A word on the caribou of Michipicoten Island

February 1, 2018

Screen shot 2018-02-01 at 7.42.52 AMLeo Lepiano, who earned a masters in forest conservation from University in Toronto, in 2015, came in by video link the other evening from his home at the Michipicoten First Nation, near Wawa in northern Ontario. He told Society and Forest Conservation students a pretty wild story about the end of the caribou on the shores of Lake Superior.

According to Leo, back in 1981 scientists from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry moved a few female caribou onto Michipicoten Island, a provincial park in Lake Superior, to join a buck they’d seen on the island. The herd grew to up to 700 caribou, even as logging and other human activities drove caribou away from the north shore of Lake Superior.

In 2012 wolves crossed an ice bridge and reached the island. Now, Leo says, the wolves have multiplied to up to 20 and the caribou are down to about 30-40.

The Michipicoten First Nation wants to save the caribou. First they wanted to trap the wolves. But since that seems unpalatable to many people, the natives have cooked up a new plan, to move the caribou by helicopter to Montreal Island, which is further down the coast of Lake Superior. The natives have the money to move the caribou and support from the mayor of Wawa. So far the MNRF doesn’t want to get involved. Apparently the chief of the First Nation, Patricia Tangie, will speak by phone with the new minister of natural resources, Nathalie Des Rosiers, sometime this week, to try to convince her to save the caribou.

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One woman in our class asked Leo whether he thinks certain people might just prefer that the pesky caribou die out entirely from that part of Ontario. He intimated that he has lots of conspiracy theories of that sort.