The Federal Subsistence Board is considering whether to dramatically curtail hunting to protect the struggling Western Arctic Caribou Herd.
Right now, hunters can harvest up to five caribou per day on federal lands. A proposed emergency order before the Federal Subsistence Board would cut that limit to four Western Arctic caribou per year. One of those four could be a cow.
Federal officials say the proposal is spurred by concern for the health of the Western Arctic herd.
“The Western Arctic Caribou Herd has continued to decline, and with the most recent estimate being at 164,000 caribou, and we feel that immediate action is needed to slow the decline and prevent the herd from reaching a point of no return,” Office of Subsistence Management Wildlife Biologist Tom Plank said at an April 26 public hearing on the proposal in Kotzebue.
That count is half its peak of over 300,000 animals in 2003.
The emergency proposal would not apply to hunters on state land.
The Northwest Arctic Regional Advisory Council, a resident group that advises the federal government on hunting policy, proposed the emergency measure.
The Western Arctic Caribou Herd is one of the largest in the world, and until recently, was the largest herd in Alaska. According to an advisory group studying the herd, its migration currently stretches across a 157,000-square mile area — or roughly the size of California. The herd spends the summer calving months in the North Slope and moves as far south as the Seward Peninsula in the winter.
At the hearing, a large majority of those who spoke were critical of the proposed four- caribou annual limit.
“For Native folks, we're gonna have to tighten our belts,” said Kotzebue resident and lifelong hunter Roswell Qalayauq Schaeffer. “We have to not hunt as much as we used to, for a while until we can get the caribou back again.”
Schaeffer and others said the board should focus on caribou hunters from outside the region.
Many stressed the importance of speaking with elders and receiving more input from remote villages who could be most impacted by the change. Several commenters said the four-caribou limit was unreasonable for hunters caring for a large extended family or for other villages.
Kotzebue resident Walter Samson, who gave his initial comments in Iñupiaq, was critical of the meeting itself, citing the lack of an interpreter.
“We're speaking in English and denying those folks that speak Iñupiaq, the ones who do trapping and hunting,” Sampson said. “But yet we say, ‘we went through the process to go through to get those regulations in place.’”
The Federal Subsistence Board will hold its next public hearing on the caribou limit on May 2. The Board plans to reach a final decision about the caribou harvest regulations at their board meeting on June 8.
