SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - At least six mining companies operating in Nunavut are sponsoring a number of the territory's wildlife research projects, in an effort to learn more about caribou while minimizing disruption to the animals.

Mitch Campbell looks through a spotting scope 100 kilometres southwest of Arviat in the spring of 2008. He and his team were doing spring recruitment studies for the Qamanirjuaq caribou population. In the background are caribou. - photo courtesy of Mitch Campbell

One of those involved in the partnership is Agnico-Eagle Mines Ltd., which owns the Meadowbank Mine, about 70 kilometres north of Baker Lake.

The company has agreed to fund a territorial government program to install collars on caribou in exchange for the stoppage of low-level aerial surveys by Agnico-Eagle, said Larry Connell, Agnico-Eagle's corporate director of sustainable development.

"I think it makes a lot of sense for us not to do the low-level surveys because what you're doing was having a whole bunch of companies out flying around, counting caribou in their specific area, but the information wasn't really brought into a common collection to commonly understand what was going on," he said.

The partnership between the mining companies and the Nunavut government started three or four years ago, when some communities often reported flights over caribou, said Mitch Campbell, a wildlife biologist for the Kivalliq region with Nunavut's environment department. His investigation revealed the low-level flying was part of the permit requirements for companies mining in the territory, as they would need to determine if caribou was present where they were working, he added. He said that was a problem.

"In some cases, the flights for the caribou research that was going on in the area caused more disturbance than the actual flights and activities of the mining companies themselves," he said. "We thought that was something that needed to be fixed."

Biologists with the territorial government collect data on long-term trends and caribou population sizes to get a bigger picture of the size and movement of caribou herds, which requires a flight every few years, said Campbell. He added the information collected by the mining and exploration companies – the presence and absence surveys – was "useless."

"The monitoring picks that up because it's of the whole population and that's valuable because then, we'll know how often caribou use an area, what areas are more important to caribou than other areas," he said. "That kind of information you can't get by just flying, what we call a very restricted study area which might be around a mining camp."

Workers at Meadowbank see caribou "quite often" around the mine and along the road, where the caribou have right-of-way, meaning motorists must slow down and let the animals pass, said Connell. On occasion, he added the road has been shut down during two to three days to allow for caribou migration.

"We give caribou the priority," he said. "They basically have the right to move through. We will cease operations if there is large congregations of caribou near where we're working."

Both the mining companies and government benefit from co-operating together on wildlife research, said Connell, as does society.

"I think that's an essential way of doing it, that there's co-ordination of everyone's efforts and the information is done by a third party who doesn't really have any vested interest, other than getting the information correct," he said.

The new partnership between biologists and mining companies is already showing positive results, said Campbell. He added such co-operation, which might seem odd at first, is here to stay.

"I think we have to get out of the 1970s and get into the new era that is coming. It's just a commitment to work together so that we can have the best of both worlds – we can (have) a strong mining base or resource development base in Nunavut, provide jobs, provide economic opportunity and have healthy caribou and muskox populations," he said.

"This last fiscal year, we had no complaints by hunters about caribou being harassed by too much aircraft. We don't know if that's directly related but it's a positive sign."