The essential diet: Collecting lichen for caribou in the conservation breeding program
Jasper National Park
Partners are helping to feed caribou in Parks Canada’s care
Transcript
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Parks Canada is working to rebuild caribou populations
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in Jasper through a conservation breeding program.
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So we're out here today to
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teach, and to learn from, partners how to pick lichen.
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It's like ice cream to caribou.
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Say if you're trying to get animals onto
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a weigh scale or something, you can bribe them with treats.
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So it's an important part of the program.
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There is some lichen where we're building the breeding centre,
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but they're going to eat that lichen quite quickly.
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We can't collect enough within the park, so we're going to work
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with Indigenous partners to collect lichen in their own territories,
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and then they're going to bring the lichen to the caribou in the breeding centre.
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From our perspective, Indigenous inclusion in the
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lichen harvest is one of the most exciting parts of the program.
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By including Indigenous partners, we're accomplishing so many goals.
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It's a really important element of caribou recovery from an Indigenous perspective,
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to deal more than just with the animals and the biology and the plants,
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but to think about things on a much
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broader scale and a much more ceremonial and spiritual scale.
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So we have learned from Saulteau
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First Nations, who have been doing lichen harvest for a decade or more,
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how to harvest lichens so they have taught us about that.
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We have passed that information on to other partners.
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We've brought different nations together to try to talk about and share information
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about lichen harvesting and maybe where lichen grow.
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For some of our partners, too, caribou is a really important animal to them.
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Many of them have caribou in their traditional territories
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and those caribou are also declining.
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There is definitely interest in our community to partake in this and to
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help with the lichen picking. You know, I met so many other people
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from different Nations around Alberta, BC,
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and I'll get to see them next time around.
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And then, you know, you kind of form
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like a bond with some of them because we're all working towards the same goal.
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That's one thing I've seen today, was
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my wife's
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sons working together. An older brother, little brother,
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you know, they don't always collaborate and get along.
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But today the bush, the direction, right, it brang them together.
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And I was real happy to see that. We're losing the caribou.
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And it's unfortunate that they can't sustain themselves in the wild any longer.
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If humans now can intervene to help them grow the herds,
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then that's a value to everybody,
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not just the Nations, but to our whole Canadian population.
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Right?
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Having a different perspective and a different relationship
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just makes it much more likely that we're going to have success.
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It brings a different element into the project.
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Before we never had a platform.
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So Jasper National Park is actually giving us
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a platform to speak from, to be heard, to be seen, to be understood, right.
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And they're implementing these
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recommendations from a traditional perspective.
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It's uplifting, really.
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It's invigorating.
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There needs to be more balance.
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And I think if the world would listen to the people
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that inhabit this environment, it'll last a lot longer.
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And so I think Indigenous partners bring that value of understanding
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the relationship that humans have to their environment.
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And that's so valuable for the work that we're doing to recover caribou.
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Parks Canada | Parcs Canada
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Canada
Reindeer ruminating
In the wild, lichen is a vital winter food source for caribou when other foods are scarce. Lichen can be found both on the ground (terrestrial lichen) and hanging from trees (arboreal lichen).
Caribou in the Rocky Mountains eat mostly bushy and branched lichen found on the ground, including the aptly named Cladonia rangiferina or “reindeer lichen.”
While caribou in Jasper’s Conservation Breeding Centre are fed pellet food to meet their nutritional requirements, lichen is needed to supplement their diet.
Having lichen to eat helps caribou transition to pellet food when they arrive at the breeding centre and helps when they are ready to be released into the wild. Lichen is also used to encourage caribou to move around the breeding centre rather than being directed by staff.
Lichen is a slow-growing organism made up of a fungus and an alga. Reindeer lichens grow in large patches on the ground across Canada’s tundra, forests and mountains. So, no surprise this is where you will find caribou!
Like deer, bison and sheep, caribou are ruminants, which means their stomachs contain microbes that help them digest plants and lichens.
Sustainable harvesting
Lichen grows only a few millimetres a year in dry, sunny patches of the forest floor and windswept mountain slopes. Carefully choosing where to collect lichens helps avoid over-harvesting, especially in caribou habitat. Collecting them sustainably ensures that lichens will continue growing on the land.
Techniques for sustainably harvesting lichen were developed by Carmen Richter of Saulteau First Nations, who studied the impacts of harvesting lichen for caribou in the Klinse-Za maternity pen in British Columbia. Saulteau and West Moberly First Nations' efforts to recover the Klinse-Za caribou herd are now also helping Parks Canada’s efforts in Jasper National Park.
Partnerships powering the program
Lichen will be an ongoing need at the Conservation Breeding Centre, but collecting lichen is not something that we can do alone. Even Jasper, the largest national park in the Canadian Rockies, does not have enough easily accessible lichen to provide the amount needed during the program’s lifetime.
As part of their collaboration with the Caribou Recovery Program, partners from Aseniwuche Winewak Nation, Kelly Lake Cree Nation and Mountain Cree are collecting lichen from their traditional territories to bring to the caribou in the Conservation Breeding Centre. We hope to work with even more partner communities in the future.
We are also exploring other partnerships to help us collect the lichen we need each year. If you’re interested in supplying lichen to the Caribou Conservation Breeding Program in Jasper National Park, contact us at caribou@pc.gc.ca.
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