Reindeer roundup
Thu, Apr 23 2009 at 3:51 PM EST
Read more: ENDANGERED SPECIES, WILDLIFE
REINDEER BY ANOTHER NAME: What's a reindeer in Europe is known as a caribou in North America. Inside this Article
| 1. Intro | 5. Scattered herds |
| 2. Man, climate conspire | 6. Migration detours |
| 3. Calving season | 7. Thin ice |
| 4. Migration patterns change | 8. Muddy swamp stew |
For more than 10,000 years people have hunted reindeer in Europe and North America, making it “the species of single greatest importance in the entire anthropological literature on hunting,” says Canadian anthropologist Ernest Burch. Fittingly, an expedition during this International Polar Year, which for the first time includes the study of circumpolar people, is tracking the species and the humans who herd them.
Two social anthropologists from the Max Planck Institute in Germany set out on snowmobiles and reindeer-drawn sleds a year ago to document the effects of climate change and socioeconomic pressures on the ancient tradition of herding and the ecology of the Kola Peninsula, in northwest Russia, just inside the polar circle. Lead researcher Yulian Konstantinov says that these pressures are challenging the long-held image of herders as “custodians of the tundra.”
Worldwide there are some 7.5 million rangifers (called caribou in North America and reindeer in Europe), with 3.5 million North America and roughly 1 million wild in Eurasia. Semi-domesticated reindeer, which exist only in northern Europe, number at nearly 3 million, and lie at the center of herding cultures in Lapland, including the Saami people, who tend the giant herds for their meat, hides, antlers, milk, and transportation.
Because the herders have increasingly abandoned the tradition of following the deer through their sometimes 150-mile long spring and fall migrations, the IPY researchers struck out on their own in an effort to understand why the deer’s migration patterns – routes and times of year – are changing. They found that due to freezes that don’t occur until late January (rather than November as they used to), the deer harvest is moving closer toward spring, which according to Konstantinov, “triggers off a whole chain of deer responses and corresponding human ones.”
Among them, the herds break into many small fragments, zig-zagging between forest and tundra, and they return to winter grounds later for mating. All of this further impacts the changing turndra ecology and the people whose livelihoods are tied to the deer.
The researchers launched their mobile study from Lovozero, a 3,000-person town on the Kola Peninsula, which is home to the herders and about 60 kilometers northwest of the reindeer-corralling base Belaia Golovka. We pick up their travel diary there. (See the NOMAD website for an unabridged version.)
NEXT: Man, climate conspire >
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