By Nancy Langston*
In September 2023, while I was hiking under the cliffs that rise steeply above Stöðvarfjörður in east Iceland, a herd of animals drifted down the mountainside towards me. At first, I thought they were sheep, which outnumber people in Iceland two to one. But as they came closer, I saw their antlers. Reindeer! Stifling my yelp of joy, I dropped behind a rock outcropping and peered at the herd through my binoculars, scribbling notes on individual movements and snapping photographs. Eventually one female lifted her head from the lichen, snorted in my direction, then trotted back toward the protection of the cliffs. The rest of the herd took her cue, and soon they were scrambling back up the mountain, taking a route far too challenging for me to attempt.
This was my third research trip to Iceland, and I was thrilled that reindeer had finally graced me with their presence. Most visitors to east Iceland who glimpse reindeer assume they are completely wild creatures, an emblem of untouched wilderness free from human intervention. But the reindeer in Iceland are just the opposite: their histories are profoundly entangled with human settlement histories. Icelandic reindeer descend from those introduced from Europe in the 1770s by the country’s elite Danish rulers, the world’s first reindeer translocation. More than 250 years later, reindeer now roam freely, wintering along east Iceland’s fjords and migrating up into the highlands during summer, far from roads. No predators threaten their migrations, so wildlife managers carefully control permits for an annual hunt, trying to prevent overgrazing. Iceland’s reindeer speak to us not of untouched primordial wilderness, but instead of the complex historical relationships between humans and reindeer that still influence modern conservation.
Reindeer and caribou (Rangifer tarandus) are members of the same species, whose current ranges stretch across the circumpolar Arctic from North America to Eurasia. Members of the deer family, reindeer thrive in a variety of habitats. They are a migratory species, with some populations migrating vast distances across treeless Arctic tundra, making the longest annual migrations of any land mammal. Other populations have evolved shorter migrations in forests or on islands. These diverse migration strategies have been key to their resilience over thousands of years.
But migration is harder than it used to be. Habitat loss, climate change, and infrastructure development have blocked many wildlife migration routes. Reindeer and caribou have retreated from roughly half their 19th century range, and their populations have dropped by 56 percent in the past decade (although some populations are expanding).
One reason to care about reindeer responses to climate change is that they may be crucial partners in the efforts to keep civilization from crossing key Arctic tipping points. Tipping points in climate models are critical thresholds that, if crossed, can lead to self-perpetuating, runaway warming in an ecosystem. Reindeer browsing can reduce the process of "shrubification" in the Arctic -- a positive feedback loop wherein heat-absorbing shrubs expand across the tundra as climates warm. As reindeer populations have declined in some sites, heat-absorbing shrubs have increased and heat-reflecting grasses decreased, leading to more warming. Ecologists fear that if this warming diminishes the reindeer’s ability to persist, it could unleash a domino effect of runaway warming. Translocation, however, may offer a way to help them persist.
Translocation of wildlife is nothing new. The first effort to move reindeer actually took place two and half centuries ago, when the ecological and social disruptions of the Little Ice Age led Danish rulers of Iceland to fear starvation among the island’s settlers. The Little Ice Age had hit Iceland hard, and settlers who had relied upon sheep herding struggled to survive. This problem was made worse by new sheep varieties imported from England that proved susceptible to scabies. The Danes tried to substitute reindeer as protein sources, calculating that if the reindeer could survive in the European tundra, surely they could survive in Iceland.
Initial efforts to move reindeer into Iceland in the 1770s failed; even without native Icelandic predators, the reindeer managed to fall off cliffs, stumble into boiling geysers, and get lost in lava fields. Finally, in 1787 a translocation of 35 reindeer from Finnmark met with more success (at least from the reindeer’s perspective). Descendants of those stragglers form the basis of Iceland’s current free-ranging herd. Rather than dying off like other introduced herds, they expanded rapidly in the latter half of the 20th century. Despite the genetic challenges associated with a tiny founding population estimated at 15 individuals, the population reached a size of about 6,000 to 7000 individuals. Because there are no native predators in Iceland, now regulated hunts and cars are the main sources of mortality.
What is the potential future for reindeer in Iceland? Climate change has brought dramatic changes to the region, as has hydropower development, which currently supplies 92 percent of Iceland’s energy production. Floods, landslides, and winter icing events have become more common. Winter ice can prevent reindeer from foraging lichen. But at least so far, Iceland’s reindeer appear to be surprisingly resilient and adaptable. When winter pastures ice over, some individuals starve, but others initiate new migrations, exploring new pastures and selecting new foods such as seaweed. Icelandic farmers long hated the reindeer, because they weren’t allowed to hunt them, but in recent decades, reindeer and locals have managed to co-exist in a rapidly warming Iceland.
*Editor's Note:
Nancy Langston, author of this article and linocut artist, is Board President of The Keweenaw Land Trust and Distinguished Professor Emerita of Environmental History, Michigan Technological University. Trained as an ornithologist, Nancy Langston's academic research in the past two decades has explored the ecological histories of wildlife in northern ecosystems. She is the author of six books on reindeer, Lake Superior, toxics, climate change, and old growth forests. To read more about Nancy and her linocut prints, visit her Web site, https://www.nancylangston.net/
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