Herds stray from traditional routes
Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services
Inuvik (Mar 05/01) - Caribou used to be so thick in this town, they were a nuisance.
Those days are gone as the migrating herds take routes hundreds of kilometres away.
"There used to be trails all over," said one oldtimer who did not want his name used. He recalled how lazy the bulls were after the rut, sluggishly walking down the road in front of vehicles. But no longer.
It's a different story a little farther south. For the past couple of years people in Deline and Colville Lake have hardly had to get out of their pajamas to get a caribou.
Richard Binder, chair of the Inuvik Hunters and Trappers Committee, got a first-hand look at how good things are south of here.
"I just came out of Deline last Friday and just a few miles from town there's thousands of them," said Binder, who recalled the days when the caribou were only a 10-minute snowmobile ride from town.
Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development regional supervisor John Nagy said satellite collar tracking indicates the three herds in the area, the Cape Bathurst, Bluenose West and Porcupine, are far from town.
"The Bluenose West are almost down at Deline, which we haven't seen before ... those animals used to winter north of Colville Lake and east of Inuvik."
The Hunters and Trappers Committee organized a hunt with 10 hunters earlier this year. Only half were successful, getting five animals each. The meat was distributed to elders who can no longer get out on the land and to needy families in town.
Collared animals in the Cape Bathurst herd are 160 kilometres northeast of town, in the Rufus Lake area. Porcupine caribou are wintering in the Yukon, closer to Alaska than the Northwest Territories.
Wintering grounds change
Over the last 11 years the wintering grounds of the herds have varied a lot, Nagy said.
No-one really knows why.
Binder said it would be unfair to blame it on seismic work now being done in the Inuvik area. That work just got going again this year. The caribou haven't been close to town for eight years or so.
The oldtimer said his old uncle told him the caribou routinely change wintering grounds every three years or so to give the plants they rely on a chance to grow back.
Though they're not here in the numbers they once were, caribou are around. You just have to go further -- about 100 kilometres -- to find them.
"It's no big deal," said a member of the Nihtat renewable resources council who did not want his name used. "Thirty or forty years ago people used to go two or three hundred miles by dog team to get meat. Now you can do that in a day. "You've got to go get them, you can't wait for them to come to you."
