In a quiet pen in B.C.’s northeast corner, pregnant caribou cows and their calves are fed hand-picked old growth lichen, provided 24-hour armed security and are the subject of one of Canada’s boldest and most experimental efforts to save a species from extinction.

Read an excerpt from the story in The Narwhal:

On a calm, chilly day in January, Saulteau First Nations member Julian Napoleon joined a three-helicopter rescue mission that rivalled a James Bond escapade in the Austrian Alps for its ingenuity and speed.

The search was on, in the snow-clad Misinchinka mountains in northeast B.C., for a dozen female caribou from an endangered herd called Klinse-Za. Caribou C-315S, spotted crossing an alpine meadow, was a bull’s eye target for a net gun shot by a biologist, balanced on a helicopter skid and strapped to his airborne machine.

“We swoop in immediately,” explained Napoleon, a UBC biology graduate. “The whole thing can go down in five minutes.”

A vet sprayed medetomidine, a sedative, into the animal’s nostrils and placed a thermometer in her rectum. If the caribou’s temperature reached 41 degrees Celsius, a sign of potentially fatal distress called capture myopathy, they would have to peel off the net and abort the mission.

Read the full story in The Narwhal

Photo by Wildlife Infometrics