With Christmas just around the corner, Santa’s reindeer are surely getting ready for the big day. But now you don’t have to go to the North Pole to see some animals like them.
The Riverview Park and Zoo in Peterborough, Ont. is home to caribou, which is what reindeer are called in North America.
“We have Margaret and Marley,” said zookeeper Keana Sloos. “They are two of our resident porcupine caribou here at Riverview Park and Zoo. They are both about six and a half years old, so they are still quite young girls.”
Sloos said the pair came from the National Council of Air and Stream, from a northern conservation study, and will now live out the rest of their days at the zoo.
“They can live into their late teens and early 20s, so we have quite a bit of time left with our girls, so we are very happy about that,” she said.
She said that reindeer and caribou are the same animal, but the difference is where they are located.
“That is a question we get all the time and there is an easy way to remember,” Sloos said.
“Caribou are from Canada and reindeer are from Northern Europe and Russia so you can remember ‘C’ for Canada, ‘C’ for caribou.”
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She says the species is well-adapted to the cold weather.
“You can see they have a beautiful silver coat that they have grown over the fall and winter. If you visit us in the summertime, they will be a nice dark brown to blend in with their surroundings,” she said, noting they also have hair on their nose to warm incoming air, which is unusual for deer species.
She said, along with their coats, their antlers also change throughout the year.
“In the summertime, they’ll be covered in what is called velvet, a kind of soft material on their antlers and that allows the blood vessels to grow and allows their antlers to grow,” Sloos said.
“And in the late summer, early fall, they shed that velvet, revealing this beautiful bone antler and come spring, early summer, our girls will drop their antlers and do it all again next year.”
Their diet in the winter consists of vegetation called caribou, or reindeer, lichen.
“It is what caribou sustain themselves on all winter,” she said. “They dig with their hooves and dig up this lichen which is a mix of fungi and algae living symbiotically together.”
Sloos said those hooves are also perfect for walking through the snowy northern landscape.
“They are split into two and it acts as a snowshoe to evenly distribute their weight across the snow and if you hear them walking, they actually make a cool little clicking sound and that is to help them stick together in a herd during blizzards,” she said.
“It is also so caribou can tell if it is another caribou coming or a predator, so it’s a bit of a defence mechanism as well.”
She said people aren’t the only ones with a Christmas list this year. Animals at the zoo — the caribou included — have Amazon wish lists.
“We have foraging items, to use their hooves, use their nose like they would in the wild, so we want them to be able to stimulate their minds and their bodies using those enrichment items,” she said.
She also added the Riverview Park and Zoo is open 365 days a year, so you can even visit on Christmas — unless Marley and Margaret are needed at the North Pole.
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