Amy-Jane Beer meets the hardy reindeer braving the snowy Cairngorms
A Thirties children’s book gave life to the Christmas reindeer that has captivated generations, but the real Rudolf is just as fascinating, says Amy-Jane Beer.
Tilly Smith is under no illusion about what brings visitors to Reindeer House in Glenlivet, on the flanks of Cairngorm. “They want to see Rudolf while he’s off duty,” she says. “But I don’t mind that, because it gives me a chance to show them that these really are no ordinary ungulates.” And Tilly, who is herder and co-owner of the Cairngorm reindeer herd, has a point. Reindeer, or caribou as they’re called in North America, are amazing, surprising creatures, well worthy of a serious naturalist’s attention. However, since being reinvented as a red-nosed children’s character by Robert L May in 1939, their fascinating ecology has been somewhat obscured.
Reindeer are among the most widespread terrestrial mammals and their wanderings cover about one-fifth of the planet’s land. Up to half a million pregnant females of Alaska’s Western Arctic herd travel 5,000km each year, from forested wintering areas to calving grounds far north of the treeline. This epic migration – the longest of any land animal – takes the reindeer beyond the reach of wolves and they arrive early enough that the newborn calves are spared the onslaught of summer mosquitoes during the first few weeks of their lives. The births, in June, are synchronised, with tens of thousands of calves arriving on the same day.
But on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, between Norway and the North Pole, reindeer don’t really migrate at all. These are the most northerly dwelling herbivores in the world, and an extreme example of Allen’s Rule, which says that warm-blooded animals from cold climates tend to have shortened limbs, ears and faces to minimise their bodies’ surface area and reduce heat loss. Such is the diminutive stature of a Svalbard reindeer, that you’d be forgiven for thinking it an entirely different species to the dark, leggy woodland caribou.
UNCHANGED AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
The taxonomy of reindeer and caribou has been reassessed more than once. But, unlike other widely distributed animals whose far-flung populations have been hived off into separate species, Rangifer tarandus is still regarded as one, albeit with 14 subspecies. Of these subspecies, two are already extinct and three are threatened.
There’s another difference. Eurasian reindeer are mostly semi-domesticated, and some have been imported to North America as livestock. Caribou, on the other hand, remain fully wild. This should make for an interesting case study into the effects of domestication, but while domestication for livestock animals such as cattle and sheep led to dramatic physical changes, reindeer have barely changed at all. Domesticated reindeer are a little smaller than caribou, their wild relatives, and more variable in colour but, arguably, it’s the human herders that have adapted, not the reindeer.
In reaping the benefits of a ready supply of antlers, super-warm hides, rich milk and meat, the ancestors of reindeer-herding peoples, such as the Scandinavian Sami, the Siberian Samoyed and Tungu, and the Mongolian Dukha and Tsataan all reverted to a nomadic, pre-agricultural way of life.
BEING REINVENTED AS A RED-NOSED CHARACTER HAS OBSCURED THEIR TRUE ECOLOGY.
BRITAIN’S LOST FAUNA
Reindeer weren’t the only large mammals to roam Ice Age Britain in considerable numbers. Six-tonne woolly mammoths, straight-tusked elephants, woolly rhinoceroses and Irish elk, whose colossal antlers make the largest reindeer rack seem conservative, were all here in large numbers. All were hunted by Palaeolithic people. There were other predators too, including sabretoothed cats, cave lions and cave bears. This spectacular assemblage of mammals was able to mingle freely with those of continental Europe, of which these islands were part before the low-lying region known as Doggerland was inundated by the North Sea about 6,500 years ago.
Even after thousands of generations of supposed domestication, tame reindeer can still do perfectly well on their own in the toughest of circumstances, as Tilly explains. “We manage them, but they live in a natural environment and would thrive without us. By contrast, a hill sheep farmer has to go out in all weathers to check on his stock, move them to lower ground or supply them with extra food.
“When the Cairngorm weather turns filthy enough to keep me at home, as it does for a few days every winter, I don’t worry. I know the herd will be fine. The snow makes a perfect bed for them – they’ll be warm, they’ll find food and they never, ever, get stuck in snowdrifts.”
A reindeer’s winter coat is probably the warmest of any mammal (there’s a very good reason the Sami and other Arctic peoples wear reindeer-skin boots). It’s made up of two layers: the under fur, with 2,000 hairs per square centimetre; and the outer fur, with an additional 670 ‘guard’ hairs in the same area. The latter are hollow, like those of the polar bear, with an air-filled cavity in each shaft, which gives the coat its extraordinary insulating properties. So little of their body heat escapes that reindeer can lie on, or even under, a blanket of snow without melting it. For much of the year, they’re at far greater risk of overheating than becoming too cold and they remain perfectly comfortable down to –40°C.
Fur covers a reindeer’s nose, ears and small udder, possibly the least well insulated part of the body in females. The udder’s greatly reduced surface area, compared to that of deer and wild cattle in
SO LITTLE OF THEIR BODY HEAT ESCAPES THAT REINDEER CAN LIE ON SNOW WITHOUT MELTING IT.
temperate regions, cuts heat loss. But it means that milk is produced in relatively small quantities and must therefore be extraordinarily rich, containing 22 per cent fat and 10 per cent protein solids. A reindeer calf thrives on little more than a teacup’s worth of this miraculous nourishment a day (supplemented with grazed vegetation) and takes no more than 45 litres during its entire development.
RENEWING ANTLERS AND THE HIERARCHY
Reindeer antlers are the largest of any living deer relative to body size. Those of moose grow bigger, but on an animal up to twice as tall and three or four times as heavy. In contrast to the permanent horns of cattle, which retain a living core, the hard part of antlers is dead tissue, like hair. Horns can’t be cast or fully replaced if they’re damaged, whereas deer antlers are renewed routinely. Reindeer are unique, however, in that it’s not only males that grow antlers, but females and calves as well.
In energy terms, antlers are costly – and large ones extraordinarily so. In males they’re an indicator of strength, which rivals use to assess their ranking without resorting to fights. In any deer herd, the animal with the largest antlers tends to be dominant and this is where reindeer hierarchies get interesting.
Male reindeer, called bulls, begin to shed their antlers soon after the rut, in early winter. But females, or cows, and juveniles hang on to them until spring. So as conditions deteriorate and food becomes scarce, pregnant mothers rise through the social hierarchy, gaining access to the best of whatever food is available. Natural selection has effectively forced the larger male reindeer to stand down, giving way to the animals that directly represent the future of the herd.
Reindeer are known to eat more than 350 different species of plant, favouring fresh browse including leaves but also taking grasses, sedges, fungi and lichen. In winter lichen are particularly important, most famously Cladonia rangiferina, otherwise known as reindeer ‘moss’. The animals use their hooves to dig through snow and find food hidden underneath, a technique called cratering. Indeed, the native American name caribou means ‘snow-shoveller’. But reindeer aren’t exclusively vegetarian and will happily scavenge meat from carcasses and chew bones for the calcium. There are even reports of reindeer hunting lemmings! And yet their influence on the landscape is surprisingly small, Tilly Smith says. “They’re not like red deer. The reindeer’s impact is much more sustainable because they move around more. And in winter, when red deer are at their most destructive, reindeer actually eat less. Their appetite declines and they’re so well insulated that they don’t waste energy keeping warm – reindeer can comfortably get by on the reserves they built up during the summer.” Reindeer also have surprisingly fragile teeth, so they can’t tear bark from
trees like red deer; when browsing a reindeer delicately strips the leaves without breaking a shoot’s growing tip.
BRINGING REINDEER BACK TO BRITAIN
The history of reindeer in Britain is long, but intermittent. Fossils found near Benson in Oxfordshire are almost half a million years old. Indeed, reindeer were probably the most numerous large mammals here at the end of the last Ice Age, and evidence of butchery shows they were being hunted and used extensively by humans. They were present in Yorkshire about 9,750 years ago and in Scotland 8,300 years ago, and there’s also evidence that suggests they may have hung on much later in some areas.
Extinction was largely the result of climate change and the spread of extensive forests, but one part of Britain retained glacial conditions very similar to those now found north of the Arctic Circle. The Cairngorm plateau is a relict glacial landscape and in 1952 these mountains and the surrounding area near Aviemore was identified as the perfect place to establish a new reindeer herd.
The plan was the brainchild of anthropologist Ethel Lindgren and her Swedish Sami reindeer-herder husband Mikel Utsi. Dr Lindgren had studied relationships between people and reindeer as far away as Mongolia, and justified importing their small herd to Scotland as an extra postwar meat source. In fact, Tilly suggests now, it probably had more to do with incentivising her new husband to move to Britain. “They were an amazing couple,” she says. “They followed their passion and were always up for a challenge.”
Establishing the herd wasn’t easy, especially after Utsi died in 1979, taking much of his know-how with him. Responsibility for the herd then fell largely to the young keeper, Alan Smith, and new recruit Tilly Dansie. Alan and Tilly married in 1983 and took ownership of the herd in 1989 after Dr Lindgren’s death. They were immediately faced with the challenge of how to make a living from what had been a retirement hobby for their predecessors. They established a second herd at Glenlivet, boosting the overall number to about 150 animals, and converted part of Reindeer House into a visitor centre.
Would reindeer make a good addition to a rewilded landscape in other parts of Britain? “Potentially, yes,” says Tilly. “We hear too much about predators in the rewilding debate. It sometimes seems that they’re the only thing that matters, but that’s an unbalanced argument. Reindeer could certainly play a part in rewilding. They don’t browse or strip Scots pine, and in the northern corries of the Cairngorms, where our herd roams, we’re seeing regeneration of Caledonian pine woodland. The same is happening in parts of Russia and Scandinavia.”
For now, then, the main business of the Cairngorm herd is tourism – over 20,000 people visit every year. The usual reaction, Tilly says, is how small the animals are. Inevitably, young visitors also ask about Rudolf. “But if he’s the reason people want to come and learn about the real thing, he’s doing a great job. Reindeer are for everyone.”
And not, it seems, just for Christmas.