Rare chance to collar caribou may not come again for years

TAYLOR B. EVERETT

February 12, 2008 at 10:06AM AKST

For The Arctic Sounder

"Nice grab!" said the biologist Kyle Joly, accompanying his compliment with an encouraging smile and an elbow to my ribs.

It was all Joly could manage, for he had his hands full with the rack of the caribou I had just landed into the boat in the middle of the Kobuk River in Northwest Arctic Alaska.

Last fall I participated with other high school students from Kotzebue and Kiana to help collar migrating caribou with scientists from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

Joly had already tried several times to snag the spirited bull himself, yet it had repeatedly slipped from his grasp.

On instinct, or perhaps out of sheer frustration, I had lunged out over the water and managed to wrestle the caribou’s monstrous antlers onto the floor of the boat.

The bull’s nose jutted straight up in the air, releasing laborious plumes of cadenced breath that failed in its attempt to heat the chilled autumn air.

The second johnboat was now forming a chute, trapping the caribou. Joly and I slowly rose, holding tightly to the caribou’s antlers as we passed the right antler to the parallel boat.

Now both boats had a hold on the caribou, and it no longer had to swim. I guess the caribou had finally concluded that if we were going to hurt it, we already would have.

Fish and Game biologist Jim Dau, holding a needle, looked for the right spot in the caribou’s neck. Dau slid the needle through the animal’s skin then pulled back the syringe.

The caribou did not jump as I would have at a needle; if anything, its ear only barely twitched.

Dau slowly withdrew and handed the needle off, grabbed a satellite collar, placed his arms and the collar around the caribou’s neck, tightened the bolts that secured the collar, and then with shears clipped off the excess strap. The assisting boat pulled away. I then let go of the antlers.

The bull swam across the river to continue a seasonal migration reaching back thousands of years.

Later that night at camp, around the fire, I asked, "How often do you get this chance? To come up here and collar caribou?"

I had struck a chord. The task of collaring one of the world’s largest caribou herds – the Western Arctic at 490,000 strong, according to 2003 estimates – were complete.

"Well with the exception of Jim Dau, Geoff Carroll, and Lincoln, we are done," said Joly, the tenor of his voice revealing his displeasure with the thought.

"We probably won’t ever get this chance again, and if we do it will be in another 20 years."

"Wait!" I said. "How come you and the others don’t get another chance next year?"

"There are long lists, I mean, long lists, and our names are again at the bottom," Joly replied, his voice still revealing his disappointment.

The next morning, camp broke too quickly, though I tried to procrastinate.

The tents collapsed quicker than they went up. Our trace was vanishing. As I walked up and down the trail making backhauls with gear, I realized that my fellow students and I had not been put on any waiting lists for this rare experience.

I am just 16.

Taylor Everett, a Kotzebue High School junior, wrote this essay as an honors student at the University of Alaska’s Chukchi College in Kotzebue. This piece is distributed by Chukchi News and Information Service, winner of a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.