Gray Ghosts

Some Mountain Caribou lock antlers in a mock fight. Sadly I just found out that two of these amazing animals were shot dead the week before last from this small herd in Northern BC. The situation has been described as dire for the Central Mountain Caribou population by the Federal Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC). Numbers of Central Mountain Caribou across Alberta and B.C declined by 60 per cent between 2004 and 2014 to just over 500 mature individuals in 11 herds. Its so sad that we are not that far from a future of having no Mountain Caribou anywhere in the rocky mountains. The mountain caribou have evolved to deal with deep snow-packs and a complex life high in the mountains and are physically quite different from their northern arctic cousins and European reindeer who roam the vast frozen plains. Makes you wonder how you can control poaching in places like Africa if you can’t even stop shooting of endangered animals in a highly educated first world country like Canada.

Three months ago I put an extended post up on Steemit about the fate of the Mountain Caribou here which has lots of my shots of this herd and was one of my first posts up on Steem to grain any traction as it was picked up by Curie. I have since been back to the same spot a couple of times to document these majestic animals again, which is when I took the shot above.

In the US it is even more dire with the last small herd remaining in the lower 48 states found in the Selkirk Mountains of Northern Idaho. A survey in 2017 found only 11 animals down from from hundreds not that long ago. The New York times wrote an article in 2016 called America's Gray Ghosts which talks about the battle to save the last herd of the once mighty animals, but it seems the greater US has simply written off Caribou in the lower 48 states.

Robert Downie
Love Life, Love Photography

_{All images in this post were taken by and remain the Copyright of Robert Downie - http://www.robertdowniephotography.com}