Reindeer

Updated on September 7, 2026. Confirm every herd count and listing on the agency page linked in the table. This is a plain-English species profile, not a harvest proclamation.

Reindeer and caribou are one species, Rangifer tarandus. They are the only deer in which females routinely grow antlers, and they live on Arctic tundra and northern forests from Alaska to Siberia. Wild North American animals are called caribou; Eurasian and domesticated animals are called reindeer.

This page is the encyclopedia entry. The family index is deer species. The naming split lives on caribou vs reindeer. The “is a reindeer even a deer” question is deer vs reindeer. Size, diet, migration, and the Christmas antler calendar have their own child pages; this profile points down instead of swallowing them.

Reindeer facts

Fact	Figure	Source
Scientific name	Rangifer tarandus. One species. “Reindeer” in Eurasia; “caribou” for wild animals in North America. In Alaska and Canada, only domesticated animals are called reindeer.	ADF&G, Caribou hunting — life history
Size (Alaska)	Adult bulls average 350–400 lb (159–182 kg); some recorded to 700 lb (318 kg). Mature females 175–225 lb (80–120 kg). Newborns average about 13 lb (6 kg).	ADF&G; ADF&G wildlife notebook (PDF)
Denali field size	About 4 ft at the shoulder, 8 ft long, 130 to more than 350 lb. Fully mature bulls 400–600 lb; antlers 3–5 ft along the beam. Calves brown, unspotted.	NPS Denali, Caribou; NPS, Denali caribou herd
Antlers	Both sexes grow them — unique among deer. Bull racks massive; cow racks smaller and spindly. Relative to body size, the largest antlers in the deer family.	ADF&G; USGS, wild reindeer
Alaska herds	32 herds totaling about 950,000 animals, including herds shared with Yukon. People harvest about 22,000 caribou a year in Alaska.	ADF&G
Porcupine herd	July 2025 photocensus: 143,000. Down from 218,000 in 2017 (the herd’s high since monitoring began in the 1970s).	ADF&G photocensus release, Jan. 7, 2026 (PDF)
Western Arctic herd	Peaked at 490,000 in 2003. NOAA (2024) reports a 70% decline from that peak. The herd calves and summers inland; communities have watched summer snow patches shrink, removing insect refuge.	NOAA Arctic Report Card 2024
Global listing	IUCN Vulnerable (A2a), 2016. Observed ~40% decline over three generations, from about 4.8 million to 2.89 million.	IUCN, Gunn 2016
Tundra herds	Arctic migratory tundra caribou declined 65% over 2–3 decades, from 5.5 million to 1.88 million. Inland giants (Taimyr, Bathurst, George River, Qamanirjuaq, Western Arctic) have not recovered.	NOAA Arctic Report Card 2024
Boreal woodland caribou	Threatened under Canada’s Species at Risk Act since 2003 (reconfirmed 2014). COSEWIC put the Canadian population at about 33,000–34,000 in 51 ranges — not a 385,000-animal “woodland herd.”	Government of Canada, Caribou
CWD	First natural CWD in reindeer worldwide: a free-ranging cow in Norway’s Nordfjella mountains, March 2016. That Nordfjella Zone 1 herd was later culled. See CWD symptoms.	Norwegian Veterinary Institute
Reproduction	Rut late September–October. Gestation 225–235 days. Calves mid-May to early June. Cows usually first breed around 2.5 years. One calf is the rule.	NPS Denali
Lifespan	Denali cows can live about 20 years; few bulls live past 9. The rut costs bulls about one-third of their body mass in 3–4 weeks of not eating.	NPS, Denali caribou herd

How to tell a reindeer from a moose or an elk

A reindeer is a medium-to-large deer with a deep chest, relatively short legs, a small tail, and a muzzle covered in hair. In late fall the coat is clove-brown with a white neck, rump, and feet, often with a pale flank stripe. The print is the widest, roundest hoof in the deer family — a snowshoe on land and a paddle in water.

The animal people mix it with on the tundra is a moose. A moose is taller, solitary, and carries palmate (paddle) antlers on bulls only, plus a dewlap. A reindeer is a herd animal. Both sexes can carry antlers. Side-by-side: moose vs caribou.

An elk (wapiti) is a meadow grazer with a bugle and branched antlers on bulls only. Elk and reindeer barely share a landscape in North America. A white-tailed deer flags a long tail and lives in woods and suburbs, not on calving grounds above treeline. A mule deer is the western mountain deer with a black-tipped rope tail. None of those three grow antlers on the females as a normal rule.

Two other field marks you will not get from a whitetail: calves are brown and unspotted, and walking animals often click. Denali’s sound station recorded tendons snapping past sesamoid bones in the foot — a herd you cannot see can still be heard.

Range: circumpolar, not one giant herd

Range is circumpolar: arctic and subarctic tundra, mountain tundra, and northern boreal forest across Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia, and Siberia. The map of where caribou live is the geography child. What this page needs to say is that “the reindeer” is many herds with different calendars, not one animal that always migrates a thousand miles.

Barren-ground / Grant’s caribou (R. t. granti in Alaska) are the big migratory tundra animals. Woodland caribou (R. t. caribou) live in the boreal forest, stay in smaller groups, and do not form the postcard herds. Peary caribou (R. t. pearyi) are the small, pale High Arctic island form. Eurasian subspecies include the European tundra reindeer, Finnish forest reindeer, and the short-legged Svalbard reindeer. ADF&G lists seven subspecies worldwide; Alaska holds only the barren-ground form.

The old encyclopedia line that “the Boreal Woodland Caribou” numbers 28,000 to 385,000 mixed two different animals. Woodland caribou in Canada are a Threatened designatable unit of tens of thousands. The huge swings belong to barren-ground herds such as George River and Qamanirjuaq. If a number cannot wear a herd name, it does not belong here.

Not every herd migrates. Many woodland and mountain populations are sedentary or make short seasonal shifts. The famous circuits — Porcupine between the Yukon and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Western Arctic across northwest Alaska — are the subject of caribou migration. Insects push animals onto windy, open ground in summer. Winter range is often lichen woodland south of the calving grounds.

Diet by season

This is a lichen specialist in winter and a green-plant generalist in summer. USGS puts it plainly: in winter, lichens are the food they seek most, with shrubs and grasses or sedges filling the rest. On alpine and Arctic tundra that lichen is the low mat people still call reindeer moss. In summer the menu opens to forbs, sedges, grasses, and the leaves of willow and birch. The full seasonal list is what caribou eat; the family diet hub is what do deer eat.

ADF&G notes the gut contents in the scat: dry winter pellets from fibrous shrubs, wet summer clumps from lush forage. Ice is the winter killer. NOAA’s 2024 Arctic Report Card records a midwinter rain-on-snow event on the Western Arctic herd’s range in December 2005 that locked forage under ice; cow survival fell to 70 percent that year. A warmer fall raises the odds of those ice lids. That is climate as a grocery problem, not a slogan.

Reproduction

The rut is late September through October. Bulls spar antler-to-antler, then rear and strike with the front hooves. Locked antlers can kill both animals; injuries are otherwise uncommon. Cows usually first breed around 2.5 years. Gestation is 225–235 days. Calves hit the ground in a tight window, mid-May to early June, on traditional calving grounds with fewer predators than winter range. A baby caribou is a calf, not a fawn, in northern English.

USGS biologists weighing newborns in Denali get about 17 lb on average. ADF&G’s statewide notebook uses about 13 lb. Either way, a calf can stand and follow within hours. In small herds such as Denali, wolves and grizzly bears take more than half of the calves in the first two weeks. In the large migratory herds, a ten-day pulse of births swamps local predators and early survival is higher. One calf is the rule. Twins are not the white-tailed-deer pattern.

Denali bulls at peak condition weigh about 500 lb before the rut, then starve themselves for three to four weeks of fighting and breeding and drop about a third of that mass. Annual survival for those mature bulls falls to about 78 percent. Very few live past nine. Cows hold about 90 percent annual survival and can reach 20 years. That is why a winter herd looks like cows, calves, and a thin scatter of young bulls.

Antler cycle

Both sexes grow antlers. That is the species fact. Why the cows keep them through winter, and why Santa’s team is probably female (or castrated), is the child page: do female reindeer have antlers. The short version for this profile: bulls use the rack in the rut and drop it in late fall. Pregnant cows keep theirs into spring and use them to hold feeding craters against antlerless bulls. Calves of both sexes can grow small spikes in their first summer.

Bull beams sweep back, then forward, often with a flattened shovel near the end. Cow racks are smaller and simpler. Velvet comes off before the rut; a new set starts after the old one drops. Svalbard cows are the honest exception: a share of that island population grows no antlers at all. Nutrition and body condition decide more than a calendar date.

Predators, insects, and disease

Wolves and grizzly bears take calves first, then weakened adults. Golden eagles hit newborns on open calving grounds. Wolverines scavenge and take calves. In Denali, where the herd is unhunted and predators are intact, early calf survival has been the limiter for decades — the herd fell to about 1,000 in the 1970s and sits near 1,760 in the park’s last published figure on that page.

Insects are not a footnote. Warble flies and nose bots lay eggs on the animal; mosquitoes and black flies drive summer movements onto snow patches and windy ridges. NOAA notes that Western Arctic communities have watched summer snow patches shrink, which removes a traditional insect refuge.

Chronic wasting disease reached wild reindeer in March 2016: a free-ranging cow in Nordfjella, Norway, the first natural CWD infection in reindeer anywhere. Norway later culled that Zone 1 population. North American caribou have not had a parallel outbreak; the disease in deer country is still a whitetail and mule deer problem. Symptoms and testing belong on CWD deer symptoms. The species is also on the endangered deer species list as Vulnerable, not because every herd is gone, but because the global trend is down.

People: herders, hunters, and Christmas

Reindeer are the only truly domesticated deer. Sámi, Nenets, and other Arctic peoples have herded them for meat, hides, milk, and transport for thousands of years. In North America the wild animal was never domesticated the same way. Gwich’in, Inuit, Iñupiat, and many other nations still organize the year around caribou. Alaska’s 22,000-animal annual harvest is mostly subsistence, not a Lower-48 trophy circuit.

If you came here from a hunt search: the deer hunt in Alaska is Sitka blacktail, covered on Alaska deer hunting. Caribou is a separate ADF&G hunt with herd-specific seasons and, in declining herds, tighter cow harvest. Do not treat this profile as a tag chart. Buy nothing until you read the current unit page on ADF&G.

The Christmas animal is this species. Clement Clarke Moore put eight of them on a sleigh in 1823. The red-nose question — nasal turbinates that warm air, which show up hot on a thermal camera — is do reindeer have red noses. They do not fly. They do click, swim rivers on migration, and outrun a person on the tundra; speed numbers live on how fast can caribou run. Body-size detail is on how big is a caribou.

Three comparisons that actually change a decision

Caribou vs reindeer. Same species. The useful split is geography plus domestication, not two Latin names. Start at caribou vs reindeer.

Reindeer vs “a deer.” All reindeer are deer. Most deer are not reindeer. Female antlers, a hairy muzzle, and a circumpolar tundra range are the three tells. Full side-by-side: deer vs reindeer.

Caribou vs moose. If you are standing in Alaska or Yukon and the animal is huge, palmate, and alone in a willow swamp, it is a moose. If it is in a line of brown backs on open tundra, it is a caribou. Moose vs caribou holds the table.

FAQ

Are reindeer and caribou the same animal?

Yes. One species, Rangifer tarandus. English uses “reindeer” in Europe and Asia and for domesticated animals everywhere, including Alaska. “Caribou” is the North American wild animal. Differences in size and migration are real between herds and between wild and domestic stock. They are not two species.

Do female reindeer have antlers?

Yes, in most populations. It is the only deer species where that is normal. Cows keep the antlers through winter; bulls drop theirs after the rut. The Christmas and castrated-male caveats are on do female reindeer have antlers.

How big is a reindeer?

In Alaska, a typical bull is 350–400 lb and a typical cow is 175–225 lb. Denali’s fully mature bulls reach 400–600 lb. High-Arctic island forms run smaller; interior and southern herds run larger. A 400-lb caribou dresses about 240 lb and yields about 100 lb of meat, per ADF&G. More on how big is a caribou.

What do reindeer eat in winter?

Mostly terrestrial lichens, plus shrubs and dried grasses or sedges they crater out of the snow. Summer is green plants. Ice layers after rain-on-snow can lock that winter food away. The seasonal menu is what caribou eat.

Are reindeer endangered?

The species is IUCN Vulnerable because of a roughly 40% drop over three generations. That is not the same as “about to vanish.” Some herds are stable or recovering; several of the old inland giants are still down. Canada’s boreal woodland caribou is Threatened. Check the herd, not the Santa cartoon.

Can you hunt caribou in Alaska?

Yes, where ADF&G and federal subsistence boards still allow it, on a herd-by-herd basis. Statewide harvest averages about 22,000 animals a year. Declining herds have tighter rules, especially on cows. The Sitka blacktail hunt is a different animal and a different page: Alaska deer hunting.

Sources

• Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Caribou hunting — life history. Last checked September 7, 2026.
• Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Caribou, wildlife notebook series (PDF).
• Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Porcupine and Central Arctic photocensus, January 7, 2026 (PDF).
• National Park Service. Denali National Park, Caribou.
• National Park Service. Population dynamics of the Denali Caribou Herd.
• U.S. Geological Survey. The other 364 days of the year: the real lives of wild reindeer.
• Gunn, A. 2016. Rangifer tarandus. IUCN Red List. Vulnerable A2a.
• Gunn, A. et al. 2024. Migratory tundra caribou in a warmer climate. NOAA Arctic Report Card 2024. DOI: 10.25923/qn4a-td90.
• Environment and Climate Change Canada. Caribou in Canada. Boreal population listed Threatened under SARA.
• Norwegian Veterinary Institute. First detection of CWD in Europe (wild reindeer, Nordfjella, 2016).

Related reading

• Deer species hub
• Caribou vs reindeer
• Deer vs reindeer
• Moose vs caribou
• Moose · Elk · White-tailed deer
• Do female reindeer have antlers?
• Do reindeer have red noses?

Updated on September 7, 2026.