SAVE Rudolph!
Spare a thought for Santa’s helpers: half the world’s reindeer have died out in the past 20 years. Here, SIMON BARNES reveals their true magic and says we MUST...
MANY of us are too old for it these days, but I suspect that, at some point over the traditional 12 days of Christmas, nostalgia will get the better of us and we’ll watch Father Christmas and The Missing Reindeer.
It’s a jolly little 1998 animation, with actor David Jason doing the ho-ho-hoing.
I don’t wish to spoil it, but they find the nine missing reindeer and Christmas can happen after all.
This week, there came another story of missing reindeer — we have lost 2.6million of them. not lost as in temporarily mislaid, but lost as in dead. We’ve managed to lose more than half the world’s reindeer since the mid-nineties. The population is down from 4.7 million to 2.1 million — a 56 per cent fall.
We should be worried, for this is a species we dare not lose. Too much of the way we see the world and our place in it depends on the continued existence of reindeer, so sentimentally attached have we become to the legend of Rudolph. If we lose them, it will expose us as the careless custodians of our planet that we are.
We would understand reindeer better if we could look directly down on the north Pole.
They live in a great circle all the way round the top of the planet. They are arctic beasts and have no interest in national boundaries. The same species spans alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and northern Russia. The north americans call them caribou, while we in Europe call them reindeer, but they are all the same thing: endearingly shaggy and with antlers colossal for their size.
In proportion to their bodies, reindeer are the most impressively attired deer of all and, unlike all other deer species, most females carry antlers as well.
They can be divided into different populations and sub-species, with different ranges and movements. But they are all the same animal and, if you were a scientist, you’d call them Rangifer tarandus whether you saw them in Lapland or Manitoba.
The great problem in the reindeer’s life is the most obvious: cold. The Christmas story about them bringing us gifts from the frozen north might lead you to think a reindeer’s life in the freezer is straightforward. It is nothing of the kind: reindeer are very special animals and wouldn’t survive for a moment if they weren’t.
Their crucial adaptation is a circulation system that keeps their blood warm with remarkably little expenditure of energy. It’s a piece of stunning natural engineering and it’s contained in the nose in the form of a highly efficient counter-current heat exchange system. Reindeer noses contain a 25 per cent higher concentration of blood vessels than those of humans for this purpose, enabling them to warm the polar air as they breathe it in. It is why they actually do have reddish noses. They are also great travellers, moving north to exploit newly uncovered pastures in spring and returning south as the cold descends. Some populations routinely travel 3,000 miles in a year, making them the besttravelled of all terrestrial mammals, beating the more famous Serengeti wildebeest. Their hooves are wide and crescent-shaped, which helps to spread their weight as they walk across snow in winter and swamps in the brief summer. Listen as they pass and you will hear a curious clicking, like knees cracking when you rise after sitting for too long. It’s the sound of clicking tendons and is usually reckoned to be a signal of a reindeer’s social status — the better the click, the more formidable a reindeer you are. But it may serve a dual function: you can hear your neighbour even if you can’t see him when a herd is moving through a whiteout.
This is a truly crazy place to make a living and even the reindeer’s eyes are adapted for it. They can see deeper into the ultraviolet end of the spectrum than humans can, which means they can see much better in a white landscape.
THEY are pretty remarkable beasts. They need no tales of supernatural abilities to make them so. Real reindeer are every bit as wonderful as anything we humans can make up — shiny noses and flying skills and all.
They have been domesticated to pull sleighs and provide food, clothing and shelter for traditional people: the Sámi in Lapland, the Inuit in north america.
Reindeer are also hunted for food by everyone else across their range: reindeer meat is claimed to be healthier and less fatty than beef or lamb. however, there are problems for reindeer and they seem to be worsening.
It’s a fact that their populations do go up and down but, at the moment, they are going through a very big down. The figures come in a report put together by the national Oceanic and atmospheric administration, a U.S. body. It covers the global reindeer population and its lead author, Don Russell, has been quoted as saying: ‘They’re at such low levels, you start to be concerned . . . if we return in ten years and [their numbers] have gone down further, that would be unprecedented.’
as usual with such declines, there is a collection of possible reasons. Over-hunting is likely to be one. you think a resource is endless and then, too late, find it isn’t: an old story that never improves in the retelling. There are also problems of disease and the possibility there is less food for reindeer to eat.
Probably, the principal issue comes down to climate change. you’d think that warmer summers would be good news, but they bring drought, more parasites and flies and heat stress that leaves an animal perfectly adapted to the cold vulnerable to disease.
There is a further problem that when rain falls instead of snow, it freezes into ice, making movement difficult and food harder to find.
Reindeer can dig through snow with their noses and antlers to forage on herbs, ferns, mosses, grasses, shoots, fungi, leaves and energy-packed lichens called reindeer moss.
But it’s far harder with ice, which is why, in 2013, 61,000 reindeer died of starvation in Russia because of excess ice.
It seems reindeer are one more victim of the way we humans choose to run the planet.
If we want to live in a world with reindeer, we must make a series of decisions as individuals, as societies and as a species.
These might seem to be decisions that run against our own interests, but they are nothing of the kind. We need to look after the planet a little better.
What’s good for reindeer would be good for everything else that lives on Earth, including our own great-grandchildren. So perhaps we should say thank you to the reindeer we have left — because they have brought us a Christmas message we all need to listen to.