Nunavut plans caribou-collaring project around Cambridge Bay

Cambridge Bay elder Joseph Tikhak recommends a limited collaring of female caribou from the Dolphin and Union herd at an Oct. 1 public meeting in the community. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Nunavut’s environment department wants to collar female caribou from the Dolphin and Union herd to see how many animals are in the herd and their migration patterns. (FILE PHOTO)

CAMBRIDGE BAY — Nunavut’s environment department will be able to move ahead with a project to collar caribou in the Dolphin and Union herd around Cambridge Bay in April 2015.

But the Ekalututiak hunters and trappers plans to recommend that only 25 caribou from the Dolphin and Union herd be collared — although the Government of Nunavut originally wanted to collar 50 female caribou.

That recommendation came at the end of a community meeting held in Cambridge Bay Oct. 1, when elders determined that half that number of collars — 25 instead of 50 — would do the job.

They also asked to receive regular updates during the three-year collaring project, intended to collect new information on the population numbers of the caribou, their migrations and their habitat.

James Panioyak, who chairs Cambridge Bay’s HTO, said its members were not in full support of the collars — and that’s why they wanted direction from the public meeting.

Among their concerns: how the collars would affect the animals, whether the collared animals could be hunted, and, if not, whether hunters would then be compensated.

At the Oct. 1 meeting, Lisa-Marie LeClerc, regional wildlife officer for the GN in Kugluktuk, explained how caribou cows would be netted and outfitted with a state-of-the-art, flexible radio collar.

The collaring would be a technical, helicopter-led operation, which she said would not allow for more than one local observer.

The collars, light devices equipped with radio transmitters, would show where the caribou go, she said. If the collars ceased to send signals, this would provide information about whether the animals, for example, drowned while crossing the ice or died on the land through predation or hunting.

Responding to concerns from those at the meeting that the collars could hurt the caribou, LeClerc said the animals would only be collared for about three years because the collars are designed to fall off when the batteries die.

The maps resulting from the collar “pings” showing the location of the collared caribou are expected to be useful tools for mining companies, including the Hope Bay mine project promoter, TMAC Resources, which has offered to contribute financially to the project, those at the meeting heard.

The Dolphin and Union herd’s population has not been surveyed since 2007 — and there’s worry that the herd’s size, then estimated between 21,000 and 27,000, may have dropped as much as those from the nearby Bathurst caribou, whose numbers appear to have declined by 75 per cent in recent years.

Panioyak and others at the meeting in the Luke Novoligak Hall suggested that caribou numbers on Victoria Island had often dropped in the past as the animals migrated to different places.

More predation from grizzly bears and wolves may have caused the herd to move away now, they said.

They also listed disturbances from mining exploration, increased shipping traffic and climate change other reasons that the caribou may have moved — perhaps as far away as Baker Lake.

The Dolphin and Union herd relies on sea ice between Victoria Island and the nearby mainland for its fall and spring migrations: the herd calves and mates on Victoria Island, but spends the winter on the mainland.

Some at the meeting said they had seen caribou falling through weak ice.

The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife already designated the Dolphin and Union caribou of “special concern” in May 2004 — that listing has not changed due to lack of new information about the herd’s numbers, which the GN said its planned collaring could help clarify.