Word: caribou
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...refuge is intact, with little more than 1,000 tourists visiting a year. Established by President Eisenhower in 1960 as America's last unspoiled frontier, the area contains large populations of caribou, moose, musk oxen, wolves, foxes, grizzlies and polar bears, along with loons, snow geese and many other species of migratory birds. It was doubled in size, to 19 million acres, by the Carter Administration in 1980. But at the same time, with millions of barrels of oil being extracted from neighboring Prudhoe Bay, Congress set aside 1.5 million acres along the coast of the refuge--the so-called...
Most important of all are the more than 130,000 caribou of the Porcupine herd, which migrates each spring onto the coastal plain to calve. These caribou are at the heart of the environmentalists' case against drilling. In late May, the animals arrive on the plain after traveling 400 miles around the mountains, to give birth far from their predators: the eagles, wolves and grizzlies that live principally in the mountains. After calving, they forage on the rich greenery that springs up in the 24-hour sunshine. As new snow approaches, they return to the forests on the south slopes...
...Caribou will move away from oil fields as disturbance increases," says David Klein, professor emeritus at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. In the Prudhoe oil field, he says, the 25,000-head Central Arctic herd of caribou was displaced from oil developments. "The pipeline and [nearby] haul road have essentially fractured the Central Arctic herd into two groups," Klein says...
...impossible to know how the Porcupine herd will be affected by oil drilling. But Evon Peter and the other members of the Gwich'in tribe fear the worst. Peter lives in Arctic Village, pop. 130, on the southern slopes of the Brooks Range. The caribou come through his area every fall, and the Gwich'in hunt them to feed the whole village. "The caribou for us are like the buffalo were to the Indians of the Lower 48," says Peter. The Gwich'in are worried drilling will drive the caribou away into Canada forever. "Our struggle," says Peter, "is spiritual...
...boom would also mean a multibillion-dollar windfall in tax revenues, royalties and leasing fees for Alaska and the Federal Government. Best of all, proponents of drilling say, damage to the environment would be minimal. "We've never had a documented case of an oil rig chasing caribou out onto the pack ice," says Alaska State Representative Scott Ogan...