Can reindeer swim?

Google will tell you pretty quickly and you’ll also see a cool clip on Youtube from a dude on a boat filming his herd across a body of water.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlJUO5DHcbU

Reindeer are good swimmers and today we’ll find out why and how.

Reindeer have spent millennia migrating across continents to access seasonal pastures. Their habitat grows relatively coarse fodder meaning they must travel vast distances for grazing. These migrations tackle many obstacles and one particularly challenging is water. This water body was often a river but also small sections of ocean between the mainland and an island perhaps. Either way the reindeer needed to swim. And Swim they did. And this is how they do it…

Reindeer have miraculous hooves. Their hooves can be used as snowshoes or spades in the winter for dealing with all that snow and flippers for swimming! Their action is a doggy paddle stroke and I feel we should rename this stroke and call it ‘reindeer paddle’.

We know their fur is hollow trapping air to insulate them from winters’ frosts but did we know this air fill coat also acts as a buoyancy aid! How fantastic is that?!

Manouk’s interpretation of a swimming reindeer

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking yea ok reindeer can cross a river, so can I. I swam across the Spey River once. No, they can really swim. The herds in North America are known for especially large migration routes. These herds swim across huge rivers. The Yukon river flows for over 3000km the Spey just 170km. The Yukon has a volume of 6428 cubic metres per second almost exactly 100 times larger than the Spey. These rivers are big and anything that could swim across would need to be a strong swimmer.

Caribou swimming across the Porcupine river, Yukon.
Photo credit: Niclolas Dory, www.nicolasdory.com

Dave

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Book Now