Reindeer Herder Fights an Uphill Battle with Caribou

Tom Gray remembers the black day in 1996 when his wife BJ called him home from setting a net for beluga whales in Golovin Bay. Someone had seen caribou mix with his domestic reindeer east of White Mountain. Gray rushed home, chartered a small plane, and saw what he feared-thousands of caribou dotting snowy tundra hills where only his reindeer stood the day before. "It was like the end of the world," he said.

Gray lost 700 reindeer that November day, when one-half of his domestic herd defected with their wild brethren. Now down to 400 reindeer, Gray is struggling to stay in the business of selling reindeer meat and antlers. He shares his plight with the seven remaining reindeer herders on the Seward Peninsula who want to remain in business despite the encroachment of the western arctic caribou herd.

Gray, an Alaska Native, lives in White Mountain, Alaska, a village on the Fish River 77 miles northwest of Nome. I met him in a cabin near Nome. Gray was snowmachining to Nome for a meeting with UAF's Greg Finstad and others interested in the fate of Seward Peninsula reindeer.

Those who herd the reindeer are today facing their greatest challenge.. The western arctic herd, of 200,000 caribou, first wandered onto the Seward Peninsula in 1996. The caribou have driven eight of 15 reindeer herders out of business, and Gray said he feels lucky to still have a herd of 400 animals. He keeps his herd isolated from caribou on a strip of land that juts into Golovin Bay, but he doesn't have much of a buffer between his animals and the caribou. "There are caribou six miles away from my reindeer," he said.

Caribou and the reindeer herding industry don't mix because the animals are the same species, Rangifer tarandus, and reindeer follow the caribou when they migrate out of an area. When caribou of the Seward Peninsula experienced a population crash in the 1800s, the area became prime ground for reindeer, which the Reverend Sheldon Jackson introduced to the area from Siberia in the late 1800s. After political and personal battles over the fate of the reindeer, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the 1930s, the federal government transferred them all to Alaska Natives with the Reindeer Act of 1937.

When Greg Finstad began his job with UAF's Reindeer Research Program in the early 1980s, more Alaska Natives were becoming interested in the reindeer industry. The market for reindeer meat was good, and Koreans and other Asians were paying from $30 to $50 per pound for powdered reindeer antler in velvet, which they used for medicinal purposes, such as a cure for sexual impotence. "With the sales of meat and antlers in the early 1980s and 1990s, the future looked very bright for the reindeer industry," Finstad said.

Along with the invasion of the caribou in the mid-1990s, the market for reindeer antlers crashed when the government of Korea banned imports of reindeer antlers. Finstad said the declining economy of Asia and medical approval of the drug Viagra may also have helped to drive the price of reindeer antler down to about $10 to $15 per pound.

Finstad and his colleagues at the Reindeer Research Program have worked with herders to develop vaccines for reindeer, design corrals, and fit reindeer with satellite radio collars. He has many stories of herders who fought as hard as Tom Gray and still lost their herds, but he doesn't think the situation is hopeless. "The herders aren't giving up and neither are we," Finstad said. "We're optimistic that there's always going to be reindeer on the Seward Peninsula."

Gray shares Finstad's hopes, but he is also a realist. He now has four business licenses. Besides the one for herding reindeer, he guides tourists on hunting, fishing, and snowmobile trips. He said he is preparing for the possibility that caribou may soon envelope his remaining 400 reindeer, and he may no longer be a reindeer herder. "My goal is to have a big reindeer herd one of my two boys could manage," Gray said. "But until the caribou leave the only goal I can have is to keep a few animals . . . The caribou either have to change their migration path or crash or we will lose an industry."