Nunavut biologist hopeful about Rudolph’s high Arctic cousins

These Peary caribou on Bathurst Island have telltale reddish noses after eating purple saxifrage in August 2013. (PHOTO BY MORGAN ANDERSON)

Two Peary caribou bulls rest on the tundra of Melville Island in August 2014. (PHOTO BY MORGAN ANDERSON)

It turns out Rudolph, that red-nosed reindeer, has a close cousin living in Nunavut.

Let’s call him Colby, the crimson-nosed caribou.

High in the Arctic — on Ellesmere, Devon, Cornwallis and Melville Islands — lives Colby, a Peary caribou. His diet consists, in part, of flowering saxifrages.

“Eating the flowers can turn their noses reddish,” said Morgan Anderson, the Government of Nunavut’s regional wildlife biologist for the High Arctic.

Colby’s Christmas story, like his name, isn’t quite as smooth as that of his more famous cousin, Rudolph.

The flower is actually called a purple saxifrage, and, obviously, it doesn’t bloom anywhere near Christmas.

The reddish hue left on the caribou noses after feeding doesn’t glow, and certainly couldn’t be seen on a foggy Christmas eve.

But Colby’s story is worth telling anyway.

The Peary caribou are listed as an endangered species by both the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, and under the Species at Risk Act, which requires a recovery strategy for the animal, Anderson said.

This year, Anderson led a team of local hunters from Grise Fiord and Resolute — the only two communities found within the range of the caribou — on an aerial survey expedition to estimate the caribou’s population.

But the weather didn’t cooperate.

“We just had a lot of fog and then a lot of wind,” Anderson said over the phone from the GN’s regional wildlife office in Igloolik.

In her first survey attempt, using a helicopter out of Grise Fiord in April, Anderson only surveyed about a third of the area on southern Ellesmere Island which she had hoped to cover.

Later, using a Twin Otter out of Resolute, Anderson managed to conduct an aerial survey for a day and a half, instead of the four or five days she had planned.

But Anderson is optimistic about the population of Peary caribou, whose range spans Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.

Although there are an “awful lot of data gaps” on this population, Anderson said aerial surveys done by the GN between 2001 and 2008 estimated more than 4,000 animals throughout Nunavut. And the NWT government conducted a survey between 2010 and 2012, counting more than 7,000, Anderson said.

That puts the total population between 11,000 and 12,000.

And the communities which harvest the caribou are doing their part too.

While other communities, such as Taloyoak, Gjoa Haven and Arctic Bay, occasionally hunt the Peary caribou, Grise Fiord and Resolute are the main harvesters, Anderson said.

“But these are small communities that don’t have overlapping harvest zones,” Anderson said. “And they have a history of implementing their own restrictions, imposing self-regulated restrictions by their local HTOs [hunters and trappers organizations].”

Resolute, for example, managed its harvesting in the 1970s and 80s according to caribou scarcity on the nearby islands, Anderson said. And Grise Fiord observed a self-imposed 10-year moratorium in the 1980s on parts of southern Ellesmere Island.

The knowledge and experience gained by these two communities is being put to good use outside the High Arctic, Anderson said.

“Those communities have been sharing their story with the Baffin communities, during the community workshops on the Baffin caribou, so it’s great to see that experience is being shared and transmitted.”

The Peary caribou have another thing going for them: unlike the Baffin caribou, which rely heavily on lichen beds for foraging, and unlike muskoxen, which rely on sedge meadows, the Peary caribou have a much broader foraging diet, including sedges, grasses, flowering plants and even willows, Anderson said.

They’ve even been known to swim between islands in search of food during the summer months. Sure, Rudolph could fly, but Colby would have him beat in the river, for sure.