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The North’s Vanishing Caribou

To help save the once-thriving Bathurst herd, Indigenous groups confront problems of overhunting

The North’s Vanishing Caribou

To help save the once-thriving Bathurst herd, Indigenous groups confront problems of overhunting

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY PAT KANE

Published 6:30, OCTOBER 28, 2026

On the side of a snow-swept ice highway last March, Amos Scott loaded a pickup truck with caribou parts discarded from harvesters that he hopes to salvage, such as antlers and hides for clothing and artwork.

The pickup truck was full, and it could be filled several times over on this small stretch of the Tibbitt to Contwoyto winter road that starts near Yellowknife and ends 400 kilometres northeast at the Ekati Diamond Mine. Scott is the executive director of the Caribou Guardians Coalition, a partnership between various Indigenous organizations across the range of the Bathurst caribou territory who promote sustainable harvesting in Northern Canada.

It was eerily quiet and a bit solemn as Scott and other members of the coalition sifted through piles of dead caribou lining the road. The caribou had been legally harvested, and unused parts—heads and guts, for instance—are often left behind. (Space is limited in the toboggans hunters typically use to bring the meat out.) But on that day, the group was concerned about the excessive number of animals taken and all the meat left behind. Barren-ground caribou populations, especially the Bathurst herd, are plummeting. And overhunting could be partially to blame.

In the mid 1980s, the Bathurst caribou herd covered the tundra like an undulating carpet. The population was thriving with nearly half a million caribou moving between Great Slave Lake and the Arctic Ocean. The animals sustained communities nearby as they have for thousands of years. By 2003, the herd’s population dropped dramatically to 186,000. By 2009, just 32,000 remained, and, in 2018, the count fell again to 8,200. In late 2025, the Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) found only around 3,600 Bathurst caribou remaining. Extirpation—when a species goes extinct in one location—is now a sad possibility for the herd.

Researchers, biologists, and government officials agree there is not one smoking gun to explain the stunning population decline but a collection of factors, like the development of diamond mines and the winter road that it serves, changes in climate that affect caribou and predator life cycles, overgrazing along migratory routes, and overhunting.

In 2010, meetings between Northwest Territories First Nations and the GNWT were held in the Tłı̨chǫ community of Behchokǫ̀ to address the rapid decline of the Bathurst herd and to find ways to help the population recover. Indigenous governments pointed their fingers at sport hunters and diamond mining for much of the decline, while acknowledging that subsistence hunting was also a contributing factor. The Yellowknives Dene First Nation cancelled a caribou hunt that autumn.

Five years later, after studies showed that the herd was........

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