The Last Word On Nothing

_{Caribou collar compilation provided by the National Park Service.}

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Last week I traveled to Fairbanks, Alaska, for work. Though the melt had begun, plenty of snow still blanketed the ground and thick rafts of ice clotted the rivers. It had been a big winter in the area, the coldest on record, with 31 days at or below -40 degrees Fahrenheit, and more than 90 inches of snow. People in town were still talking about winter when I arrived, and it was clear it’d live on in their memories, and maybe their bodies, for a long time. The National Weather Service itself—not know for hyperbole—had called the season “a marathon of sub-zero endurance.” 

Despite all this spring was insistent, inevitable. The days were bright and mild. On distant hillsides pale painterly washes of red showed where the aspens were budding. At the top of town, on the University of Alaska campus, students were jogging in shorts. And even though the river downtown still appeared frozen solid, you couldn’t trust your eyes. The ice had turned with the season; who knew how much longer it might hold weight. All week I was distracted, partly by the weather—there is nothing quite like Alaska’s spring—but also in thinking of the mysterious forces gathering farther north, way beyond what I could see from Fairbanks. 

A couple hundred miles away, above the Arctic Circle, caribou were on the move. They were beginning their migrations toward the North Slope, Alaska’s coastal plain, where tens of thousands of females would give birth to tens of thousands of calves. This kind of mass caribou migration happens all across the top of North America, and involves some 12 major herds, comprising roughly 2 million animals. Some of them start the long walk north in early April. By May momentum is building, and the animals are feeling something like compulsion—a physical, inimitable need to be norther. Then, at the start of June, even the slacker males are feeling restless, and an incredible continental synchronicity unfolds: every caribou is hustling, hurrying, homing in on a specific spot, a calving grounds that is unique to their particular herd. 

Better than me telling you is that you watch this video, or this one, which gather GPS data from tracking collars looped around the animals’ necks. You’ll see the momentum build, then break. You’ll see these pixellated avatars almost sprinting northward. After your first watch, press repeat and try to arrange your imagination around the synchronicity: hear their hooves clicking over the tundra. Listen as mothers grunt and give birth. Shiver at the wolf song that accompanies the herds’ movement, as the big canids follow the caribou and hope for a meal. There is nothing quite like this anywhere else on land. The migration is inevitable as spring, or at least it has been, for more than a million years. What’s most stunning, and bewildering, and wonderful is how they all seem to know when to go. At the same time. Almost in flood—like a damn collapsing, or an ice-jammed river bursting open. 

_{Migration animation, shared by the Beverly and Qamanirjuaq Caribou Management Board.}

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I’ve spent a long time studying caribou, and traveling with hunters and talking with scientists about them. From these people I’ve adopted or maybe ingested a strange form of caribou fever. Every year at this season I wonder where the herds are, and what they’re up to. Some scientists I know do way more than merely wonder: they can open a laptop and punch up a program that lets them see, by way of tracking collars, exactly where on the map the herds are. I’ve always envied these folks. They get to watch the greatest migrations on earth like they’re some kind of caribou Tour de France. Overlaid across their digital maps are the huge rivers, the mountain ranges, the wind-scoured tundra. The hazards, in other words, that caribou face as they travel. And while very few people actually get to see much of the action, these scientists come close as most of us will ever get to a seat beside the race course.

So much of caribouness remains mysterious to us. Invisible, despite our satellite eyes. They live so far away, and spend so much of their lives in what we often call wilderness. Despite my professional interest in caribou, which has become a vested personal interest, I’ve only observed their lives for brief, intense periods. In other words, my experience of them isn’t much different from what you might see through a doorbell camera: I’ve watched them at many different discreet points in their journeys, but I’ve never come close to stringing together the whole thing. I witness without rhythm. Like a guy watching the Amazon delivery driver drop off a package, then get into his car, and vanish.

And this is why I spent a lot of time last week watching some truly amazing videos of caribou. It wasn’t footage from hunters, or documentary filmmakers, or even scientists. These were images captured by the caribou themselves—albeit without their really knowing it. The videos are made with collar cameras: battery powered devices that caribou wear around their necks and that automatically record brief, regular segments of a caribou’s life as it happens out on the land, far from human sight. 

Researchers first started using collar cameras several years ago in Canada, and since then it’s become a more common, if not very well-known, method of trying to answer the question that hangs me up each spring. What are the caribou up to? Well, the cameras give fresh insight into where they go, what they eat, who eats them, and how it all happens. One American researcher who’s worked with the cameras told me most of the footage is, from a certain point of view, pretty boring. Lots of eating. Lots of walking around. But for a scientist this is gold. The cameras tell you about diet down to specific species of plants and lichen. They tell you how mothers relate to their young, and how caribou move together or alone across vast stretches of territory where no humans lives.

Sometimes the footage can be life-and-death dramatic, too. The researcher described to me a sequence in which a female caribou faced off against a wolf. “She loses,” the researcher told me. But the camera kept recording. “And then a bear comes and chases the wolf off the kill.”

You can find several of these floating around online, but my favorite, the one I’ve shared at the top, is a compilation from a herd called the Fortymile that lives between Alaska and Canada. It’s very beautiful, and mildly weird. For one thing, the collared animals’ lower jaws are always in the frame. Then there is, for me anyway, a nagging sense of voyeurism. Like we’re invading caribou privacy, or tampering with the metaphysics suggested in the old adage, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it … ” But I admit these things mostly don’t bother me. I’m all in for the vibes, and the views of things I would never otherwise see.

In the video above you’ll watch caribou eating and walking, sure. But you’ll also see a mother tearing at a fresh placenta, or nudging a sleepy newborn, or nursing a wobbly calf. You’ll see caribou tramping up a river together, and shuddering under the relentless assault of mosquitoes. I’m grateful to the National Park Service researchers who cut the clips together for us from collars mounted on 30 female caribou, and I only hope they’ll do more, and longer ones. I can see this becoming a new kind of Slow TV—the movement that originated in Norway and in which people settle in to watch hours of mundane footage of trains rolling over the landscape, or ferries cruising up the coast, or knitting needles, or swimming salmon. The point is mundanity—and simplicity, and movement. When you watch this stuff, you recognize bodily that there is great comfort in the steady comings and goings of a ship, or a train, or an animal. Watching allows you to surrender to the season, or the journey, and set yourself adrift in a visual current. If there were more videos of caribou, I know I’d fall right in.