Caribou will remain a state protected species despite being extinct in Washington.
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Commission voted unanimously to keep the protection during a Friday meeting in Colville.
Biologists with the Kalispel Tribe of Indians addressed the commission prior to the vote. While they supported the continued protection, they raised concerns about the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's periodic status review, which was published in May and the fact that the state does not have a recovery plan for the species.
In particular, Kalispel wildlife biologist Bart George said the tribe worried that language in the review calling for feasibility studies prior to caribou reintroduction — alongside questions about how climate change will impact traditional caribou habitat — may delay timely reintroduction.
While caribou have been extinct from Washington, Idaho and Montana since at least 2019 when the last members of the South Selkirk herd were airlifted farther north into Canada, the Kalispel Tribe has continued to work with Canadian biologist and first nations to recover the species. In particular the Kalispels are looking at the Central caribou herd in Canada as a possible source population for relocation efforts.
"If caribou come available the tribe is not willing to accept no for an answer as far as bringing them in to the South Selkirk recovery area," George told the commission.
While George and Ray Entz, the director of wildlife and terrestrial resources for the Kalispel Tribe, supported the commission's vote to keep caribou on the state endangered list, they asked that the periodic status review be amended.
"The tribe is still out there working on caribou despite them not being in the recovery area," George said. "We're still working on habitat protection and all these sorts of things. We'd like to see some mention of that as well as either striking or amending language about feasibility studies and all this red tape that is getting built into place."
Commissioners agreed to look at this issue and WDFW Director Kelly Susewind committed to "engage with you all to take a look at all the documentation."
Caribou are federally endangered species and the federal government has a recovery plan in place which, among other things, designated 30,000 acres in Pend Orielle and Boundary counties as protected critical habitat.
"Our real concern has more to do with language in the periodic status review and the lack of a state recovery plan," George said.
Mountain caribou, unlike tundra caribou, use their wide feet to walk on top of deep snowpack. That allows them to reach lichen growing high on old-growth trees. The South Selkirk herd ranged through the high country along the crest of the Selkirks near the international border. The remaining 14 or so herds are all in Canada. It's estimated that fewer than 1,400 mountain caribou are left in North America. Scientists believe caribou once roamed as far south as the Salmon River in Idaho.
Mountain caribou numbers plummeted in the 1900s as their habitat was decimated by logging. Simultaneously wolves and other predators took advantage of logging roads to access previously inaccessible areas in the high country.
Over the decades there have been expensive multiagency and multinational effort to transplant caribou into the Idaho and Washington Selkirk Mountains including in the 1990s and in 2012.
