This year, in the dead of a cold winter, America’s wild reindeer became extinct in the contiguous US

[basquebromance]

"After years of dwindling, the last remaining herd of caribou known to roam between Canada and the Pacific Northwest states of Idaho and Washington was down to just one known member. In January, wildlife managers in British Columbia captured the female and put her in a pen, where they hope she will have a better shot at survival than alone in the snowy wilderness. For the foreseeable future, the capture put an end to the Selkirk herd in the wild, which was already what biologists consider “functionally extirpated.” The herd was one of 15 isolated subpopulations of a broader group known as southern mountain caribou, which, as their name indicates, live in different landscape from the robust northern tundra herds. All 15 are shrinking, mostly because of human development that fatally altered their habitat."

source: the washington post