The view from my tent in the morning
Today was a notable day in many
ways. First off, I woke up to people talking near my tent, along with a
background noise of caribou grunts. I left my tent and stood with the other
people who were up, all of us watching the herd of 800 or so caribou all spread
out below camp across the swamp, their grunts and the plaintive calls of calves echoing across the landscape on this windless morning.
Brad was lying down on the slope
by camp, and had animals ~20 meters away from him at some points. Once the
close part of the herd left we went to the scope to see what else was around,
and watched two wolves loping across the river bed, and a bear feeding on a
caribou carcass that Brad had watched a wolf kill earlier in the morning – one
of the six wolves he had seen before most people woke up!
This morning is also the morning
that Brad and Mark will be departing camp, weather permitting, so we said
farewell as we headed out to work for the day. We had to wait for a while
before heading out, since the aforementioned bear walked right through where we
were headed, but since he kept heading east we were soon able to press on in
his wake.
After a few nest checks we were
down in the 7s, and as we looked south there was a wave of caribou cresting the
ridge – a living river flowing in our general direction. I quickly suggested
that we go lay down in their potential path, in a ditch near where I had seen
many caribou tracks worn into the ground recently. As they neared they caught
our scent, about 300m off, but once the herd leaders declared their ambivalence
about our presence, the rest of the herd followed along.
This male had a rack about as wide as a caribou is long!
This male had an eye on us for quite a while
For about 10 minutes we had a herd
of roughly a thousand caribou walking around us as close as 8-10 meters, calmly
feeding and ambling along. There were massive bulls with antler spreads wider
than a caribou is long, calves trotting along by their mother’s sides and
periodically suckling, and then hundreds of animals in between. They were
grunting and snorting the whole while, along with the bugs and the visuals we
were getting the full sensory experience.
You can see the winter fur being molted in the facial area
The limb coming out from the lower-left of the head of this caribou is in fact it's hindleg, being scratched by an antler
This bull was so dark that it was reminiscent of a moose
The grizzled faces look wise to me
We went on from this
once-in-a-lifetime experience to band a Semi Sandpiper and return to camp by
2pm – not too much work to do when there aren’t many nests to find or check.
But the excitement of the day was not over yet!
Around 4 or 5 I heard someone
exclaim “People!” Sure enough, two rafts had landed on the runway area below
our camp and were setting up tents. It turns out that the same raft trip showed
up here last year on the exact same date, they put in up in the mountains and
then float down the Canning for a couple weeks. Apparently they will be here
near us for three days! On top of it all it has been mercifully windy most of
the day – no bugs since early afternoon!
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