Putting the focus on caribou
Ever since the Dempster Highway was built, there have been concerns about caribou hunting along the road. This narrow strip of gravel is the only road within the vast range of the Porcupine Caribou Herd, and every year a large proportion of the caribou harvested from the herd are taken along the Dempster.
The total number of animals being harvested has not been the issue. About three to five percent of the herd is harvested annually, an amount that is thought to be well within sustainable levels at this point.
But there have been on-going concerns about hunter safety and respect for traditional ways of hunting. The Porcupine Caribou Management Board -- the advisory group responsible for the well-being of the herd -- has tried to address these issues for some time.
The board wanted more information on how traffic, snowmachines and hunters affect the caribou along the highway. For wildlife managers, finding a way to do that research was no easy task. An approach was needed that would satisfy both hunters with detailed knowledge of the caribou, and government biologists who needed a standardized research design.
The territorial government decided on an approach that is usually associated more with market research on consumer products than with caribou hunting in the North. Expert caribou hunters were asked to participate in focus groups and share their knowledge about how the caribou behaved in different -- very specific -- situations.
Deciding exactly what to ask the hunters was one of the trickiest parts of the undertaking. For one, migratory caribou are not the easiest species to study. They do not follow the same migratory routes year after year, and a wide range of factors can affect how they will behave in a particular situation.
"There's a lot of variation in caribou," explains Barney Smith, head of the public involvement program with the Department of Renewable Resources. "You do not know where they are going to migrate or when, or the earlier experience of a particular caribou. Nobody has the word on the caribou."
Smith helped set up the focus groups, along with Jim Tousignant from the Bureau of Statistics and Dorothy Cooley, a regional biologist. The researchers spent a great deal of time coming up with the scenarios used in the focus groups. They would pick known locations along the road, and include details such as the time of day, wind direction and snow depth, and the number of caribou.
Each scenario would include some sort of human disturbance, such as an approaching snowmachine or a truck on the highway. The hunters were asked how the caribou would respond in these very specific situations.
Biologists listened in on the focus groups, and asked follow up questions at the end. For them, the sessions with the hunters presented a golden opportunity to learn from people who have had an immense amount of experience with caribou.
"Some of these hunters were hunting there even before the Dempster existed," says Cooley. "We were tapping into a database in the minds of hunters who collectively have experienced hundreds of thousands of human-caribou interactions."
All of the sessions were recorded, and Smith says that many subtleties in the hunters' information were picked up when listening back to the tapes. "That was fascinating for me. You think you hear everything at the session, and then it is not until you listen to the tape that you realize how much you can miss the first time."
In all, 39 hunters from four different communities participated in at least one of the ten focus groups. The hunters' observations were recorded in a matrix format that showed how the caribou responded in different circumstances.
Some clear patterns have emerged from this research. For example, the hunters always wanted to know whether the caribou in the scenario had just reached the highway.
"This was a way of asking whether they had been hunted before," explains Smith. Caribou described as acting skittish or spooked were assumed to have been hunted before, and that experience would dictate how they would react to a new disturbance.
But turning these scenarios into hunting regulations still remains a challenge. Smith says that the next step will be reporting back to the hunters in communities along the Dempster. And even though they still have a ways to go with this project, he thinks that the department is on the right track with the focus groups.
"This approach is much different from collecting traditional knowledge and letting researchers comment on that," he explains. "These conversations were like few others that you hear. They were on an expert-to-expert basis, and I think that it is very much in the spirit of the land claim agreement."
