Caribou records concentrate most heavily in Denali National Park’s open tundra and taiga edge, with a second cluster along the North Slope’s coastal plain and scattered reports from Lake Clark and the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. Alaska is essentially the whole US range for this species. Nowhere else in the country holds a resident population.
They’re built for a diet almost no other large mammal can live on: purple saxifrage, polar willow, black crowberry, and Labrador tea, tough, cold-adapted plants scattered across open tundra. Calving is timed tightly to the brief window when that forage becomes available, since newborn calves can’t yet outrun a chasing wolf or bear.
Records here rise sharply through the short arctic summer, peaking from June through September before falling off fast once the season turns. That drop tracks both harder terrain to survey in winter and where caribou concentrate on accessible ground, not a true absence once snow returns.
Full species profile
