Day: May 12, 2018

rjzimmerman:

This is a trailer for a short documentary (46 minutes) entitled, “Last Stand: The Vanishing Caribou Rainforest.” Description from Vimeo:

Hidden in the interior of the Pacific Northwest is the largest remaining inland temperate rainforest on earth. This magnificent landscape is home to numerous First Nations communities, thousand year old trees and critical habitat for endangered species like mountain caribou. However, industrial development has pushed this ecosystem to the tipping point. The forthcoming documentary “Last Stand” puts the Caribou Rainforest on the map before it’s too late.

Today (May 12, 2018), EcoWatch published a story written by representatives of onEarth (which I think is part of NRDC), telling us that the mountain caribou are about ready to become extirpated (i.e., gone) from the US Lower 48. The caribou live in the mountain temperate rainforest described in the video. The headline to the story is “America’s Last Woodland Caribou Herd Is Down to Just Three Animals.” Here’s the link, if you want to read the whole story.

Screen shot from the film:

Excerpt from the story about the Mountain Caribou:

Most people associate reindeer with the North Pole. And it’s true, the animals also known as caribou tend to live in remote, wintry landscapes most Americans will never see. But did you know that caribou once roamed as far south as Minnesota, Michigan, Vermont and New York? And that the Selkirk woodland caribou herd still spends part of each year in Idaho and Washington?

Well, three of them do. Because that is all that remains of the Selkirks. By next week, next month or next year, the Lower 48’s last remaining reindeer could be gone forever, making a sad irony of the animal’s nickname, the “gray ghost.”

Several kinds of caribou inhabit the world’s northern stretches (see “Mapping a Future for Boreal Caribou”), but the ones that spend time in the Pacific Northwest belong to an endangered subspecies commonly known as woodland caribou. This spring, aerial surveys confirmed that only three females remain in the Selkirk herd, named for the mountains that span the border between British Columbia and Washington. There were around 12 individuals in 2016, down from 50 in 2009.

Even if each of the Selkirk trio is pregnant—and there’s no evidence to suggest that this is true—the herd is a whisper away from disappearing forever.

Worse still, just two weeks after the approaching demise of the Selkirk herd became public, researchers announced that another group, known as the South Purcells herd, found a bit to the north in British Columbia, are in similar straits. Aerial counts identified just four individuals (three females and a male), where last year there were 16. “When you get in a situation of such small herds, it’s not unusual to expect a dramatic decline at some point,” said Chris Johnson, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Northern British Columbia.

Sadly, this is not the first time a caribou herd has died out. Over the past decade, Johnson, who lives in the city of Prince George, watched this happen with two other caribou herds practically in his own backyard. “We saw it coming,” he said. “They got smaller, smaller, smaller. And then you go and do a survey, and it’s like, ‘Hey, look at that. They’re gone.’”

A similar fate befell the woodland caribou herd in Alberta’s Banff National Park. The herd dwindled to a point where a single avalanche wiped out its last remaining members in 2009. Poof.

The losses aren’t so surprising, said Candace Batycki, a program director for the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, given what the animals face as they travel across their range. Their fate is the culmination of several ecological threats—deforestation, habitat fragmentation, climate change—occurring across Canada. “Here we have an animal that roams around, uses different habitats, is always on the move, doesn’t really do well with roads, needs old growth forests, and is very, very shy,” she said.