LONG AGO Massive Caribou Population problems, tell your accounts.

[Sourdough]

OK, those who lived when and with the massive caribou herds that were an ongoing problem, make those who can't imagine the endless herds of caribou cry with jealousy. Tell them about the years when the Alaska Highway crews used snowplows "YEAR AROUND" to blast the dead caribou off the highways 24 hours a day. Tell them about when the valleys were wall to wall packed with caribou, so many caribou you could not guide hunters to Moose, Grizzly, Black Bears

When they would migrate for months by the thousands in your (front & back) yard, scraping their antlers against your wilderness cabin as they passed, the endless "clicking" of the tendons of thousands of caribou keeping you awake all night. And the large Wolf packs that followed them. Tell them of when the official harvest quota was (5) but F&G and law enforcement made it clear there was no limit so long as you processed them for some use (Man or Beast).

TELL YOUR ACCOUNTS. ("Where & When" disclosure Optional)

 

[Larry Bartlett]

Damn Sourdough I waited for replies but weez got crickets.

I'm afraid my 27 years here all I can attest to is what those caribou left behind and where, plus my experience with remote herds. I've found 100-150 y/o sheds on the upper Chena and some older than that on both sides of the Chena/Tanana confluence above mean high water, which supports the old stories of caribou moving through Fairbanks in the "early years." This was before there was an official ADFG or biological fact gathering by scientists, so we dont know if these were a wandering 40-mile population or a separate herd that locals hunted to extinction. The Andreafsky Herd extinction is a modern historical example of what likely happened to this local caribou population.

However I did witness the boom and complete bust of these herds from historically used regions: Mulchatna, Killbuck Mountains, and Northern AK Penn herds. As in, there in abundance one year and absent without body counts the next. The big mystery to me, with all my flying and friends who fly professionally, one would expect to find fields of dead caribou carcasses in such extreme declines but few are reported. In other words, there's a greater likelihood of caribou dispersal than complete or largely decimated populations in these events.

In either argument one thing is abundantly clear about caribou...those suckers can ghost out of entire regions for years and reappear as if they never left. Maybe with today's satellite technology biologists will seek clearer evidence over vast landscapes and possibly capture an event period of "rapid declines" in herds.

Musings after coffee and a freshy...

 

[oenanthe]

Can't remember which year it was, but back around 1990 there were caribou traversing the Fairbanks area in winter. There was a picture in the News-Miner of a bull that got hung up in someone's volleyball net they'd left up in their back yard.

That same winter, I was out skiing near Smith Lake well after dark in the half-light and thought I heard something. That was back before LED headlamps. Stopped to listen and heard nothing. Started skiing again and ... thought I heard something. Stopped to listen and ... heard nothing. Repeated that cycle about 3-4 times and finally realized I was hearing clicking tendons. I moved, they moved. I stopped, they stopped. About twenty caribou out there on the ski trails; never seen anything like it before or since.

Every now and again, caribou decide to roam.