00:00:00
Speaker 1: One hundred and fifty years ago, out on the prairie of the northern Great Plains, hunters sat on sagebrush covered hills, marveling seemingly endless herds of bison. For as long as Americans had known this land, these animals had existed in the tens of millions, and these hunters surely thought that this abundance would last just as long into the future. This wealth of wildlife was assumed to be infinite, here forever taken or granted. But it did end. By the late eighteen eighties, the Great American bison herd had plummeted from somewhere north of thirty million all the way down to possibly fewer than one thousand individuals. Today, while the specifics are obviously different, some are beginning to ask if we are witnessing another disappearing act of unbelievable proportions. In the far north of our continent and the wider world beyond, once seemingly endless herds of cariboo, some numbering in the many hundreds of thousands, are blinking nearly out of existence. The greatest aggregation of large mammals in North America, our own version of the vast migrating herds of the Serengeti are disappearing. Migratory Arctic caribou populations have dropped across the world by sixty five percent in just the last two decades. Herds that once numbered more than half a million have been reduced to just tens of thousands, and yet few seem to be taking notice. What is going on with cariboo? Why is this happening? Are we unknowingly witnessing the end of one of our wild world’s greatest wonders. My guest today has been asking these questions for himself, and with a unique set of firsthand experience to him. Jim daw is an Alaskan, a caribou hunter, and, prior to his retirement, was one of the foremost caribou biologists in our nation. After nearly three decades tracking, monitoring, and studying the Western Arctic caribou herd for the Alaska Department of Fishing Game, I’ve asked Jim to join me here to discuss his life lived close to caribou, the many ways in which these remarkable creatures impact the land, animals, and people that surround them, and his first hand insight into the widespread decline of these animals and the factors that might be a play. Thanks for being here. This is Future Wild, brought to you by Conservation First Bank. Jim daw Thank you so much for joining me today.
00:02:53
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
00:02:55
Speaker 1: I want to dive right into things and start where most stories would begin, which is at the beginning. And I’m curious when you look back on your career, was there any one moment or experience or venture out there in the field when you realized that caribou and the Western Arctic was where you needed to spend the rest of your career and much of your life. Does anything stand out? Is that pivotaal moment for you?
00:03:31
Speaker 2: Maybe not one, but they’re probably twenty. Over the course of my career, I worked with caribou Central Artic Cariboo, different herd than this one during my graduate work back in eighty two to eighty five and found them just fascinating. But it was a graduate work and I wasn’t sure if I’d continue in Cariboo. Heck, I didn’t even know if i’d get a job, but I’d have taken anything. But then I got hired in concha Bu, Alaska to be an area biologists. So I worked with everything out here, wolves, bear’s ball sheep, most caribou. And after doing that for about ten years, we had a personnel change in the office and they said, boy, you know, we really need to get you an assistant. And I said, boy, you know, I don’t need an assistant. What you need to do is fire me as the AB, hire another person as an AB, and make me a Western articred turbo biologist. And they agreed. I said, it’ll be better in a two person office. Somebody doesn’t want to be an assistant for twenty years. They want to call the shots for their area, and you’ll have a better chance of retaining people if we’re equals instead of me supervising one person. So they did that and it was a decision, kind of a joint decision that I’ve never regretted. It worked out really well for me and I think the people that were working as the area of biologists. Luckily for me, it meant that I’m a pilot. I was a pilot profession game as wall as a biologist, so I didn’t have to give up the most work in the barrel work and the sheet work. I still flew on all those projects. But what I thought about in the data I managed and analyzed that was all caribou data.
00:05:11
Speaker 1: Okay, what is it about caribou uniquely of all those different species you’ve been able to work with, that stands out. There’s so many different features of the species, of the individual and of the broader species that could stand out. I imagine when I look at them from afar, when I think about my handful of experiences with them, but you having this up close, such as a long runway with them, when you look at that animal, what stands out to you as making them extraordinary?
00:05:46
Speaker 2: Well, I think one thing that appeal to me, So it’s just the fascinating natural history. You know, really, if you look, you look hard enough at any animal, they all have fascinating life histories. That’s one of the beauty of wildlife, whether you’re you know, enjoying them recreationally or you’re making a living you know, studying them. But with cariboo, one of the things that really stood out for me was they are so important both ecologically as well as socially to people. There were lots and lots of commercial operators out here, big game guides, transporters that provided transport services to hunters, and then virtually everybody that lives in northwest Alaska relies on caribou for their principal source of terrestrial protein. So I can’t think of another single species or more things hinged on their biological well being than cariboo.
00:06:50
Speaker 1: That’s a great point, just the scale that the breadth of landscape that they can also cover. In the scale of that, you know, any one individual herd I can see being something that leads to that too, which is pretty remarkable and exceptional. The numbers that they can appear on this continent is unsurpassed today.
00:07:12
Speaker 2: Right well, Caribou herds are fascinating, whether they number three or five hundred animals or all the way up to five hundred thousand caribou like the Western articr did back in the early two thousands. The Western article is not only one of the largest or was one of the largest herds in North America probably the world, but it also has one of the longest migrations. And one of the things that is just truly fascinating about this herd is you’d see them doing these inexplicable things you just couldn’t fathom. How did they do that. I asked that question of myself hundreds of times over the course of my career. How do they do this? An example is during fall migrations. I saw this probably a half a dozen times during my career, but right in the middle of the fall migration, when they should have been on the march, all of them heading south, they’d stop. The entire herd would stop, and they’d be stopped for gosh, sometimes four or five days a week, and within a day or two they would all be moving again, And I thought, how did they do this? It’s not just the animals out on the coast or the ones inland or in the mountains, not well. They must be responding to weather or some big umbrella queue that’s affecting them all equally. So I looked at weather in these different areas where the caribou were in it was not weather, and some places it was coal, other places it was not. Some places snowing, some places not. I don’t know how they did this, but by the time I retired, my definition of a group of caribou was completely different than what it was going into my career. It’s not twenty or thirty or one hundred animals that are all kind of shoulder and shoulder moving through the willows. It’s like this meta being, this caribou heard, and I’m convinced. I don’t know how they do it, but I am convinced that caribou utter on the coast somehow knew what cariboo were doing hundreds of miles inland. Can’t explain it, but I saw it too many times to just say, oh, it’s just random chance. It wasn’t random chance. These things are incredible.
00:09:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I took my first road trip from the Midwest to the Rocky Mountains as an adult when I was twenty one. I think and I remember the first time I drove across the Great Plains, and now almost every year since, every time I go across the Great Plains, I always find myself at some moment coming over some hill and thinking to myself, what must it have been like two hundred some years ago when Lewis and Clark or somebody else came over one of these grand hills and looked out over the plains for miles and miles and saw buffalo as far as the eye could see, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of buffalo buffalo that would stream pass them for days on And what must that have been like? I constantly find myself nostalgic for what that experience must have felt like, the awe that must have inspired. And you, uniquely, and anyone who has had the good fortune of getting to be in the Arctic and see some of these remaining caribou hers that we have still have gotten to experience something very much like that. I don’t think many people take the time to realize that we still have that to a degree in the far North. What is that like? What does that experience like to see a wildlife spectacle like that of these hundreds of thousands of caribou that have been part of that western Arctic her that you mentioned. Can you share that? Is there any way to put words to that?
00:11:05
Speaker 2: Well, it’s phenomenal. I didn’t I wasn’t born in Alaska. I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in the northern Michigan, the Midwest. I came to Alaska straight out of the Navy back in nineteen seventy six. And so you’re right, I was extremely fortunate to work with great people and to work with the western art occurred and just working really remote areas and having come from the Midwest, I never took it for granted. It was always kind of a tingling moment when you saw something that was truly remarkable. I can remember doing several caribou photo censuses. We’d do those in July when insect harassment was bad. The caribou would get all grouped up, and then we’d have a photoplane come in. They’d fly transits over the big groups, photograph them, we’d count them. That’s how we got population estimates. Several times in my career I saw aggregations numbering over two hundred and fifty thousand carabow. One time I had a we were we were doing preliminary radio tracking. We knew it was too windy and cold, we wouldn’t have photography possibilities for the next day or so, but we wanted to see how close the callers were together to know to have an idea how fast, you know, the big, the big photographable aggregation aggregations could form. And we got there and it was incredible. Essentially the entire Western Arty curd was in one big, spread out group. They were pretty dispersed, which made it even more impressive. But as far as you could see in about three directions were caribou going out of site and it was really something I was I was, oh, I don’t know, one thousand or fifteen hundred feet in a cub and I think I had a little point to shoot camera and I tried to get this, you know, just a few pictures to show people, and it was really disappointing. You just had to be there. The camera could not capture it, which and it’s off is pretty remarkable. But I am so fortunate to have worked with us, heard what I did, and to live in northwest alas Canal.
00:13:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, what about when you’re on the ground with a herd when they’re moving through it. I know you’ve had a number of different, really interesting experiences. I want to ask you about the onion portage experience. But what’s it like when you are surrounded by these animals when they’re passing through. I’ve heard about the sounds. I’ve heard about a lot of different things from different people. When you’re out there with that migration amidst its. What’s that experience like it?
00:13:52
Speaker 2: Very seasonally, if you’re in in amongst the carabo in the winter, it’s quiet, it’s just still and they’re not vocalizing them. The cows are not grunning to their calves. The calves are big enough, they’re not constantly calling for mom. It’s amazing that you can be, you know, in the middle of thousands of caribrew and not hear anything, but you can see them if if you’re in the middle of them, say in July, when the insects are harassing them and they’re forming these big aggregations, completely different experienced sensory experience on the ground. We used to collect try to collect composition data in July, because you’d have minimal segregation by bulls, cows and in calves. So we get ahead of these groups, we’d see, we’d radio track them, we’d land in front of them, get set up, and the caribo would just as long as you say it’s still, they walk right by it. They just divide and the it’s their feet. They’ve got these these tendons in their in their feet and so with every step caribo holfs makes a little click. And so when the cariboo they’d be going by and by it, sometimes twenty thirty feet away, it sounded like you were in a forest in a real light breeze all these clicks clicks, clicks, and it was really a beautiful sound. But not only did you hear them, you got to smell them. They have this wonderful and if you’ve ever harvested a caribou and you bury your nose and in its hair, you smell this. You can smell the landline in their hide, in their hair, and oh, it was really cool. And then of course the females and calves, the cows and cows were talking to each other all the time, especially as they went by us. You know, the deep guttural grunts of the cows telling juniors, stay by, stay by me, stay on my flank, and calf’s saying okay, okay, okay. It’s just almost deafening. It’s it’s really, it’s really wonderful.
00:16:02
Speaker 1: You mentioned these aggregations that they have, and that’s one of the interesting things that you know, as I have studied caribou further, I discovered that I’d never realized before was just the profound impact that bugs and mosquitoes actually have on these animals. And then they’re not just seemingly an annoyance but actually a life or death threat in some circumstances. Can you expand on that a little bit. Why it’s so important for them to have places to avoid the mosquitoes, and it seems like many times the calving grounds are places that specifically are there where they can avoid that to some degree, and then they move on to these post calving aggregation sites. I’d love to hear more about that, because I think that’s so unique compared to so many other species that I think people would be interested in learning about.
00:16:50
Speaker 2: I think cariboo are unique and in how affected they are by insect harassment. You know, I’ve watched musk auctions and bears and they combat insects by having lots of thick hair during even during even during the insects season. And you know, I’ve never really seen muskogs respond the mosquitoes or that’s that’s mostly what would gets muskocks. They’re up around their eyes and their nose, but they just stand there just like a big water hair. They can’t get through all the hair. Moose will occasionally go lay down in water and they go into lakes to wash the bugs. They have lots of biting flies that mighte the short hair on their nose. They can get through that short hair and so they will respond to insects a little bit. But with caribou, I think insect harassment is probably the most underrated population. The factor that affects cariboo. You know, you hear about winters, you know, deep snow, cold icing events. You hear about you know, snow machines and disturbance and roads and disturbance. I think during summer it’s really only about one thing that really affects carabone. That’s insect harassment. Of course that’s all mediated by weather, but it effects our movements. It’s you know, you hear about the migrations, and you know they’re traveling. When they’re traveling during migrations, it’s it’s pretty much a steady walk and it’s net distance traveled. Every day they’re going south southwest, but it’s always nut movement. During the summer insects season, you get a lot of what’s called a barrant running, which means it’s uh, it’s like entropy in action. They can head north, they can head south. There’s any kind of a breeze, they’ll always run into the breeze. But when insect harassment is the worst, there’s no breeze and so they make their breed by running, and those caribou I’ve radio tracked them, and they can go without batting an eye. They can go fifty or seventy five miles a day. Even calves that at that point, are you know, four or five six weeks, you’re weeks old. They form these incredibly dense aggregations. The aggregations can be so dense that when we would photograph them, they were almost impossible to count because they were shoulder to shoulder. It was almost like trying to count Laurus out on the ice when they’re laying on top of each other. They’re so dense it’s hard to get a decent count of them, especially when they’re on snowfields. They go on snowfields because it’s cooler just above the snow. They lay down in that snow. But also they can see the estrid flies, especially the nosepots. They put their head down, they can see the flies against the sky, or if they got their head up, they can see them against the snow. When they’re out in the vegetation, they can’t see them well. It affects every aspect of caribou ecology in the summer, in terms of their movements and their behavior. How much time they spend eating, ruminating versus just traveling to make a breeze to stay out of them. When they form the deasest aggregations in the most severe insect harassment, they will the group will stay in one spot, but they will run like they’re inside a corral. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anything corral in an actual coral. I don’t even know if like catt will do this, but it looks like they are in a fenced and compound, but they will run as hard as they can go on the outside in a circle. It’s like a big spinning wheel. The animals in the center are just standing there. They’re the axle, but the ones on the outside are going just as hard as they can possibly go. This has the potential to be a deadly activity for calves. They get separated from their mothers, and I’ve seen these big spending groups. There’s actually a term for this. It’s a German term and I can’t remember the name of it. But the calves get separated from their mothers, they fall down, they get trampled, and I think it can be a significant source of mortality in the summer, depending on the size of the group they’re in, and how many times they do this in a summer. So the other thing that affects all of them, even the ones that are not trampling being trampled, is it affects how much time they spend eating ruminating versus burning calories. And in really bad bugiers, they come off the summer range non mud fat like they want to be there. In some years, I’ve seen them come off the north slope western Arcti Carbo where they have very very little fat, especially females that have been locktaining all summer. So anyway, insector, harassment is not just I don’t of an annoyance like it is for us. Some more bugdo. It can be life and death for those guys.
00:22:13
Speaker 1: So I’m curious to learn more about how all of this data was collected. How we’ve learned so much about these movements. You mentioned earlier the aerial surveys that help you guys estimate population where you flew over these large aggregations, took photos and then counted. I understand actually counted all of those as best as possible to get an estimate. But what about the movement data. I understand that you know the radio collar program was a huge part of what you helped with, and that what you were involved in. And there’s a unique area where this was done to some degree called the Onion Portage. I’ve read a bit about it in some of Seth Canner’s books, and I’d love to hear about what you did there, how you radio collar these caribou and what that helped you understand about them.
00:23:05
Speaker 2: Well, about ninety or ninety five percent of all the information we use to manage the Western Article during my career was based on radio telemetry data. I started working in CONTs of you back in nineteen eighty eight, and back then, satellite telemetry was just barely becoming available, not to people with big research money, but to people working biologists like Mefield, biologists that wanted this just for nuts and bolts survey and inventory activities. So when I got here, I think we had five satellite callers deployed in the Western Article, and we wanted we did We put those callers out for two reasons. We wanted to see if they’d work, and then also we really wanted to have some even little tiny kernel of data where to go to find the callers that we had been using since about the nineteen seventies, so conventional radio telemetry had been around about twenty or twenty five years. So those five callers, you know, we quickly lost two of them, so we were down to three. But it was amazing just having three callers that we could access the data online and they would tell us, man, you need to go a lot farther north and east than we usually do. There’s there’s this collar up there, and I bet there’s some conventional callers to It really made us more efficient in doing the radio tracking surveys. With the satellite telemetry callers, all the data just comes to your computer, so it doesn’t make any difference if it’s you know, winter solstice and we’ve got an hour and forty two minutes of sort of daylight, or the middle of July when you’ve got twenty four hours of daylight. That data came in. The satellite telemertary data came in every day, good weather, bad weather, whatever. For the conventional radio callers, you had to get out little airplanes with antennas. You had a receiver and you flew around until you picked up a signal and then you track. You could track in directionally find the caribou. You could record things like whether or not she still had a calf group size, group location. But I think most of the bile is in the field today probably have almost no experience actually having to do conventional radio telemetry tracking flights like that we did all the time back in the eighties. It all, it all is fed to them over their computer. Everybody’s putting out satellite callers. Now you can get other information too. You can get like ambient air temperature. You can have sensors in the transmitters that’ll pick that up. You can get activity monitors that’ll tell you not whether they’re or trotting or running or feeding, but it can tell you basically how active they are. You don’t know what they’re doing, you don’t know if they’re digging a hole or if they’re trotting, but you can tell they’re more active than they were the previous five hours when they were just laying there. So there’s all kinds of information you can get from telemetry information. We were most concerned with distribution, movement patterns, and then mortality and productivity. And then even more important than productivity is something we called recruitment. It’s how many of your calves live to well at least past their first year. After their first year, we couldn’t we couldn’t really say they had been recruited into the population because most caribou cows don’t reproduce until they’re three. And we didn’t call our calves when we did the calling around only six to nine months to see what initial survival was. But telemetry was really the backbone of the Western Arctic or AT S and I program, survey and inventory program, and I think it’s that way for most caribo birds and probably the world now.
00:27:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, so how did you get these colors on these caribou?
00:27:23
Speaker 2: When I got here in eighty eighth, they had just started kind of an experimental study to see if they could catch caribou as they were crossing the Kobuk River. They had to swim this big river. There was a place called Onion Portage that you referred to earlier, and it had been well documented as a place where indigenous people and of back people had hunted caribou for millennium. They had data going back archaeological data going back about nine or ten thousand years, and that site had been used continuously for that time. So this was before I came on. I think the first year they did this was eighty five or eighty six, But they took boats up there just to see if they could do it catch caribo in the water, and they couldn’t. It wasn’t easy. They had actually lassos and they would get a boat up within twenty or thirty feet and they’d throw this lasso and they’d catch some by the antlers and pull them over to the boat. Well, we figured out it was a whole lot easier on the caribou in us to just drive the boat next to him, grab an antler, and then you’ve got them. So the project evolved a lot. The main reason why they wanted to do that was the alternative to catch them by hand. The only way to get them was to use helicopters. And back then, this was before nut gunning had become widely practiced. So it’s chemical immbialization from a dark gun, and there’s problems with that, you know, some mortality capture mortality was much higher when using chemical and mobilization back then that it is now. But the thing they weren’t and it’s not that they were killing lots of cariba, but the hardest thing about using chemical I mobilization with helicopters was northwest Alaska is you know, at least five hundred miles from the nearest helicopter back then, and there were very few helicopters in Alaska, so they often couldn’t get a helicopter to go out and do the capture work up here because they were trying to capture caribou. And then Alchina heard, and maybe the Maulchana heard, and all these birds that were closer. So they thought, man, we’ve got to have something that’s cheaper, less expensive, and that we can do on our own. We don’t so we don’t have to depend on getting helicopters. Let’s try catching them in the river. So they did that and lo and behold it worked. A side benefit of that that they really hadn’t been thinking about, was it. Local people never liked the idea of chasing caribou with helicopters. They said, this is cruel, this is splitting up cows and caws, this is really hard on them. You shouldn’t do this, And so they started onion portage just to make it more economical and feasible for the biologists. A huge side benefit of that was that it didn’t involve chasing caribou for half a mile or more with a helicopter. So not only did we save money, we reduced mortality. And it was much more readily accepted by local people that they weren’t real keen on callers either back in the nineteen seventies and eighties, but they said, well, you know, this is a lot better than you know doing it the other way. So that kind of sealed the deal. And from nineteen eighty six until about four or five years ago, that’s the only way we collared Western Arti caribou was from boats and the nuts and bolts of the couture operation. We handled balls differently than Coyle’s. I could talk, you know, I could talk about collaring carribou and Onion Portage for two hours. We don’t have that much time, but it was it was a great project. It was one of the best projects, the most enjoyable projects that that I did in my annual round of work. One of the things we started doing in conjunction with the coloring project at Onion Portage was in the We did this in September when caribou were migrating south and so we Uh. My original idea was to bring local people out onto the collaring project, hunters. I wanted unters to see what we were doing, that we were not hurting them. I wanted them to see, you know how much work it was to get these callers out. And we talked about the information. Well. I called and called, and everybody was too busy either picking berries or killing caribou for their freezers. They needed they needed meat. So I thought, man, I can’t get anybody to come out on this project, and not ah students. There’s a captive audience. They’re in school, they’re not picking berries, they’re not out, you know, every day trying to get cariboo like their fathers. And so I talked to a couple of teachers from Narwick and nearby village and I said, oh, you know, I’ve got this project. Would you ever think about bringing some kids up. You know, they could stand on the bank with us. We’ll put them on the boat. Long story short, it was a great project. We had six or eight kids from two schools, six or eight from one school, six or eight from the next school every fall, and we had them all the way from We tried to get high school kids, but We had them as little as I think third graders, and it was really good. It was so much fun to interact with the kids. They’d always they’d usually bring an elder with them as a kind of a chaperone, And so while we were talking science and showing them about collaring careb but the kids got to put collars on caribou. The elder they’d make sure they’d go out and they’d yet they’d get a ball for count meat. You’d show them how you shoot a caribou in the water, how you skin it, Here’s how you cut it up. And sometimes it’d be an old man and an old woman, and the women would teach the girls, this is how we make cariboo soup. This is how we cook the puttuck bones. Overall, it was really one of the highlights of my career working on that project.
00:33:22
Speaker 1: Wow, that’s uh, that’s phenomenal. I it sounds like I went to the wrong elementary school, because I would have been I would have been all about that. So you got to be involved in such a fascinating hands on part of studying This massive herd, as he mentioned, was once the largest caribou herd in Alaska. I believe, and you study them so closely for so many years, in so many different ways and facets of that study. I want to move us forward now into the present day and something that our shared acquaintance, our friend Bjorn, has frequently brought just just constantly kind of whispering in my ears, Hey, are you paying attention to what’s going with caribou? You see the latest numbers with caribou? Did you see the latest article about what’s happening? And I have been following that relatively closely, but I’m not sure that the wider world really is. I feel like this is something that’s that’s passing in the dark of night, of monumental importance that most Americans have no idea about. Some wondering if you could, Jim very explicitly for those who maybe have been, you know, you know, focus on what’s happening the lower forty eight or on their backyard or whatever might be. What is happening with cariboo right now? What is the status of caribou in North America and what the trajectory for this species?
00:35:04
Speaker 2: Well, I’m glad we talked about on in portage. We could laugh a little bit about that, and that was an uplifting story. But I have to agree with you. I think by and large most people don’t know what’s going on with caribrew. But what you said with regard to cariber I think you know in the Caribo world, the Caribo biology world. I was in the North American Cariboo Conference back in May of twenty twenty three, was held in Anchorage. It was held in conjunction with the Arctic Ungulate Conference, so there were lots and lots of ungulate biologists. There were six over six hundred registered participants in that big, huge meeting, and that’s what people talked about in the hallways. That’s what lots and lots and lots of the presentations were about, was what’s going on with caribrew. The opening present at that North American Cariboo workshop was given by Don Russell, the late Don Russell. He just recently died about about a month ago, one of the finest Cariboo biologists in the world. He and Anne Gunn did a status report on Caribou, not just in North America. Both Anne and Don were longtime Caribou biologists ecologists in Canada, and so what they did was for you know, probably a year or more prior to the conference, they contacted every Cariboo biologist that had or might have population data for the herd or herds in their areas, and they collected all that and they gave the status report along with Grass and you know, we could talk hours just about this. I think her presentation. Anne gave the presentation. It was about an hour and a half long, but I can’t remember how many herds she had data for. Probably she thought two thirds to three fourths of the herds in the world. And for the herds that she didn’t have data on, it’s not that they wouldn’t share the data. For the real small herds and the un herds in Russia, there just is no data. But for herds with data, probably two thirds to maybe even three fourths of the herds were stable at best or declining or had already declined, and some of some of these herds had crashed. Two of the biggest herds in the world in eastern Canada, the George River Herd and the Leaf River Herds. They were almost twice as big as the Western Arctic Herd. At its peak, they were eight hundred to nine hundred thousand Carribo a piece. By the time they gave their presentation, each one of those herds was under ten thousand animals, and it didn’t take decades to get there. Those herds crashed. I think it was within you know, a ten or twelve or fifteen year period, Max. I really think of it that those herds went from eight hundred thousand caribo to less than ten thousand caribo. Wow, in like ten years. In addition to that, she had range maps for these herds, so she’d show you where the herd was, and she said, boy, you know, for the herds that have been the best studied, we not only know where they where they where their home range is, we can see how that shifted over the last ten twenty years. And for the herds without kind of information, not only were the herds, you know, much much smaller than they had been ten twenty years before that the ranges had shifted north. She didn’t have a lot of information about what was driving these declines. That’s always the next question. People want to know, why is this happening? And there was no real dated driven conclusions that she could offer because I don’t think I think people know, you know, some of the things that are affecting Curriboo. I knew what was I thought, I knew what was driving Western Arctic herd numbers at least phrenominantly. But I can’t tell you the whole big picture. I don’t I don’t have it all ironed out. But again going back to their status report, this is Caribou herds throughout the northern hemisphere. So with Scandinavian herds, they had little data out of Russia on wild reindeer herds, the Canadian herds, Alaskan herds. And one of the amazing things was when you looked at the onset of these declines, they didn’t all start declining on this year. It was over about a twenty year period that these herds around the northern hemisphere or started their declines. They didn’t all just drop off the edge like the George River and Leaf River herds did. Some of them tapered off pretty slowly. A lot of them didn’t, though they dropped off. But as I as she went through her slides and her presentation heard by herd by herd, I thought, we have never we being caribu biologists and people who use and depend on carib but we’ve never seen anything like this before, where so many herds, the entire all the herds, most of the herds, like I said, you know, probably two thirds to three quarters of the herds all started a decline within about a twenty year window, which is just the blink of an eye in terms of caribou time. This is new, and so don’t I don’t know of any paper that has definitively linked global warming to these caribou declines. But I can’t think of any other umbrella factor that could be affecting so many herds over such a huge geographic area in such a short window of time other than climate change. Now, what makes it tough, what makes it tough for the researchers and the biologists to try and write this definitive paper is that rising temperatures affect different areas and thus different herds. I think differently. It’s not just temperature rise and you know, they just they overheat and they die. It’s it’s not that. But there’s lots and lots of data coming in from throughout the world how these warming temperatures are changing overall biomass species composition of lichens and forbes that caribould depend on. For the western areat occurred, I thought, and this was this was before climate change really became a buzzword. But starting around two thousand, I started saying much more frequent icing events during winter than I had ever seen prior to two thousand, and not only were they more frequent, they were more severe. You know, Northwest Alaska’s been getting winter thaws probably since Northwest Alaska started to exist, but they would last for a day or two. You know, we’d go from zero or twenty below up to maybe thirty thirty four degrees for a day or two, and then it dropped right back down and it wasn’t a huge deal. The way it has been in recent years around here is we’re getting lots more precipitation in the summer and fall. We transition out of fall into winter. The only change is it goes from rain to sleep to mix snow and rain, and then it freezes and so the ground is saturated, the vegetations covered with moisture, and then it drops to you know, usually zero to twenty above even up here in northwest Alaska. And then during the winter, after it drops down, we’re getting three four, five, half a dozen rain on snow events during the winter those can be anywhere from a day to maybe four days freezing fogs. It’s almost like almost like drizzle. I never saw that prior to two thousand. Like I’ve been saying it since two thousand and I think that’s what initiated the current decline of the Western Arctycurd. Before I talk more about the Western art Curd, I want to make the bigger point that these rising temperatures, that’s how it affected the Western Arctycurd. But for other herds, maybe in eastern Canada, maybe in Scandinavia, maybe the major effect is on insect harassment. I know the Western ARCTICRD now has probably an additional two or three weeks of insect harassment than they had back in the eighties and nineties when I started. As I said said earlier, insects are a huge factor. That’s when they’re laying down fat the bulls, you know, to carry them through the rout and winter. That’s when that’s when cows are lactating, and that imposes a huge physiological demand on those cows. They come out of summer and they don’t look very good because they’ve been producing milk. The ones that didn’t lose their calf. If you’ve got two or three additional weeks of insect harassment, that’s a big deal. We’re saying things out here. I’m not enough of a range ecologists to know the impacts, but just being out in the country a lot, I still fly a lot that willow growth here has fundamentally changed that. The wheelers are much higher, thicker. The gravel bars that used to extend for you know, a half a mile on the major rivers, they’re completely under willows. Now we’re seeing the northward migration, if you want to call it, that, northward extension of spruce trees where they’re never used to be spruce trees. So it could be it’s not just icing events that started the western arcticre down. It could be that plus insects plus vegetation changes Scandinavia may be a different mix of these individual impacts or manifestations of climate change. In some areas, you know, maybe it’s affecting not predator abundance, but just predator mobility, snow conditions where caribou can almost stay on top of the snow, but not quite. We’ll stay on top of that stuff just fine. So temperature has the potential to affect every aspect of caribou life in ecology, and it’s the only thing I can think of that’s driving all of these declines worldwide. I said, you know, when we got into this and then this is this is all new ground for for all of us. And that’s one of the scary things about it. We don’t we don’t really know is wildlife managers and biologists, how what do we need to measure to document this? What do we need to do to try and offset some of these negative impacts on caribrew Some of the impacts on caribou are not that’s not one hundred percent bad news. You know, caribou benefit from warmer conditions in some places too. But from what we’re seeing, the overall net effect on these northern adapted species like caribou and muskox and dall sheep, Laska Yukon moose, it’s more bad news than good and not by just a little bit. But that But that’s another thing. It doesn’t have to be you know, it doesn’t have to be so significant that you can see the change every year. All all it has to do these animals live so close to the edge. You only have to shift mortality in relation to recruitment of young into the population by a few percentage points a year, and in ten twenty years you’ve got a lot less caribou than you had before. Now with caribou, it’s not acting suddenly like that. I think we’re seeing really our ground swell change and it’s happening fast. You know, the Western we’ve lost three fourths of the Western art occurred in the last twenty three years. That was one of the largest cariboo herds in the world. We went from four hundred ninety thousand caribou back around two thousand and three. The census they did fishing game did last summer one hundred and twenty one thousand caribou. There’s no end that that’s starting to slow, that decline is starting to slower reverse, they’re continuing down. It’s not just the Western arcticre again, it’s two thirds to three fourths of the herds in the world. I’ve been doing a lot of talking here. I’ll stop it. But one other point, and point I really want to make, I think, in terms of public awareness of what’s going on. Even though most people, especially people in the lower forty eight, they don’t depend on caribou. Like people up here where I live. You know, people every year, where’s the caribou, where’s the caribo? You’ve been flying, I haven’t found caribou. They depend on those for their food. It’s it’s not recreation, it’s not quality of life. It’s putting meat on the table for these folks, and it’s something it’s it’s even beyond that. It’s part of their cultural identity. Just like hunters, they have this inner part of them that, by God, I’m a hundred this is what I do. This defines me, define not just people like you and I who love to hunt. It affects people out here that it goes really to the essence of their culture as well as mainly what’s in their freezer. But I wanted to contrast that we haven’t had We haven’t had what we would all call probably normal levels of sheep in Northwest Alaska Kotsabu Sound for at least fifteen years now. You still can’t hardly find a sheep here. I think the last decline, I think that was precipitated by icing, just as it did with caribou. I’m as concerned about moose numbers in this area of Kotsabu Sound. As I am about caribou numbers, I think they’re going down too. Maybe not as rapidly, not as dramatically yet, but the trends are all the same. And it’s not just mammals. Our salmon runs in Kotsubu Sound and in other parts of Alaska too. They’re a lot less dependable than they used to be in terms of timing, in terms of species composition, in terms of numbers. Three years ago we essentially had no chum salmon returned to Kotsubu Sound. I’ve talked to, you know, dozens and dozens of elders and said, boy, have you ever seen anything like that? They’d never seen that before, unprecedent. These are people that are seven, eighty, seventy or eighty years old. It’s not just fish, it’s not just animals, it’s birds. Cornell has come out with a number of studies over the last seven eight years showing estimates of bird numbers globally, and it’s shocking to see the percentages that they report in terms of just bird abundance, not species disappearing business overall numbers. So for me and my way of thinking, I can’t think of anything besides climate change that could have such a widespread and dramatic impact on such a wide range of natural life on our worlds and climate change JIM.
00:51:21
Speaker 1: For most people across the nation, when we hear these numbers that there’s for example, three billion fewer breeding pairs of birds in America since nineteen seventy, or that some salamander population or amphibians are declined by forty percent, let’s say, or in this case, caribou on average down sixty five percent across the Arctic. We hear these numbers, we see these statistics, and it’s really hard to compute. It’s really hard to make it feel tangible in any kind of way. First, because we as a speed I think we’re not prepared to handle and understand you know, something at that scale, right, you know, one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic. I think that’s as true you know, for wildlife, as it is you know anything else. But you have had a up close and personal, lived experience with something that’s undergoing this kind of free fall. You have seen this Western Arctic caribou herd that you have been literally hands on with decline from nearly half a million animals to now just over one hundred thousand devastating decline. What does that feel like to see something that you’ve spent a life studying for and stewarding and caring for. What has that been like personally for you?
00:52:53
Speaker 2: Well, a range of emotions. It’s terrifying, first of all, extremely worrisome. I mean, the climatologists are clear, you know, they know what’s driving global warming. It’s our reliance on fossil fuels. And you know, not just in the last ten twenty years, but since you know, the Industrial Revolution back in the early nineteen hundreds, so we’ve been digging this hole for decades, you know, over one hundred years. Really, we’re not going to turn it around in the next five or ten. I think for me, my main reaction is, besides sadness and terror, it’s frustration. I think we know what we need to do. You know, if climatologists have been clear, we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Look at the United Nations reports, they are very clear. If we’re going to you know, limit global warming to one and a half degrees, this is what we have to do. You know, with regard to our reliance on fossil fuels, coal, gas oil, and we’re not doing it. The current administration, they’re doing everything possible to take us in the other direction. It’s bad science. I can tell you from my experience, it’s not bad science. The scientists like me on one of them. We’re all scared, we’re frightened. I can’t tell you how many caribou biotists that I’ve talked to. They aren’t close to tears talking about what’s going on and what we might be able to do. Another part of the frustration is, you know, I think people are getting it. I have never had a conversation with somebody who lives around here, a local person, and most of the people in the villages, they don’t wake up to NPR, they don’t read, you know, the New Times and the Climate Column and all this stuff. But I have never talked to any of them who have disputed the fact the temperatures are rising and we’re seeing impacts. We’re seeing impacts on not just caribou numbers. Caribou were coming off Western Arctic. Caribou are coming off the North Slope one or two months later now than they did back in the eighties, and nineties. I used to go to Onion Portage on the first of September every year because we knew that cariboo had been crossing since the middle of August. I think it’s been at least five, maybe six years since they last conducted the Onion Portage collaring project. Even before I retired, it was getting really hard to get all of our callers deployed because the caribou weren’t showing up. They now have. They’ve had to revert to collaring caribou using helicopter capture work, not chemical and mobilization. They’re using nut guns. But but the point I want to make is there’s not a caribou are coming off in our slopes so late that they’re not at Onion Portage until there’s ice in the river. You can’t do it by boat anymore. Hunters. Hunters could tell you lots and lots and lots of similar stories about where they have to go to find caribou and when they go there to get caribou. You know, it used to be everybody tried to fill up with big bulls in the fall because they were the fattest. They weren’t looking for antlers. They wanted fat over the hips. Now by the time caribou get down to this region, the caribou have entered rut some years. They’re they’re not only entered rut, they’re they’re coming through after rut. As soon as caribou going to rut, subsistence users generally stopped taking bulls because the meat gets strong. They don’t they don’t even want to cook it, much less eat it. So what they do they still need meat, they do two things. They’ve switched to taking moose earlier, because moose don’t migrate like that. If you look hard enough, you can shoot moose in August or September. But they really want caribou. That’s what these people want around here, and so they switch to cows. Well, that’s that’s not what you want to be doing on I heard that’s declining, you know in a study, you know, a twenty two year decline. So I’m getting back to this frustration. Everything seems to be stacking up against people that are concerned and against caribou. I think, in fairness to the people in the lower forty eight, they don’t see carabou or there’s no state outside of Alaska that has carabour anymore. It used to be Maine would get a few out of Canada. You know, Idaho had a few. Those those animals are gone. This is the last place. And when I moved to Alaska back in seventy six, caribou outnumbered people in Alaska. Not by ten or twenty thousand, I mean by hundreds of thousands of individuals. That’s the Alaska that I miss. There’s a lot of people that would disagree with me, especially politicians. And so when I say the word politicians, the next word that comes to my mind is frustration, because they know what needs to be done, but there is not the political will. They don’t have the backbone to do what we need to do. If we’re going to have maybe not a herd of five hundred thousand caribou, but at least a herd where you have more than a permit hunt for one bull, when you’re lucky enough to be drawn to have enough caribou that non resident hunters can still come up here and hunt, we’re very very close to eliminating that even for the Western article. Most of the herds in Alaska now there’s no non resident hunting anymore. What about unthinkable twenty years ago. When I got here, though, I never thought i’d see a day where it was tough to get caribou here.
00:59:13
Speaker 1: So tell me this, Jim, on the topic of politics a little bit here decisions made by some policymakers amidst this free fall of caribou populations across the world, but definitely in Alaska specifically, where there seemed to be a number of different overlapping pressures that are leading to these declines, many of which seemed to be related to climate. What kind of impacts do you imagine there being if we were to take the current moment we’re in, in the current situation that caribou are in now, and then say, turn their calving grounds into an oil field, or develop a two hundred mile industrial corridor that would split their migration route. Of course, I’m talking about opening up the coastal plane of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where the Porcupine caribou herd currently cavs. Or I’m talking about the Ambler Road, which has been supposedly approved and fast tracked to build a two hundred mile industrial corridor bisecting the western Arctic caribou herds migration route and opening up a mining district and all that. You know, some people hear that and they think jobs, and they think economy, and they think, you know, good wages, and they think improved you know, way of living, all you know, good things. But what does that mean for caribou? That’s something that probably most people don’t think about, but of course you do. What would something like one of those projects.
01:00:47
Speaker 2: Mean for.
01:00:49
Speaker 1: These herds that are already hurting in such a serious fashion.
01:00:53
Speaker 2: That’s an excellent question. Is something that I think about far more now than I did even when I was working, just because things momentum is building in the wrong direction in terms of wildlife, fish, wildlife bird numbers and impacts. Well, the it’s a complicated question. I think people in Alaska are thinking about caraboy I mean, it’s men in the news, both both sides. You know, the proponents of development are saying caribou cross roads. You know that we got lots of roads in Alaska, and I agree, We’ve got decades of experience in Alaska showing that caribou herds can survive in areas that have roads. We know that. But when you look at the numbers and you think about what do we want, that’s kind of where Really the discussion is not whether or not caribou cross roads, because we also have lots and lots and lots of information from the Western artycurd as they’ve approached the Red Dog Mine. There’s a fifty two mile law road out to the coast there, and it’s some of the clearest biology I have ever seen. You know, biology tends to be messy. Animals do all kinds of stuff, even stuff that doesn’t make sense. But with regard to the impacts of the Red Dog Road on Western arct occurred moments. Nobody can look at these maps that I’ve made and say they weren’t affected. They were clearly affected. You know, tens of thousands of Cariboo have been affected every year when big numbers approached that road, and they weren’t delayed for three or four days, they were delayed for up to two months.
01:02:37
Speaker 1: Wow.
01:02:39
Speaker 2: So every time, every time some big resource extraction project is developed, it reduces options that caribou have to find the best mix of environmental factors to get them through the next year. I think Anmar has done a wonderful, just a magnificent job of teaching everybody that the calving grounds are sacro sanct You know, you’ve got to have the calving grounds. You can’t mess with them there. And I have disagreed with that for decades. What good is a pristine calving ground if they can’t get to it because there’s a two hundred and eleven mile road that’s stopping them. What good is if you have all these calves and they drop but you’ve got some you know, some other big development Cole say over in the Lisburne Hills are near there, and they can’t go over there and evade insects. Every time you build one of these projects, you reduce their options. And I’ve been saying for a number of years now that the resource, the critical resource for managers and people to protect is space for caribou. It’s space to give them options to find the best combination of predator numbers, hunting pressure, vulnerability to icing, insect harassment, food availability, chances of icing events happening. That’s about the worst thing that can happen to them in the winter. Every time we build a new gas line, we reduce options for caribou to access these areas. And the scary thing about roads, you know, the footprint of a road really isn’t very big, even a two hundred and eleven mile road. There has been some biologists that figured out, well, we’re only going to lose a thousand acres. You know what’s a big deal. It’s not how much under you cover with grovel. That road can act as a semi permeable barrier or a total barrier to caribou movements. You could block access to hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat that they used to use whatever conditions called for it. That’s what frustrates me about are politicians. Politicians want to be re elected. The best way to get reelected is to put money in people’s pockets make them feel good, and so all other decisions are to maximize money for short term gain that almost never is in the best interest for wildlife and people who value and depend on them.
01:05:31
Speaker 1: So, to oversimplify things, if I were to take everything you just said and try to boil it down to some kind of action item, I guess when I listen to this, When I listen to anything like this, I inevitably quickly turned to, well, then what does that mean for us? What can we do? What action should I take? It sounds like one of the most tangible things we can do in the relatively short term to try to preserve options for caribou to adjust to this changing world around them. So let’s try to maintain these migration r us. Let’s give them this open space and habitat they need. Is that if you were to ask folks in the lower forty eight maybe who are listening to this, who who care about wildlife, who care about cariboo, and they’re thinking, hey, what can I do way far from so far away? Is simply trying to support that an important first step advocating for protecting these places, maintaining space and options for caribou is that that focus area. That makes sense absolutely.
01:06:37
Speaker 2: I think you need to think of it. And maybe two terms. You know what you said, protecting habitat for caribou, that’s a short term necessity. You know, right now with caribou on the ropes globally, we have the capability through either harvests or development and not necessarily exterminate cariboo. We could, we probably won’t, you know, if they build the Ambler Road and then they extend that road west out to the coast to reach some deep water port, which is what I think the state of Alaska ultimately wants to do. Even at that, the Western arcticred probably isn’t going to disappear completely. What we may end up with is what caribou herds on the road system are right now. Herds at number maybe forty, maybe fifty thousand caribou, but all those herds are intensely managed. There’s almost no non resident hunting for any of those herds, and the only subsistence hunting is by permit only through the state where you’re If you’re lucky enough to get a permit, you can shoot one bowl and you can do it in the fall, and that’s it. There’s not a family out here that can support themselves on one caribrew, So really, what do you want? So that’s a short term thing to answer question that people can do these little you know, relatively little. A two hundred eleven mile road in the range of the Western Artica. It sounds small. I hear pro developers saying that all the time. It’s only two hundred eleven miles. Look at the size of this range, of this herd. It’s a drop in the bucket. But it has the potential to wall off much more than just the area. You know, within a mile or two or three miles either side of this road, they may lose access to a big area that they’ve used for wintering range in the past, but the road’s not going to stop there anyway. If we want to have an Alaska where animals are a prominent characteristic of the state, it’s not just big mountains and pretty rivers and lakes. It’s wildlife too. People come to Alaska to see the mountains and the rivers, but by god, they want to see moose, and they want to see a grizzly, and they want to see numbers at caribou, and if they can see a wolf man, that’s that’s really something. People want those things, so it’s worth protecting those. So the last, the last thing I’ll say, it’s really important your vote counts. And one of the terrifying things about cariber declines everything else is that I think we are moving past the period when wildlife managers could tweak seasons in bag limits and whether or not we hunt it all, whether they could try and reduce predator numbers, even perhaps through you know, liberalizing public regulations on trapping and hunting wolves or other predators. Coyotes, whatever. We’re at the point now where the decisions made in Washington, d C. And in state capitals are going to have a much bigger impact on or fish, wildlife and non game species like birds, and also on the people who use, depend on, or just value these things than the wildlife biologists, Like I was a decision to build the Amber Road, for an example, that has the potential to do far more damage in you know, the five years that it takes to build the road than wildlife biologists have been able to counteract in the last probably twenty thirty fifty years. That scares me because politicians. From my experience with politicians, and I’ve talked to lots of them, a few of them even called me for questions, not very many, but a few. They don’t know anything about animals. They live in DC, they live in Juno, they live in lasting, Michigan, they live in all the state capitals. Some of them go hunting, but most of them are politicians, you know, about five hundred days a year. To have them making these big, huge decisions scares the hell out of me.
01:11:26
Speaker 1: There’s so much that you brought up there that I have have thought about that, and that you know, to my earlier comments, seems outside of my understanding or outside of my ability to influence change, or outside of the short term per view of of of my own decision making and like my own choices and and my own life. But one thing when I when I look at this and we’ll just look at will zoom back into the caribou exam specifically one personal relationship with this issue for both of us. I think UH is hunting caribou. I’ve hunted caribu once, UH planning on doing it again soon. I understand you have as well. That’s been a part of your life. How does everything you understand now influence that part of your life and how you engage with caribou and in the future hunt them or not. How How how have you thought that through and process that for yourself personally?
01:12:42
Speaker 2: That’s an excellent question. When I was working the last two years of my career, I was a one man traveling road show. I went to every village except one in the in this region. And it wasn’t to talk about the Ambler Road or Red Dog and you know, the Red Dog Road and crossing. It was to show villas, the population data. It was mostly me putting up graph after graph after graph and map after map because they can understand those things. It was all laid out in front of them. Wasn’t talking about statistics or you know, p values or any of that. It was one of the most satisfying things I did in my career, and I wanted to make sure that they knew that we were entering into what I thought was going to be tougher times. And it’s been playing out. I was right. Things are a lot worse now than they were back in twenty sixteen. And I think what anyway, during those presentations, one thing that I usually said to people, one of the characteristics of in youpact society is hunter success. Other ones too. There’s a ton or twelve things that that are part of their culture, you know, sense of humor and all these different things. Well one of them was hunter success. And I said, boy, you know this has been so important to your culture for so long, but I think we need to redefine what hunter success is. Hunter success is taking absolutely no more than you can possibly get by on for food or whatever, whatever the reason. It’s not okay anymore to shoot more than you need just to have a pad. So that if you know your neighbor needs some meat, you can give them some meat we need. We need to start thinking minimally. So in terms of my harvest, we ate caribou primarily. That was our primary source of meat until about four or five years ago. And I’ve shot two caribous and the last five years. The bag limit, you know, is now it’s fifteen per year. I’ve never come close to shooting the bag limit. You can shoot fifteen caribou a year right now for an Alaskan resident. One of those can be a cow. That is far too liberal. What’s legal is not always what is responsible. So like I didn’t get carabou this fall either, and it’s not because I didn’t try. I’ve worked my tail off for the last four or five years and I couldn’t find that. I haven’t even set up a camp. So fast forward to November and there’s caribou just within ten miles of town. But I take my cues from what the elder is saying. If they say the bulls are no good to eat, I’m not going to shoot a bull, and I’m certainly not going to shoot a cow now, even if I legally can, so I would say you know, talking to all hunters, Alaska hunters and villages and cots of you. You know again, people in the lower forty eight, Green Bay or LA or whatever. Don’t wait for the agencies or the politicians to tell you what you need to do. I think we all we’re all smart enough and most of the hunters that I know. Doesn’t make any difference if you’re from Wisconsin or if you’re from Ambler. If you look at the numbers, you can see when things are going downhill. Just because it’s legal to shoot fifteen caribou a year. If you can get by on two, get buy on two and don’t shoot cows, do what’s right. And I would say the same thing applies to climate change. If if you can afford to get a hybrid car or you know, a clean car, or just even when you go to the polls, take the time research the candidates. And if somebody is rapidly pro development, that they are going to back any big project because it’s going to put money on people’s product without any concern about oh, that’s going to affect the environment for the while, ife keep looking, try and find another another candidate. Our votes count, that’s showing right now. With the administration we have in DC, I think we’re going to lose a lot of ground in the next three years environmentally.
01:17:36
Speaker 1: I have one last question, and it’s a selfish I.
01:17:41
Speaker 2: Have one hundred answers. If you can’t stop now.
01:17:45
Speaker 1: This is one last selfish question, Jim. I had the great fortune of getting to visit the Arctic Refuge last summer, and I was able to stand on top of a ridge and look out across the coastal plain, across the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd, and see all the way to the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean, and it is completely unblemished. It is the wildest, most vast, most untouched landscape I’ve seen in my entire life. And it was it was, It was undescribable how reassuring it was to me to know that there was still some place like that, and that in some number of weeks there would be hundreds of thousands of caribou across that landscape with no impediment to their movement and their ability to give birth to tens of thousands of calves, and that this incredible cycle of life and migration would continue. And I remember standing there and thinking to myself that, gosh, I can’t wait until my sons could come here someday and see this and experience this themselves. I have a six year old and an eight year old, and I want it so badly for them to see that and experiences. And then in that same moment, I thought to myself, will they get that chance? Or will this place right now there is this vast, incredible landscape that wildlife of so many kinds enjoy. Will that be changed irreversibly in some number of years because of some of the things you’re talking about. And that was a really difficult possibility to reckon with. I spent a lot of time sitting on that ridge by myself for several hours thinking about that, and then I came home and continued to marinate in that thought. And then the other day our mutual friend Biorn sent me something he had written, and he was reckoning with a similar question, this question of the uncertainty of our future. And he made a connection that I have not been able to stop thinking about since. He wrote about an experience he had where he was in one of these places where there are caribou today, and he had this incredible encounter with them in this incredible place, and he thought to himself, will or am I in this moment like the hunters of eighteen seventy were or eighteen eighty were, when they were still seeing these vast herds of buffalo and had no idea that in just a number of decades they would all be gone? Were we in this moment now? Are we in this moment now? Just like those people in the nineteenth century who thought the buffalo would would continue on forever, and then one day they did not. We’re faced now, I think, or at least I am reckoning now with this uncertainty of if that might be the case with caribou, and as you’ve talked about many many other things, maybe too. I’m thirty eight years old. I do not have all the answers. I have a lot of questions. You have been able to You have been able to reckon with these things a bit longer than I have. And I’m curious how you do that? How do you reckon with this uncertainty that you were experiencing even more firsthand than I am, and that you’ve seen more up close and personal than even I have. This final thought from you, I’d love to understand how you are, how you are dealing with this uncertainty and looking into the future.
01:21:32
Speaker 2: Well, I’m doing this the exact same thing that you are, Mark, except my youngest kid is forty six now I’m seventy four. My oldest was fifty one. But the youngest one he lived until two years ago. He lived in Kotsaber. So we started getting his little boys out a lot about age two or three, and he and I have had this conversation conless times, lots of times and tense. We’re doing it now because we’re afraid that when his kids they’re they’re eight and ten now about the age of your years, when they’re my age. Unless unless there are big, big changes in the United States about our priorities in terms of quality of life things and not protecting and preserving wild areas and wild wildlife, they’re not going to be here. And this isn’t this isn’t just wild speculation. Look at the East coast of the United States. How many how many you know that was all indigenous people back before Columbus got here, They were all subsistence users. One hundred percent. How many actual functioning subsistence tribes are on the East coast of the United States. I’ll speculate here. I would say zero, not subsistence the way they do it in Ambler. Still, so we know where we’re headed. We’ve been down this road for a couple of hundred years. We know where the Ambler Road leads. It doesn’t lead just to the Ambler mining district. It leads us to where New Jersey is. Now. I’m scared as hell. I’m seventy four. I’m at the other end of the spectrum. It’s just like you worrying about your kids. I’m worried about my grandkids and their kids, and I’m really worried about caribou and wild places. I love Alaska. I love its wildlife. But one of the things that really doesn’t get a lot of press is that, you know, I’m a pilot. I’ve got a cub In a half an hour, I can be to some place where I don’t see anybody else. I don’t hear other airplanes except during the hunting season. I don’t hear it’s no machines. It’s getting so hard in this even in our country that tend steaks. You know, it’s it’s still has a high quality of life, but it’s become almost impossible to find solitude. No, that’s at stake too, and it’s worth a lot. Alaska will be much, much, much diminished if we don’t have more than just remnant populations of moose and caribou and sheep and muskogs. If we can’t find solitude. I really hate to think of our state going going that way, but really frightens me.
01:24:45
Speaker 1: Well, Jim, we have a lot, all of us have a lot to think about, to try and find ways that each of us, in our own ways, can can do something to move things in a more positive direction. But I want to thank you for what you have already done over decades in studying these animals and advocating for these animals and wild places and helping us understand them in such a way that we have the data and the knowledge to make informed decisions, which which again today I think you’ve helped us do as well with this conversation. So thank you for all of that work, and thank you for this chat today, Jim.
01:25:23
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for the opportunity to appear on your podcast, and I want to thank you for getting this out there. This is what we need now. What you’re doing is at least as important is everything I did as a biologist. You’re getting the word out to people who vote, to people who can make a difference. It’s not going to be safe, you know. Things aren’t going to be turned around by a bunch of biologists like me or even climatologists that are you know, looking right directly in the mouth of the beast and telling us what’s going to happen. It’s guys like you that are getting the word out to voters. It’s incredibly important, and I really thank you and everybody like you doing this well.
01:26:06
Speaker 1: We all have our role to play, and I have faith that each in our own way will do just that.
01:26:13
Speaker 2: Thanks Jo, thank you, Thank you. Mark
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