Back from the brink: Caribou are thriving once more on the Grey Islands

Retired fisherman Paul Bromley steers his longliner toward the Grey Islands off the coast of Newfoundland's Northern Peninsula.

He's been coming here for more than half a century.

"This is where I fished out of for a couple of years when I started fishing in a speed boat," said Bromley.

The fishing was good on the Grey Islands, and so was the hunting.The herd of caribou that lived on the lower island peaked at almost 600 animals by the 1990s.

Thirty years ago, hunters were permitted to take 150 Grey Islands caribou annually.

"There was some good caribou here. Big caribou. Yeah, one fellow killed one here one year that was 400 pounds. That was a big caribou. I killed one myself that was 42 points. Yeah, big stag," Bromley said during an interview for CBC's Land andSea.

Eventually, though, Bromley witnessed caribou all but disappear from the islands. The hunt finally closed in 2016.

In 2017 there were only 16 caribou remaining on the lower Grey Island.

Wayne Barney has watched the decline of caribou populations all over Newfoundland and Labrador.

Barney, a senior biologist with the province's wildlife division, says herds on the island have dropped by almost two thirds.

"Originally, the insular island caribou population was documented at approximately 95,000 individuals, right? And over the past 20 years, that number fell quite dramatically, down to and kind of plateauing off somewhere around 30,000 individuals overall," said Barney.

'Really good recruitment rates'

In 2019 the wildlife division undertook a project to populate both the upper and lower Grey Islands.

They took 13 caribou, one by one, from a healthy herd on Fischot Islands in Hare Bay and put them on the Grey Islands.

And already, that work is showing great promise.

"It's better than we expected. It's really good recruitment rates. Good birthing rates and really high survival rates," said Barney.

The upper Grey Island caribou have likely more than doubled, and from the sixcaribou brought to the lower Grey Island, there are now more than 30.

You can learn more about the efforts to re-establish healthy populations of caribou in the Land and Seaepisode The Grey Island Caribou Revival by clicking the video player above.

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