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Caevraspace
Hoofed Giants

Tundra, taiga and boreal forest

Reindeer

Rangifer tarandus

Status

Vulnerable

Habitat

Tundra, taiga and boreal forest

Range

Arctic · Europe

Group

Hoofed Giants

The only deer in which both sexes grow antlers.

Both males and females carry antlers, which no other deer does, and the female's are retained through winter — useful for clearing snow from lichen and for defending a feeding crater. The hooves change with the seasons, spreading soft and broad on summer ground and hardening to rimmed edges that cut ice and dig through crust in winter.

The threat now is precipitation as much as temperature. Warming brings rain onto snowpack, which refreezes into a sealed layer of ice the animals cannot break, and herds starve above food they can smell. Add industrial roads and pipelines fragmenting migration corridors and several subpopulations have fallen by more than half in two decades, which is what moved a species numbering in the millions onto the Vulnerable list.

The open shelf

More frames of the reindeer

Streamed live from the Commons Quality Images archive, eighteen at a time. Tap any frame to study it — each remains its photographer’s.

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Where we photograph it

More hoofed giants