By Hillary Rosner
Seeing a caribou wander onto an Idaho highway (click here) is about as likely as watching a UFO land there. The South Selkirk herd—the only remaining caribou herd that roamed the continental United States—has dwindled to just two animals, both female. “Not even Noah could save them,” a Canadian biologist told me. Last spring, scientists declared the herd functionally extinct.
Though that news barely registered with the American public, it was powerful: the imminent disappearance of a large mammal species from the Lower 48. And the Selkirk caribou are only the tip of the melting iceberg. Across a broad swath of Canada and Alaska, caribou populations have been plummeting for decades. The main cause: industrial development in their habitat. Today seeing caribou in their original Canadian range requires luck, patience, and often a helicopter....
Map (click here)
...They are also what scientists call an “indicator species,” one whose own health shows the status of a whole ecosystem. And they’ve become unwitting sentinels, on some level, of life as we know it. The boreal forest, a vast band of spruce, fir, pine, and birch that covers one and a half billion acres of North America, stores roughly a third of the planet’s land-based carbon. It is a crucial source of Earth’s fresh water, and billions of birds from more than 300 species breed within it. The boreal is still the largest unbroken forest on Earth, representing a quarter of all remaining intact forest. But nearly a third of Canada’s boreal has already been carved up or earmarked for industrial use....
...Canada’s woodland caribou, a subspecies, are most at risk. They live in old-growth forests, where they feed largely on lichens that grow on the ground and on trees. The reasons for their decline are not especially complex or mysterious. Cutting down forests wipes out their habitat. Building roads across forests provides easy access for animals that eat them. And because caribou reproduce so slowly, the problem boils down to simple math: Too many are dying, and not enough are surviving to reproduce....
Pine beetle map (click here)
All to often pine bettle infestation is used to deforest an entire area. The habiat of the Boreal Forest Caribou does not match the infestation estimates. The caribou habitat needs to be assessed by scientists for infestation before a forest is clear cut.
The facts are simple, the pine beetles do not infest healthy treas. A Silvaculturist and a biologist familiar with the pines and caribou need to assess the habitat in question before clear cutting a forest.
The pine bettle is a serious threat to forests, but, it is not like a cold that spreads between individuals without abatement. There are preventive measures that can be employed and selective removal of infected and weakened trees. Preserving the caribou habitat has to come first while logging has to be put in perspective as a measure to end pine beetle infestation.
