Story Pitch: Caribou extripation

Today, there are no caribou walking in the contiguous United States. There was one left in the Selkirk herd in Idaho until November. She was with two other females in May, but one of her company was killed by a mountain lion, and the other one’s tracking collar went dead in June. In the first week of December, biologists in British Columbia saw her by herself, but weren’t able to capture her, they’ll try again soon.

She, and a handful of caribou in the Purcell Mountains are the only caribou left of a herd that used to extend down as far as Missoula and west towards Spokane through Idaho. The herd was doing better between 2002 and 2009, but then their numbers took a nosedive. In 1980, we had somewhere about 100 caribou on the U.S. side, and added in another 103 in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, there are none. The U.S. added caribou to the herd in response to their ESA listing in 1983 when caribou numbers were at historical lows.

Unlike western grey wolves there is no real plan to bring caribou back. Biologists want to capture the lone female and keep her in Canada at a captive breeding facility. The USFWS has no better answer, the Endangered Species Act didn’t produce more caribou under its recovery plan. The question is: Why did the world’s strongest environmental law fail to protect caribou? It’s a complicated answer, but we’ve effectively lost a species and spent millions doing it.

The ESA came about under Nixon as a means for the federal government to protect species from the "consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation." The U.S. did stop logging most of the critical habitat for caribou, but B.C. failed to. They're still logging. In 2017, the province produced $14.1 billion worth of timber. A look at Google Earth comparing both sides of the border of the Selkirk and Purcell mountain ranges show the timber harvest. Environmental degradation in British Columbia coupled with presence of top-tier predators have created a no-win/no-growth situation for caribou in the United States. 

"We brought the caribou down, dumped them in the forest to see what happened," Dr. L. Scott Mills, the U.S. biologist who worked on the 1990s introductions, said. "The patchy-ness of the forest favors predators, and some species, like the white-tailed deer do well in that environment. Caribou are kind of wimpy comparably as far as survival goes. They were easy for the wolves to get."

Most scientists seem hopeless caribou can return, “Would you waste hundreds of millions of dollars?” says Dr. Mark Hebblewhite, a Canadian wildlife biologist at the University of Montana, “The United States has given it a lot effort and money, millions, really. But what’d they get? Society has to decide if they care enough and are willing to pay for it.”

Yet there are some, like Norm Merz, Biologist for the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, who believe there is chance for caribou to return and remain in the contiguous U.S., and he says his tribe plans to work with B.C., the USFWS and whoever else wants to see the animal return