“Reindeer” is a familiar name to most people, due to the animal’s association with Santa Claus and Christmas. However, relatively few of those people know much about the real animal (or believe that Reindeer are real at all.) So, what are actual reindeer like, and why are they so special? Let’s go!
Reindeer, also known as Caribou, go under the Latin name of Rangifer tarandus. They are members of the deer family (Cervidae), though are not particularly closely related to other deer. And yes, Reindeer and Caribou are the same animal. Reindeer are what as known as a “circumpolar” species. That is, they are found in the arctic all the way around the world. So, the northern reaches of North America, Europe, and Asia.
So why are they called ‘Caribou’ in North America? Well, the name Caribou is an anglicization of the Mi’kmaq ‘Qalipu’, which means something like ‘snow shoveler’. (Referring to the way they use their front hooves to dig through snow to reach food). The first Europeans to encounter these animals in North America were French colonists, who likely had never seen a real reindeer. (Though reindeer were historically found in France, as evidenced by prehistoric cave paintings, they left the area and retreated north at the end of the last Ice Age.) So, these French people, upon encountering a new, unfamiliar animal, adopted the local Native American name.
(Reindeer and other ungulates in France's Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, painted by neolithic humans over 30,000 years ago.)
Sometimes, people claim that ‘Caribou’ is used for wild animals, and ‘Reindeer’ for domestic. This is only true in North America. Because North American caribou have never been domesticated, people seeking to keep domestic herds imported reindeer from Europe. Hence continuing to call them Reindeer even after arrival in North America. There are populations of wild, never domesticated reindeer in Europe and Asia. Though local dialects will often have different words for the wild and domestic animals, in English they are all reindeer.
There are about 17 subspecies of reindeer recognized. There’s discussion over whether some populations are genetically distinct enough to be considered separate species, but currently they are all still considered Rangifer tarandus.
During the last Ice Age, reindeer were found as far south as France and were an important food source for early humans migrating into Europe and Asia. Currently, reindeer are found in the northern reaches of Asia, Europe, and North America.
Like all arctic animals, Reindeer have a range of very specialized adaptations for dealing with the environment. The most obvious is their fur. Reindeer fur is very thick, and composed of two layers. The outer coat is made up of stiff guard hairs, which shed snow and protect the soft, fluffy undercoat. (If you’ve ever owned a double-coated dog, you know what I mean). Air pockets make excellent insulators, so the air trapped in the fluffy undercoat help Reindeer keep warm even when its bitter cold outside. Their hair is also hollow, providing even more insulating air pockets. Reindeer can keep perfectly comfortable in temperatures of -40, and all the air trapped in their coats also makes them incredibly buoyant. Reindeer are very good swimmers, which is important, as they often have to cross rivers and lakes during their migrations.
In the winter months, reindeer fur is at its thickest. Reindeer are typically light brown with white manes and undersides, and dark brown stripes on the sides, legs, and face. Though, some populations are lighter in color than others, with some (like the Svalbard reindeer) being nearly all white. Domestic reindeer can also display unusual coat patterns, like piebald and pure white.
In the late spring, reindeer shed their winter coat in big chunks and wear a much thinner, darker coat for the summer so they don’t overheat.
Of course, reindeer fur being such a good insulator has also been very useful to humans as well. For thousands of years, people of the high north have made clothing out of reindeer and caribou hide. This warm clothing is the reason humans have been able to survive in polar regions.
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(Canadian Inuit woman's outfit of caribou hide)
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(Traditional reindeer skin boots of the Sámi people. The curled toe keeps the boots from slipping out of ski bindings)
There are also other ways that Reindeer change to fit the seasons. In the summer, they have a large, fleshy pad between their hooves. This is important, because much of the tundra is soft and swampy in the summer after the ice melts. In the winter, that fleshy pad shrinks, so that its only the hard edge of their hooves against the snow and ice.
Their eyes change as well. Reindeer have the same horizontal pupils of other ungulates (hooved mammals), but they have to deal with long periods of darkness during the winter. Above the arctic circle, there can be anywhere from days to weeks of Polar Night where the sun doesn’t rise at all. In the back of the eye of many animals is the tapetum lucidum, which reflects light back into the retina for better low-light vision. (This is why the eyes of many animals seem to shine or glow at night when a light is shone on them)
Most of the time, the tapetum lucidum is brown. And indeed, reindeer in the summer have deep chocolate eyes. However, in the winter, reindeer eyes change to blue. Not the iris, but the tapetum lucidum, which reflects blue light and makes the eyes many times more sensitive to light to help reindeer see in the darkness. As their pupils dilate for long periods of time in the winter, the pressure inside the eyeball increases and the wavelengths of light being reflected change with it. Too cool!
Reindeer can also see into the UV spectrum, one of the few mammals known to have this ability. This is very useful because, while to us humans the winter in the arctic looks like an endless sea of white, to reindeer, things such as the white of snow and the white fur of an arctic wolf are different in UV. Very important to reindeer who are looking to avoid getting eaten. Reindeer lichen, their favorite food, absorbs UV instead of reflecting it, so Reindeer can see it as dark spots in the snow in addition to sniffing it out.
Another important insulator against the cold is their big, squishy noses. Reindeer have the most boopable snoots, and their noses are completely fur covered. (No, reindeer do not have black dog-like noses, as most other deer do, every Christmas cartoon ever has lied to you. A moist, hairless nose would freeze instantly).
If you look inside the nose of a reindeer, you will find a maze of channels the air has to navigate. Arctic air is very cold and very dry (the colder air is, the less moisture it can hold, which is why its never cold and humid at the same time). When a reindeer breathes in, they don’t want that cold, dry air in their lungs. They’re working very hard to keep their organs warm, after all. So, as air passes through their nasal labyrinth, the air is heated and moisture added so that it doesn’t cold shock their lungs.
And then the opposite happens when they exhale. Have you ever breathed out on a cold day to watch your breathe fog in the air? That’s heat and moisture leaving your body. But when a reindeer breathes out, their nose reabsorbes all that heat and moisture so that the air is cool and dry again once more.
Conserving heat to the brain and internal organs is crucial for any mammal. So, reindeer legs are also designed for that. Their legs are a lower temperature than the rest of their body, and they help keep it that way by having veins that are very close together. Warm blood headed towards the legs heats up the cool blood returning to the heart, so the reindeer doesn’t have to work so hard to keep their core warm.
Reindeer legs are pretty cool in another way. If you ever watch
reindeer walking around, they don’t vocalize much, but you do hear a regular
click click click sound. That is from tendons in the reindeer’s legs. As they
put weight on their hooves, a tendon slips over the bone with a Click! Kind of
like a human cracking their knuckles. These clicking sounds help the herd find
each other in white-out conditions. They are also louder the heavier a reindeer
is, so they are a good way to judge whether another deer is stronger without
having to resort to a fight.
Their legs are pretty awesome in other ways too. Some populations of caribou make the longest migrations of any land mammal. The Porcupine Caribou herd (named after the Porcupine river) migrates 1,500 mi (2,400 km) annually across Northern Canada and Alaska to go from winter feeding grounds to summer calving grounds and back. This herd numbers more than 200,000 animals and can cover miles a day.
(Range of the Porcupine Caribou herd. If the US allows oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it would wipe out a large portion of the herd's calving grounds)
Other populations of Reindeer, like those who live in the forests or in mountainous areas, make smaller seasonal movements in their territory, but Reindeer are always on the move.
This is because of what they eat. Reindeer are one of the few animals that survive primarily on lichen. A curious symbiosis of fungus and algae, lichen can survive in even the harshest environments. Including grow on bare rock, on the bark of trees, and yes. On the arctic tundra.
The favored food of most reindeer is the appropriately named Reindeer Lichen, Cladonia rangiferina. The name is also used for the related Cladonia portentosa. Sometimes also called Reindeer moss, these are both lichens. They grow in fluffy bunches along the ground in boreal forests and on the tundra, and reindeer hoover them up eagerly. However, like most lichens, reindeer lichen grows extremely slowly. Less than half an inch a year. Which means once reindeer graze an area, it can take years for the lichen to re-grow. Reindeer are constantly on the move as a result, eating in one area before moving on to prevent over-grazing all the lichen in one area. In the winter months, reindeer use their large front hooves to dig down through the snow to reach the lichen underneath.
There are also reindeer who live in forests and on mountains, including the Mountain Caribou of the inland rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. In this environment of towering, old growth trees, caribou prefer arboreal lichen. That is, lichen that grows on the limbs of trees. Their favorite are beard lichens (Such as Alectoria sarmentosa and other long, draping arboreal lichens), which hang down from the branches of trees like long beards or curtains. Mountain caribou will actually move downslope in the autumn, then return to high elevations in the winter once the snow is deep enough for them to stand on top of it and reach lichens even higher in the trees.
Of course, reindeer do eat foods other than lichen. Like all deer, they also enjoy the fresh, young buds and leaves of plants. Particularly the fresh leaves of birch trees, which they consume with great relish. Reindeer are also big fans of mushrooms, including, infamously, the Fly Agaric mushroom. Though toxic to humans, it is a favorite treat of reindeer. These mushrooms are also highly hallucinogenic, though it’s unknown whether this actually affects reindeer. (And no, reindeer eating red mushrooms with white dots and going on drug-induced wild trips is not why Santa Claus wears red and white and is pulled by flying reindeer. I’m sorry. You can learn more about the actual origin of Santa in my previous blogposts on his history)
It is the reindeer’s ability to survive on a diet of lichen that has allowed them to expand and thrive in environments too hostile for any other deer species.
Reindeer are also, famously, the only domesticated species of deer. Domestication is a long, complex process in which humans control the breeding of a species of animal over many generations to produce something more suited to their purpose. It is different than taming, which is just habituating an animal to be used to humans. Taming is done to the individual, but domestication is a multi-generation process done to an entire population.
The exact date when an animal was domestication is hard to pin down, but we do know that reindeer are one of the most recent cases of animal domestications. It’s estimated that reindeer domestication started around 3,000 years ago in Siberia. We’re still not sure if these deer then spread across Europe and Asia, or if the Sami people of northern Europe domesticated reindeer independently at the same time.
Originally, reindeer were domesticated for meat and hide. Humans living in the north have survived on hunting reindeer for many thousands of years, and keeping your own herd is easier than hunting them down. Then you have meat for food, and furs for clothing and shelter. But reindeer also make good draft animals. They are used to pull sleighs, of course. People who depend on reindeer must be nomadic, following the deer as they move frequently to new feeding grounds. So, packing up your house and transporting it on reindeer-drawn sleigh is the best way to keep up with the herd on the move.
In parts of Mongolia, the Tsaatan people live in mountainous regions where sleds are not practical, so they instead use saddles on their reindeer. Gear is secured to pack saddles, and the people ride reindeer like horses as well.
Reindeer are smaller than typical horses (people often express surprise at how small actual reindeer are compared to their mental idea of them), but large males can carry a surprising amount of weight.
Though dog sleds, used by many Arctic peoples, is much faster than traveling by reindeer sled, an advantage of reindeer is that you don’t have to feed them. When you stop for the night, you can tie off the reindeer and they will dig up their own food. Reindeer are quite fast for short periods, like many deer, and can hit the speeds of a racehorse in sprints, but cannot keep up those high speeds for extended periods of time like specially bred sled dogs.
Herding reindeer is still a way of life for many indigenous groups of the Eurasian arctic, though the introduction of snowmobiles mean that most families no longer travel with their herds. The Sami, who’s land stretches across the northern portions of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula, are probably the most well known group of traditional reindeer herders.
Though Sami families now live in permanent housing, their reindeer still free range across the landscape. It’s not uncommon to see them traveling the hiking trails of National Parks, hanging out in the middle of the highway, or wandering through people’s yards. But these are not wild deer, they are all owned by someone.
Herders tell their deer apart using earmarks. Every herder has their own unique earmark, a set of notches cut into the ears of the deer. Twice a year, all of the herders in an area get together for a cooperative drive, rounding up all of the reindeer into pens and sorting them out by owner. In the spring, it’s a chance to look over the new calves and give them their earmarks. In the fall, animals are separated out for slaughter.
Reindeer have a harem mating system, like other deer. This means that one male gathers a group of females, and fights off any other males that may attempt to mate with them. A bull reindeer’s antlers are the signal of how fit they are, with the largest rack winning in a showdown. But if no one backs down, then the antlers are used to grapple. Interlocking with eachother, the males will attempt to twist and force the other to the ground.
: Mark Bradley)The mating season, when males go into rut and stop eating in order to focus everything on fighting and mating, occurs in the fall. When winter comes, all of the females are pregnant, to give birth the spring, while the males have expended much of their energy and fat reserves and may struggle to survive the winter.
Because only one male breeds many females, herds can be maintained at a very lopsided ratio. Sometimes 1 male to every 30-60 females. Herders select which bulls will be allowed to breed that year, the others will be slaughtered or castrated. Castrating the males prevents them from entering rut, and thus expending all of their energy each fall, so they are more docile and maintain better body condition. This is more desirable in an animal to be slaughtered, but is also done to sleigh deer. Young males will be chosen for sleigh training, castrated, and then trained to pull sleighs. These days, though, sleigh pulling reindeer are mostly used for tourist rides in Europe.
One of the noticeable unique things about reindeer is that, unlike any other species of deer, both males and females grow antlers. Bull reindeer grow the largest antlers (compared to body size) of any deer, and many females develop pretty massive racks as well. Since antlers are primarily used for signaling and fighting rivals of the same species, why do the females have them too?
Well, it has to do with the harsh environment reindeer have evolved to survive in. During the winter, food is scarce and difficult to find. It’s important for the pregnant females to get plenty of nutrition if they are to have healthy calves in spring. Since deer with antlers are higher in the social structure of the herd than those without, pregnant females with antlers can bully others away from the best feeding sites. The males, having already bred, drop their antlers by midwinter and move down to the bottom of the herd hierarchy.
Reindeer have a single calf in the spring, born after about 230 days of pregnancy. A female reindeer leaves the herd to give birth, finding an isolated place hopefully far from predators. Reindeer calves have soft, dark coats and can stand on their own soon after birth. By the time they are a week old, reindeer calves can outrun any predator.
Just like a cow, reindeer have an udder with four teats, though they only nurse a single calf at a time. Their milk is very rich in fat, helping the calf grow quickly so that they will have the reserves to survive the coming winter after they are weaned. Domestic reindeer are also sometimes milked by their herders, though they have not been bred for milk like modern dairy cattle, so the amount they give is fairly small.
In the spring, as life erupts across the Arctic with the melting of the ice, reindeer are still continuously on the move. Even when food is abundant, the reindeer don’t stay in one place for long. With the melting of the ice also come the biting insects. Mosquitos are infamously large and ravenous in the arctic, along with other blood-sucking bugs, which harass reindeer endlessly. To escape the swarm, reindeer migrate into the wind, since most insects are poor fliers in wind, and will chew their cud while standing on patches of permanent snow and ice where the chill keeps away the insects.
Different populations of reindeer and caribou have different seasonal patterns, from the many-thousand-mile walks of Barren Ground Caribou, to the season up and down movements of Mountain Caribou. They are also different sizes, depending on environment and resources. The largest are the Southern Mountain Caribou of the inland Pacific Northwest, 4 feet tall at the shoulders with weights of 250-over 400 pounds. (1.2meters, 110–210 kg) and are dark in color. At the other end of the spectrum is the Svalbard Reindeer, found only on the Svalbard Islands, who reach 3 feet at the shoulders, and weigh 110 – 200 pounds (1 meter, 53-90 kg). They are also the lightest in color, nearly white with darker grey markings, a feature they share with the almost as tiny Peary Caribou.
Though Reindeer are widespread around the arctic, both domestic and wild populations are facing challenges today. Climate change, and a warming arctic, have caused declines in many tundra species of reindeer. When temperatures are warmer than normal in the winter, layers of snow may thaw during the day before refreezing at night, creating layers of ice. Freezing rain also falls, instead of snow, coating the landscape in ice. Reindeer are well designed for digging through snow to find their lichen food, but have trouble breaking through ice layers, so if the snow frequently melts and refreezes, the reindeer starve.
Woodland and Mountain caribou, who live in the thick forests and up on mountains in the lower reaches of their range in North America, face other issues. Mainly, habitat fragmentation due to logging. These caribou rely on arboreal lichens, which are most abundant in old-growth forests. It can take a patch of forest 100 years to grow enough lichen to support caribou, so logging patches of forest has a strong impact on caribou. These lichens are also very sensitive to air pollution, and won’t reach their full size without clean air. New growth is also attractive to other species of deer (Such as white-tailed deer and Wapiti/ American Elk) who prefer to eat fresh growth. And with other species of deer, come their predators. Caribou rely on remaining at high elevations while other deer retreat lower, because the predators will often also retreat to follow the other deer species. As deer roam higher into the mountains, aided by logged corridors and lower snowpacks, they bring predators with them.
Winter recreation, like snowmobiling and heli-skiing, are also very disturbing to the Mountain Caribou, adding extra stress as they flee from the intrusion. Caribou are now gone from the lower 48 states, except for a small population along the northern border of Washington and Idaho. Non-profits and First Nations groups are seeking to help the Mountain Caribou through initiatives like preserving old growth forest from logging, negotiating areas where snowmobiles and helicopters are banned, and the use of maternity pens. (Multi-acre fenced areas where pregnant caribou can be kept safe from predators and provided food until they give birth. Once the calves are 3-5 weeks old and past the high-risk age, they and their mothers are released). Find out more about how you can help! : https://caribourainforest.org/act-today
Alright, that's all for now! There's more to say about Reindeer and their association with Christmas, but that will have to wait for the next blogpost.
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