What kind of habitat do caribou live in

Share Tweet Email. Go Further. Animals Climate change is shrinking many Amazonian birds. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals This frog mysteriously re-evolved a full set of teeth. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London.

Animals Wild Cities Morocco has 3 million stray dogs. Meet the people trying to help. Environment COP26 nears conclusion with mixed signals and frustration. Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big. Environment As the EU targets emissions cuts, this country has a coal problem.

Paid Content How Hong Kong protects its sea sanctuaries. History Magazine These 3,year-old giants watched over the cemeteries of Sardinia. Science Coronavirus Coverage What families can do now that kids are getting the vaccine. Magazine How one image captures 21 hours of a volcanic eruption. Science Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. They will continue to nurse occasionally through early fall, when they become independent. Females generally have longer life spans than males, some over 15 years.

Bulls typically live less than 10 years in the wild. Average life expectancy is 4. Caribou are known to travel distances greater than any other terrestrial mammal. The can travel more than 5, kilometers in a year, with extensive migrations in spring and fall. Spring migration leads the caribou off their winter range back to their warm-weather calving grounds areas where females give birth to the young.

Caribou herds are defined by the location of their traditional calving grounds. Caribou are gregarious and the largest groups, which can number in the tens of thousands, are found during the summer months. This grouping behavior is thought to bring about some relief from the huge swarms of harassing mosquitoes, warble flies, and nose bot flies found in the arctic tundra during summer.

As cooler weather arrives, groups become smaller but caribou may aggregate again during the rut breeding season and fall migration. Most caribou winter in forested areas, where they escape the deep snow and blowing winds of the tundra. Caribou are able to locate forage grasses, sedges, and lichens under snow, apparently by their ability to smell it.

To reach the forage they use their front paws to dig craters. Dominant caribou frequently take over craters dug by less dominant animals. Caribou communicate among themselves through vocal, visual, chemical, and tactile cues.

They have a keen sense of smell, which allows them to find food buried deep under snow. Caribou are mainly grazing herbivores. Their diet varies depending on the season. In summer they eat the leaves of willows and birches, mushrooms, cotton grass, sedges, and other ground dwelling kinds of vegetation. In the winter lichens are an important food source, although they continue to eat whatever vegetation is available. Calves are vulnerable to predation by bears, wolves, and other predators during their first week of life.

Healthy adult caribou are less susceptible to predation until old age and illness weakens them. By traveling in herds, caribou increase the number of individuals that can watch for predators. Through their foraging activities, caribou have a dramatic impact on communities of vegetation throughout their range.

They are also important prey species for large predators, such as bears and wolves, especially during the calving season. Caribou have been used extensively for their meat, fur and antlers. Reindeer, the domesticated subspecies of caribou, have been herded throughout their range for thousands of years. Although Alaska, with its more than 30 herds, has nearly double the number of caribou 1,, than people, caribou in the lower 48 United States are considered endangered.

Provincial biologists and the conservation community have urged adequate protection since that time. Despite over 40 years of researching and monitoring these caribou declines, and holding multiple collaborative planning processes, Alberta has yet to produce caribou range plans and actions that adequately protect caribou habitat. Under SARA, if the federal Environment Minister is of the opinion that identified critical habitat is not being protected on either federal or provincial lands, then the Environment Minister must, after consultation, recommend to Cabinet that the federal government issue an order to protect the critical habitat from destruction.

In Environment Canada finalized the national boreal woodland caribou recovery strategy, five years past mandatory SARA deadlines. In the national southern mountain woodland caribou recovery strategy was released, seven years past mandatory SARA deadlines.

The recovery strategy for boreal woodland caribou gave provinces and territories another five years to develop range management plans. These range plans need to outline how they would manage ranges to achieve and maintain, in the next years, at least minimum caribou critical habitat requirements.

Alberta continues to rely mostly on land-use guidelines at an individual industrial project level to try to lessen caribou habitat impacts, instead of managing cumulative landscape impacts to caribou habitat. On either side of the self-sustaining spectrum, green is likely and red is very unlikely.

In response to the federal recovery strategies, Alberta has been developing range plans since Not a single one has been completed. Meanwhile, disturbance from industrial and other human impacts has continued to expand in most caribou ranges.

Some positive habitat-related policy decisions made by the provincial government since include:. Federal progress reports since show that Alberta has not effectively protected critical habitat for woodland caribou on provincial lands. This means that SARA could be used to apply a habitat protection order, providing mandatory protection to woodland caribou critical habitat. Committees of key industrial representatives and other stakeholders have been involved in discussing caribou and developing provincial guidelines since The Woodland Caribou Policy for Alberta committed the Alberta government to achieving naturally sustaining woodland caribou populations.

In practice, cumulative industrial land-use decisions have led to ongoing fragmentation and loss of caribou habitat, and to population declines. Woodland caribou have co-existed with natural predators including wolves and bears for millennia. Caribou live in intact old growth forests and peat wetland areas, which other prey species such as deer and moose avoid.

These ranges have high levels of energy and forestry industry disturbance. In subsequent years very high numbers of moose hunting permits were issued to control the resulting high numbers of moose. The wolf culls rely mostly on aerial shooting, although strychnine poisoning was used as part of the wolf culls in some years.

In , a peer-reviewed article by caribou scientists in government and academia concluded that the wolf cull appeared to stabilize, but not recover, these caribou populations.

They suggested long-term habitat conservation, restoration and management was needed. AWA does not support the use of poisons to manage wildlife populations.

Furthermore, AWA believes the dire measure of predator culls can only be justified as a temporary, last resort measure combined with strong caribou habitat protection and habitat restoration.

Caribou are members of the deer family Cervidae. In Alberta, there are only Woodland Caribou Rangifer tarandus caribou.

But two forms, or ecotypes, exist — the boreal woodland caribou and the mountain woodland caribou. Although they are the same species, each form has unique behavioural patterns when using the landscape. Boreal woodland caribou in west-central, central, and northern Alberta move around their dynamic boreal forest ranges depending on fire and other disturbance.

They primarily choose wetlands and older conifer or mixed conifer forests. Bistcho, Yates and Caribou Mountains populations in far northwest Alberta choose forests at least 80 years old, other boreal populations choose forests at least 60 years old.

Mountain woodland caribou in west-central Alberta are distinguished by their seasonal migratory behaviour — in winter, they have been known to migrate up to km to foothills conifer forests 80 years or older, and return in summer to higher elevation sub-alpine forests. Woodland caribou are typically 1. They have a velvet-like coat that is dark brown with creamy-white patches around the neck and shoulders, rump and underbelly. These special hooves spread wide when walking, allowing the caribou to travel easily on soft ground like snow and peaty-bogs.

In the winter, caribou also use their hooves to dig through the snow to find lichens and other plants to eat. A mosaic of these lichens can be found in old-growth conifer-dominant forests — that is, mature stands of mainly spruce and pine 80 to years old. Unlike other members of the deer family, both male and female caribou can grow antlers. Increased competition for winter food resources has been suggested as the determining factor for development of female antlers in a population.

Both male and female antlers are only kept seasonally — the male caribou looses his antlers after or potentially during the fall rut that occurs from late September to the end of October, and the female loses hers later in spring after giving birth to a calf.

Woodland caribou are slow to mature and have relatively low reproductive rates — females are able to breed after 2. If conditions are ideal, caribou can live 10 to 15 years on average, meaning that each female can be expected to have 7 to 12 calves in their lifetime.

Woodland caribou are also very difficult to count — partly due to their tendency to spread sparsely across the landscape, as well as their preference of living in forested areas. For that reason population trends from a collared subset of a population, rather than absolute numbers, are annually monitored.

Based on limited observations from aerial surveys, the Alberta government provided a rough estimate of at least caribou in Alberta Draft Provincial Woodland Caribou Range Plan, On the left is a male, and on the right is a female. Reindeer lichen Cladonia rangiferina. Woodland Caribou are a species found only in North America with historical ranges from the western Rocky Mountains in British Columbia to the eastern seaboard in Newfoundland, and from the northern tips of Washington, Idaho, and Montana in the United States upward into Alaska and the northern territories of Canada.

However, the current distribution of woodland caribou has shrunk dramatically over the past century, compared to their historical extent.

The two different ecotypes of woodland caribou in Alberta are boreal and mountain, and vary in distribution based on their habitat needs. MAP: The Canadian distribution of 5 ecotypes of woodland caribou. Both mountain and boreal woodland caribou display solitary behaviour for most of their lives, however they tend to spend time in small groups when calving, rutting, or over-wintering.

Alberta mountain caribou historically migrated between summer and winter ranges. In the summer, they live in alpine areas. In the winter, they typically descended into valleys and foothills to shelter in old-growth conifer forests.

In recent decades, some or all of the populations have abandoned their winter ranges. This shift may be because of high human-caused disturbance in the foothills, and the associated high caribou mortality within those winter ranges and during migration.

Boreal woodland caribou move extensively throughout the year but their winter and summer ranges overlap. They choose areas of forested peat bogs and fens in combination with older coniferous forests. Because woodland caribou require abundant access to lichens, they prefer to live in old-growth coniferous forests and peat wetland complexes. But these areas have been increasingly impacted by industry — the key contributor to exclusion of caribou from quality habitat. Caribou tend to avoid landscape disturbances — like un-reclaimed seismic lines and logged areas — for up to several kilometers, yet they require large areas of suitable continuous habitat where individuals are able to spread out and reach their preferred population density of approximately two to three caribou per km 2.

Landscape disturbances also stimulate other prey species such as white-tailed deer and moose, and in turn support higher wolf populations that can more easily travel to where caribou are found. With human-caused disturbances increasingly fracturing landscapes, this leaves little room for caribou to thrive. Caribou have been an integral part of Indigenous culture in Canada for thousands of years, as a game animal, providing sustenance and resources for clothing and tools, and as a spiritual symbol, surrounded by many important cultural teachings and beliefs.

Many of the traditional and treaty territories of Alberta Indigenous peoples overlap with caribou ranges. Caribou movements are probably triggered by changing weather conditions, such as the onset of cold weather or snowstorms. Once they decide to migrate, caribou can travel up to 50 miles a day. Caribou apparently have a built in compass, like migratory birds, and can travel through areas that are unfamiliar to them to reach their calving grounds.

To see herd ranges in greater detail, see the map of the 32 caribou herds in Alaska. These animated maps show the movement of caribou herds over the course of a year.

The Porcupine herd ranges into western Canada. Note that the caribou bunch up or aggregate in June on the calving grounds.

Caribou herds are counted shortly after these aggregations begin to occur, typically in early July. Data were collected from about — The Network is an international group of scientists, managers and community people who have a common interest in caribou.

There are approximately , wild caribou in Alaska including some herds that are shared by Alaska and Canada's Yukon Territory. Caribou are somewhat cyclic in number, and the timing of declines and increases, and the size to which herds grow is not very predictable. Although overhunting caused some herds to remain low in the past, today, varying weather patterns climate , population density, predation by wolves and grizzly bears, and disease outbreaks determine whether most herds increase or decrease.

Fast Facts Size Adult bulls average pounds kg. Distribution Caribou live in the arctic tundra, mountain tundra, and northern forests of North America, Russia, and Scandinavia. The world population is about 5 million. A herd uses a calving area that is separate from the calving areas of other herds, but different herds may mix together on winter ranges.

Diet Herbivore Predators Bears and wolves Reproduction One calf Other names Domesticated and semi-domesticated caribou are called reindeer. Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Hide Section Navigation.

Description Uses Research More Resources.