Don't blame the caribou ...

January 17, 2012

One of the big attractions in our local Boundary County Museum is a stuffed albino caribou. People from the world over stop in, take a picture, and go home, many from places where caribou are common. Their caribou don't raise as much stink ... we hardly know they're here ... if, in fact, they are. Somehow, it isn't our caribou raising the controversy, it's us. While we don't see them often, our caribou are up in the high country ... munching on the lichen they love so well. The caribou don't seem to make a preference when it comes to which country that high country is in, the U.S. or Canada. What we do down here doesn't seem to concern them much at all ... they get along fine without us. History shows they've never had much of a problem with us, either. The caribou don't seem to mind one way or another ... they do what caribou do. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to set aside around six-hundred square miles of "our" area, meaning the U.S., more than 200,000 of them in Boundary County, as critical habitat for an animal akin to that museum display, an animal rare here, but common and not too far away ... the elusive Selkirk caribou. The one in the museum was rare for being an albino. The normally colored caribou to which it is kin are rare in Idaho, but not in British Columbia. The late Paul Flinn, a conservation officer in his prime, a reliable county historian as he got older and a trusted source of fact, came across a herd of caribou on the U.S. side of the border during his wanderings high up in the Selkriks in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the first time anyone had documented the animal's presence in this part of the world. He was the first to obtain sign, follow it, and to bring back his findings, in writing and on film, as well as with the then new-fangled motion picture. Unwittingly, he set in motion be dilemma we're looking at today. If you do a Google search of "Paul Flinn Caribou," you'll learn how excited the scientific and biological world was by his findings, as well as the great lengths he went to to verify his fleeting discovery. Flinn, according to the record, wore out several pair of snow shoes over a period of years trekking into the high country to study these fine animals ... animals that lived "up in the area more likely assocated with mountain goats," who "easily outran him," a fact he came to attribute to the animal's unique hoof ... which spead out on impact into an amazingly effective snow shoe ... "they rarely sank in more than a few inches, while with my snowhoses I'd sink in up to my knees," he wrote. Flinn went to great lengths to keep track of these magnificent animals, going up year after year, watching the herd diminish. "They seem to like roads, and they don't mind the presence of people," he wrote. "They seem to like, of all things, grease; I've seen them standing on top of equipment licking at the cups." He counted and documented nearly 40 caribou on the U.S. side of the Selkirks, but then noticed their numbers drop off ... from a sizeable herd to a few, then none. He never stopped looking, even after he retired. "They must be," he wrote early on, "the slowest breeding big animals in the world." Then he began suspecting something else. "His" caribou, he came to believe and to tell anyone who'd listen, went back up into their range in British Columbia, Canada. "You don't have to be too intelligent to know that they weren't happy here," he said. "Especially not after we started introducing grizzlies and wolves ... they went back across the border into Canada." Canada isn't worried much about the plight of the caribou ... they have plenty. Canadians work, build roads and log in shared territory ... and the caribou don't seem to mind. The caribou haven't heard that we in the U.S. ... where one or two might cross over to sniff out the territory once in a blue moon, are thinking about keeping people out of "their" territory on this side of the border at all costs. No roads, no access, no snowmobiles ... no intrusion by people. It seems that an "if we build it, they will come" approach is being taken by our federal government. In the movie, Kevin Costner cleared out a cornfield, built a "Field of Dreams," and the baseball greats did come ... the ghosts of heroes from days gone by. In that plan, nearly at the brink of adoption by those who stand for the environment and the betterment of the world, the caribou will come once we stop building and the world will be a better place They'll be upset to know that we've also set aside that land and stayed out of it for the grizzly bear. I don't think those people, not the environmentalists who took the case to court nor the federal officials who are now mandated by a judicial decision to come up with a plan, have conferred with the caribou ... who don't seem to want to live here anyway and who seem to be doing quite well in Canada. I'm sure the caribou appreciate all the effort ... but it seems that they know better than we what works for them. Based on Paul Flinn's findings, the caribou may have gone back to Canada to eat the grease ... people, roads and logging are still allowed there in their shared habitat and the caribou seem to be doing fine. Maybe those great animals would appreciate it if we cleared some roads, did a bit of logging, and made it easier for them to survive down here? But then, it may be too hard for the caribou to live down here in the U.S. ... people there seem to make no sense, eh? Perhaps the caribou are smarter than we are.