Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Western Arctic CARIBOU herd Down.

Seems like caribou are suffering everywhere....sad.
I hunted the Mulchatna herd when it was going strong.

https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/caribou-are-vanishing-at-an-alarming-rate-is-it-too-late-to-save-them/#:~:text=After%20more%20than%20a%20million,and%20even%20harder%20to%20reverse.

This statement says it all and proves that closing hunting to the roundeyes does NOT affect the population of the herd!…..

“ While local subsistence hunters welcomed the closures, the total number of animals harvested by the non-federally qualified users is relatively small and it’s entirely made up of bulls, so the closures did not affect the population numbers, Joly said.”

While local subsistence hunters welcomed the closures


"Welcomed"..... No, they demanded it - and it had nothing to do with herd dynamics, but that was a handle to hang it on.

Racist and protectionism are ugly words.

I will say, however, that they get little or nothing of monetary value out of the visiting "sport" hunters. No guiding, equipment rentals and very little of anything else.

They get a fair amount of meat donated to them from the outfitters who guide sport hunters. That has ‘monetary’ value in the form of not having to buy meat and not spending money on fuel to go get it themselves.

No, according to them, it is all dumped into the Kotzebue Lagoon as the plane taxis in.....

Well, that did happen once....apparently - I only heard about it - it was before my time there.

I heard from elsewhere that the hunters were weathered in long enough for the meat to spoil.

If so, they did an extremely dumb thing, even tho they technically met the requirement to bring the meat out of the field. I dunno- they may even have been cited for wanton waste. If the meat was spoiled, a LEO should have signed off on it.

Never-the-less, the locals will be using the incident for the next 100 years, or until they get everything they want.

Mine sat in camp 10 days this year on the north slope. It was rarely freezinf. The meat was excellent. My grizzly hide, however, is suspect

I have zero doubt that claim is made all over rural Alaska and the locals use it to their advantage.....
It very well may happen on occasion but I suspect it is very rare, or else the troopers would be all over it...

Guided? May I ask who you went with?

Lol good golly we don’t know why the herd is crashing..


“The thing that stands out the most is that we’ve had a low survival rate of adult females, adult cows,” Joly said. “What is causing that decline or lower survival rates of cows, we just don’t know. We are looking into different factors.”

F&G comes up with goofy reg changes like they did on the slope 10 years ago, hunters galore, air taxis galore, herd crashes... F&G can't figure it out, so they get federal money to research what happened.... that appears to be their modis operandi to coming up with money.

Well, there is this also- From the time rut starts, until April or May, most native hunters will only shoot cows. The bulls are skinny- they want fat cows. Which of course are all pregnant, if they haven't been run too much via snow machine to the point they abort. Even if they don't, the calves that are born are likely to have been impacted, leading to lower survival rates.

But don't discount weather and habitat change, forage degradation or heavy browsing.

I had a gal argue with me she was native from kotzebue she said the pipeline changed to migration into kotzebue. Her grandpa talked how caribou would come through kotzebue. But the pipeline changed that. I told her the WACH herd doesn’t go anywhere near the pipeline and that herd is the CACH. She said don’t care what herd it is their more caribou in kotzebue because of the pipeline. I’m like wtf

I seen videos of the native just wearing out caribou from a boat as they cross the river. I mean just wearing them out.. now they are bitching. Sean Parnell had a plan to connect western Alaska to the road system. But the fake NG story ended that when he lost. Mike Dunleavy needs to move forward and put a road in to nome at least.

When we first opened Sportsman's in Anchorage I had an older Native man come in and was talking with him. He told me that he didn't like AR15's because "by the time you run out of ammo, there's too many caribou floating down river and you can't round them all up"
I just shook my head.

Oh come on now, the natives are the true conservationists…

DIY.

couldn't get through the ,Alatna with fog

I thoroughly enjoyed my self guided Mulchatna Caribou hunts.

Wouldn't one call that lazy stupidity? The opportunity to guide, rent etc.. is there for all to give a go at.

nothing is life is guaranteed and you certainly have to change as you go along or you are behind...

I despise roads. LOL. But I really do. They just make the world a smaller place every single time.

Too many dang people populate the planet unfortunately and they demand access to everything the easiest way possible.

Am sure it will all get chalked up to global warming/climate change......

That might not be far off the mark, or at least partially responsible. My friend Seth Kantner, who was born on the Kobuk River and has spent his entire life in the Kotzebue area, notes that at his (once his parents) cabin site where he was born and raised, what was once a bare tussock-tundra flat out in front of the cabin, is now 10' spruce.

It's big country tho, so some habitat change might not affect the caribou numbers much, unless it widely affects the forage species as well.

Shoot like you drink - until it's gone. Yeah, that does go on. I think it partly goes back to the old days subsistence mind set: Survival often depended on killing as much as you could, any time and way you could. The rest is technology improvements, without a corresponding change in habits, and of course, just dumb-[bleep].

On the other hand, I've spent about 15 years over time living with those folks. They have a wicked sense of humor, and will pull the white-guy's leg with a stone face. So who knows?

I was in Seliwick in April of ‘96 visiting my neighbor’s brother who was a school teacher there. At that time, there were about 800,000 animals in that herd and they were increasing at about 8% a year. A biologist told me they were fearful of a crash. Sounds like it happened.

But there were LOTS of caribou and we harvested quite a few in our 7 day visit. The legal limit was 5 per day.

A very interesting place.

Mackey

Reminds me of school.

We were studying the Indians and the teacher was telling how great
and resourceful they were. How the respected the land and animals,
only taking what they could use and using it all.

When she got to the part of driving buffalo off cliffs...I put my hand up.


"They were really smart to do that. But how did they figure out exactly how
many they needed? And how did they keep from killing one more than they could smoke and keep from spoiling?"



Yeah, she didn't like me after that.

Topic drift here, but I can't help myself. About 55 years ago, I was working for an old logger in Happy Camp Calif (Injun country for sure). An old bent over Injun was walking up the road, the boss says here's old Albert, we gotta give him a lift, you'll like him, he hunts for all the old people around town. We get going again and the boss asks Albert, "Well Albert, how's the huntin' been goin'?" Albert, "Oh Dick, iss been pooty damn slow, yup, yup, you know, some days on'y gets one...mebbe two. Choo guys better get some now 'fore da season opens, yup, yup." Conservation lesson for me.

My Nevada brother tells of the day he was talking to his Indian friend (yup- named John), and John was telling of the big muley he'd gotten a day or two before. Season was not open at the time.

"Was that on Indian land?"

John waved his hand from horizon to horizon and in his best Tonto voice said, "Dis aaaaaaalllll 'Injun land' "

So, the WACH is down, the Mulchatna herd is down. Where do you go to hunt 'bou? The 40 mile herd? Which herd? What area?

Nelchina

40 mile is down too. Limits have steadily decreased over the last 4-5 years.

Jeez, let me finish.


Nelchina.... is also down.

NWACH looks like it's taking another hit. Low 30 temps and rain from Nome to Barrow is gonna ice up the forage and bloody up the hocks.

40 mile herd you have about 4 choices: Fly -in, boat from Eagle or Circle to and up the 70-mile or maybe some other streams, Taylor or Steese Hwy, and maybe Chena Hot Springs road.

Depends on where the caribou are - I had 3 good years up the Steese, this year didn't see an animal. They were all in the most inaccessible area between the Steese and Taylor. I could have gone back on the winter hunt, however, when there were some animals along the Steese, but didn't.

The McComb herd also took a hit last winter. Although it's not a huge herd it was a popular registration hunt.

Any numbers on the Kenai Herd...?? There is often (on average) about sixteen or twenty behind my cabin. They mostly live in Bear Creek & Palmer Creek drainage.

If the Kenai Mountains herd is down, it Shirley ain’t from over hunting.

It's those damned subsistence hunters, with those dedicated permits....

Wolves don't help any..