional calving on the coastal plain is one of the biggest impediments to drilling--is unfolding.

Late winter snows have forced thousands of caribou to calve along the arduous inland migration route, many miles from the safety of the coastal plain. That has set the stage for one of the worst years in the history of the Porcupine caribou herd.

Early estimates are that up to 15,000 of this year’s calves will fall victim to predators, starvation or fatigue. Caribou have been seen calving on the other side of the roiling Porcupine, forcing those just a few hours old to cross its treacherous, icy waters. “It’s one of the worst years we’ve ever seen in the 30 years we’ve been looking at the herd in detail,” biologist Ken Whitten said. “The calf survival rate is way below normal, and probably not enough to sustain the herd.”

The movements of these caribou through the tundra of northern Alaska have become the subject of intense global interest, thanks to the Bush administration’s proposal to expand North Slope oil operations into the heart of the calving area on the grassy shelf between the mountains of the Brooks Range and the Beaufort Sea.

Over the last few weeks, film crews from all over the United States, Europe and Australia, private tour groups, congressional delegations and the U.S. secretary of the Interior have waited along the edges of the coastal plain to observe the calving--the apex of one of the last great mammal migrations in North America.

What has unfolded since June 1 is a sobering lesson in Arctic biology: Thousands of newborn caribou have died, scientists agree, because their mothers gave birth before reaching the coastal plain. A similar scenario occurred with unusually late snows last year, when an estimated 15,000 calves died.

“We’re looking at a natural experiment. This is what happens when they’re kept off the coastal plain by nature. The next thing is if they’re kept off by industrial development. It would seem to say that it bodes really poorly,” said Dan Ritzman, spokesman for the Alaska Coalition, an environmental group that is attempting to block oil drilling in the refuge.

But oil industry advocates look at the same facts and reach an opposite conclusion. “This was a high snow year. To me, it just shows the natural patterns and what’s going to happen regardless of whether there’s oil development there or not,” said Kim Duke, acting director of Arctic Power, a group lobbying to open the refuge to drilling.

In fact, caribou and oil drilling may not be mutually exclusive. The central Arctic herd, which roams the massive Prudhoe Bay oil field, last year recorded its highest numbers ever--although much of the herd has moved away from its historic calving grounds closest to oil facilities, an option that might not be available on the narrower coastal plain at ANWR.

Duke said it would be a simple matter to accommodate the relatively brief calving season by shutting oil operations at calving time.

Although the new Democratic leadership in the Senate has made ANWR oil drilling legislation a longshot this year, the Alaska delegation is continuing its push. And advocates say they still have enough support on Capitol Hill and in the White House that anything could happen. “We don’t feel that it’s dead now by any means,” Duke said.

In the heart of the proposed drilling area, scientists are working as quickly as possible to find out the extent of the calf mortality and understand the dynamics of the caribou’s dependence on the contested coastal region.

The first official U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service surveys last week showed that 80% of the herd’s 70,000 cows had calved but that only 51% had calves still alive by the end of June. That is only slightly better than last year, when 44% had calves that made it through June, and well below the traditional average of about 62%.

“It’s serious,” U.S. biologist Fran Mauer said. “The herd has been declining over the past 10 years, and when we get two poor years of calf production, that doesn’t bode well for the decline to halt.”

A Key Food Source for Tundra Wildlife

In some ways, the fate of a year’s worth of caribou calves in a wildlife refuge the size of South Carolina seems of little import. But that is to ignore the exquisite interconnection of everything that manages to remain alive in this fragile, brutal landscape perched at the top of the world and frozen over from September to May.

Caribou, which fossil records show have lived in the Alaskan Arctic for at least a million years, are a crucial food source for the grizzly bears, black bears, wolves and eagles that roam the tundra. As they die, their carcasses provide food for wolverines, foxes and ravens. Their excrement feeds plants that produce the nitrogen that nurtures other plants. A species of fly lives nowhere but in the caribou’s nose. The Eskimos on the coastal plain and the Gwich’in Indians of the Brooks Range have hunted the caribou for all of recorded time.

The Gwich’in village rests on the southern end of the refuge. This year, with the unusually late snow, is one of the first in which the Gwich’in haven’t seen the caribou file past the ridge at the beginning of April on their way to the calving grounds. “There’s times when, from this mountain all the way to the end of the other mountain, you see nothing but a line of caribou, 10 miles long. Just a line of caribou. And that goes on seven, eight days. It was like--what do you call it?--a shade moving,” said Charlie Swaney, pointing to the ridgeline behind his cabin in Arctic Village, where Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton met with native drilling opponents last month.

“The message I wanted to tell her was, you got all these animals that go to the same place [on the coastal plain] year after year after year. It never fails. For decades. Why do they go to that certain place? It must be a home to them,” Swaney said. “It’s because that’s where life began for them. It’s where they want life to begin for their young ones.”

Tundra Bursts Into Life for a Few Short Months

The Alaskan Arctic is a place where the dawning summer is transcendent, an Elysian landscape trembling with tentative new life after a dark winter of vast frosts and howling winds.

As the sea ice retreats from the shore of the coastal plain, snow melts into the rivers and the tundra erupts into bloom, the first gray-green shoots of the willows giving way to blooming heather, rosebay, colt’s foot, avens, oxytrope and low rhododendron. Golden plovers, having made their way 10,000 miles from the pampas grass of Argentina, nest in the sedge grasses. Tundra swans and ducks drop eggs along the lakes, and eagles, peregrine falcons and at least 170 other species of birds swoop on the breeze past the greening hills.

The sun makes a perpetual ellipse across the sky, easing just below the bluff tops at midnight for a few moments before climbing upward again, casting low, golden rays down the valleys at 2 a.m.

The Arctic summer’s splendor is eclipsed only by its brevity. There are these few months to feed and blink and grow, and no more. The caribou then must move south, into the forests. The grizzly bears den. The woolly bear caterpillars, which can take as long as 12 summers to metamorphose in the harsh Arctic, lie dormant under the snow. The butterflies that emerge years later will live only a few weeks.

That helps explain the caribou’s relentless migration toward the coastal plain for calving. The plain provides refuge from the wolves and grizzlies that feast on calves born too soon in the hills, as well as from the relentless mosquitoes that can drain as much as a quart of blood from an animal. The plain’s dense vegetation provides cows critical nutrients for nursing, and the opportunity to loll there for a few weeks before beginning the move back toward the winter range gives calves crucial time needed to be able to join the exodus.

Even in a year like this, when the calves have been born too early, the relentless drive toward the seashore persists. The Aichilik River valley last week looked like the walkways of a baseball stadium before the game, with groups of 10 or 15 caribou moving slowly down the valley, followed by groups of 30 or 40, finally giving way to groups of several hundred.

There were bulls with the new antlers of spring, young females and full-grown cows, but no calves. “Their calves probably didn’t make it,” said David Klein, professor emeritus at the University of Alaska, who at 74 has spent most of a lifetime watching the complex interaction between caribou and the landscape.

Most likely, scientists said, some of the cows with offspring still alive were lagging behind in the herd’s secondary calving range in Canada and would join the migration later.

On the bank of the river, Richard Spener, a salesman from St. Louis, was assembling a canoe to carry his wife and 11-year-old daughter down the river toward the plain. It was his third trip to the refuge.

“There are no roads, there are no picnic tables, there’s nothing except the way this world was 2,000 or 3,000 years ago,” he said. “In our short time here today, we’ve seen caribou, we’ve seen jaegers, we’ve seen eagles, we’ve seen Arctic terns and ptarmigans. And we’ve only been here a few hours. That’s awesome.”

Seeing the caribou making their way through the valley is one of the reasons Spener keeps coming back.

“On the last trip up here, we had somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 caribou come through our camp,” he said. “I was sitting on a stool with my camera trying to take a picture of a snowy owl. And I turned around, and they were there. And I tell you, the smells, the snorting, the clamping of the hooves, the grunting of the calves, and they just kept coming and coming and coming. And when they were gone, you wondered if it was real.

“Nobody hardly spoke at dinner, because we were almost in tears,” Spener said. “We knew we’d experienced something almost no one else in the world will ever experience.”