CARIBOU

Two caribou herds, the Porcupine herd and Central Arctic herd, use the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge during one of the most critical periods of the year: to give birth and raise their young.

The Porcupine Herd is one of the largest caribou herds in North America numbering about 130,000 individuals. These animals manage to trudge through hundreds of miles of wilderness from south of the Brooks Range and across the Porcupine River in Canada's Yukon to drop their calves and feed on the nutritious plants of the Refuge's coastal plain. It's one of the planet's most magnificent wildlife migrations, second in distance only to the Wildebeests of Africa, and they've been doing it for tens of thousands of years.

In a treaty with Canada, the United States has agreed to protect this great herd. The herd's most heavily used calving area has been located within the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge. This is the exact area that is proposed for drilling for oil. This is completely incompatible with the U.S. commitments to protect this herd.

The second herd also found within the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge is the Central Arctic Herd. The Central Arctic Herd has achieved some notoriety as the caribou herd that has increased from 5,000 to about 27,000 while using the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. The truth is that many have been displaced away from oil development and those caribou that use the Arctic refuge have better productivity than those displaced away from the Prudhoe Bay developments. This portion of the Central Arctic Herd also use the area designated as the 1002, for their calving and post-calving periods, a critical time for the successful rearing of their young. Development would also be expected to negatively influence the movements and reproductive success of this herd as well.

For more information about arctic Caribou please see the following: