Back a few months ago, a family member forwarded me a Canadian Press news release which focused on northern caribou, the primary topic on the agenda of scientists from around the world who were meeting in Yellowknife.

I was skimming through the article when a friend popped into the office to chat about an upcoming moose hunt, so I printed the emailed article and tossed it on my desk amongst several other papers. Only recently, as I was flipping through the three-inch pile of notes, trying to tidy up, did I finally get to read the whole story.

What the report stated came as somewhat of a surprise and I couldn’t help but compare the situation in that part of the country with ours here, both on the island and in Labrador, where caribou populations have plummeted and hunting restrictions have been put in place.

First a little background: In 2009, nine of Canada’s 11 northern herds were considered to be in decline. Biologists estimated the Bathurst population on the central barrens had fallen to 32,000 from more than 120,000 just three years earlier; a 75 per cent drop.

Preliminary surveys in 2010 and 2011, however, indicate the herd, as well as the Bluenose East herd, have stabilized or increased, with numbers in the Bluenose herd back up over 100,000 animals. Jan Adamczewski, a biologist with the NWT government, said “the situation overall is looking a lot brighter than it did two years ago... it kind of looks like maybe we’ve turned the corner there.”

So how, you ask, did this happen?

Surprisingly - to me at least - biologists have no doubt it was through hunting restrictions. Yes, hunting restrictions.

Climate change and industrial development have been blamed for some of the decline, but the two biggest factors contributing to the rebound were calf survival and hunting. Good weather for the last couple of years has decreased calf mortality, but Adamczewski pointed out that all the recovering herds have one factor in common - hunting restrictions.

Adamczewski and three co-authors of a recently-published paper estimated the annual aboriginal harvest from the Bathurst herd alone was between 4,000 and 7,000 animals, mostly females.

Resistance to the region’s first-ever hunting controls was strong, with aboriginal groups taking the government to court and outfitters taking their own legal action. But in the end, most of the caribou management boards, composed of government and aboriginal representatives, brought in restrictions.

Tough decisions had to be made, Adamczewski said, because an uncontrolled harvest, with hunters using modern high-powered rifles, snowmobiles and GPS systems, had become one of the biggest factors in the way of a recovery.

Caribou populations have always fluctuated, he added, but “in the later stages of the decline, the harvest did start to accelerate the decline...

“When you look at how quickly things changed once the harvest was either closed or severely restricted,” he said, “the proof is right there.”