REINDEER GRAZING INVESTIGATIONS IN ALASKA 35 
Reindeer have been successfully fed grain and hay with other 
cultivated crops, and lichens are found not to be essential to their 
maintenance. As a ready source of food, lichens will continue to 
be the chief sustenance of the herds, however, and are what make 
reindeer grazing possible in Alaska. Studies will be continued to 
determine the effect of a varied diet on meat quality. 
Grazing in Alaska is tending toward permanent ranches with 
natural boundaries, each grazing unit having its own summer and 
winter ranges. Under a fixed-allotment system open herding is 
found more practicable than the close herding introduced by the 
Lapps. 
Coastal, interior, and intermediate range belts have been studied 
with a view to establishing for each unit definite summer and winter 
grazing areas. As forage is likely to be trampled in wet tundras, 
and growth reduced on rocky areas, the carrying capacity is greater 
on the dry-tundra type of range. 
Timbered ranges have an advantage over the treeless in that they 
afford shelter to herds and herders and supply fuel and materials 
for cabin, corral, and fence construction. On many allotments two 
or more herders' cabins are needed, and boundary and drift fences 
are considered practicable. 
As regards range belts and types, the main forage cover on winter 
ranges consists of lichens — on the coast range with a sedge-browse 
subtype, and on the interior ranges a browse subtype; on summer 
coast ranges a sedge-browse forage predominates, and in the in- 
terior a browse-sedge-lichen type. 
Lichens are seldom present in pure stand, their average propor- 
tion in the total cover on winter ranges being about 50 per cent, the 
remainder consisting of a varying admixture of browse, sedges, and 
mosses. The most abundant of the lichens are those of the genus 
Cladonia, with Cetraria second in importance. 
To determine the reaction of lichens to grazing, quadrat studies 
have been begun on the range, and the results reached indicate a rapid 
rate of establishment of new plants after denudation, depending 
upon moisture, but a slow recovery to normal stand. One denuded 
area regained 50 per cent of its former stand in four years, and it is 
indicated that the normal vegetative stand, including other growth, 
should be reached in 7 to 10 years after denudation, but 15 to 20 years 
seem required to attain a normal lichen height of 4 or 5 inches, ex- 
cept in rocky areas, where recovery might take as long as 25 or 30 
years. Such slow recovery makes evident the necessity of extin- 
guishing and preventing range fires, of limiting the stocking of an 
area to its carrying capacity, and of carefully protecting winter 
ranges. 
Winter grazing requires a greater acreage per head than summer. 
Yearlong, from 40 to 60 acres for one reindeer is indicated — 10 or 
15 for summer and 30 to 45 for winter grazing. About Norton 
Sound the acreage per animal is 40 to 45, and farther north 50 to 
60. These figures furnish a basis for determining the future carry- 
ing capacity of definitely marked areas. The areas available to 
grazing in Alaska should ultimately support 3,000.000 reindeer, a 
third of this number on the coast section now occupied. 
