The Saga of the Reindeer of South Georgia Island
Reindeer and penguins are both at home in snowy expanses, but they’re not supposed to be together. After all, reindeer live in the Northern Hemisphere, penguins in the Southern. Yet for some 100 years, a split second in their natural histories, they shared an island. Their unlikely coexistence seemed “quite peaceful,” says Carl Erik Kilander, who first saw them together in 2004. “They did not seem to pay much attention to each other.” It didn’t end quite so peacefully.
Far out in the South Atlantic Ocean, more than 1,000 miles east of Cape Horn, Argentina, the island of South Georgia is an unforgiving place. Glaciers cover much of the land, and gales pound the jagged coast. This was the place where north and south ended up together.
For decades, no one knew how many reindeer roamed on South Georgia. In 2012, when Kilander, a Norwegian naturalist with experience in reindeer management, trekked through the island’s steep terrain to find out, he and his colleagues counted around 2,000, and guessed there was another 1,000 they missed. Later, they found out that the island had harbored more than twice that number. But by then, almost all of them were dead.
