When I was a little tad, I remember my grandfathers telling me of the old days, before the Depression, when they both farmed with horses. There were a few pictures around of the beasts: big, strong plow horses with magnificent thick, arched necks, broad chests, and huge hooves made for digging into wet spring soils to pull a plow or a harrow. I always wished I’d seen those amazing animals for myself.
But I also remember, back in those long-ago days, wondering why Santa Claus used reindeer to pull his sleigh when such big, strong beasts were available. Well, it turns out that old Kris Kringle had a good reason; reindeer are in fact perfectly suited for pulling sleighs.
Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center Executive Director Sarah “Howie” Howard says they are biologically engineered for this work.
“They’re just built to pull, and they’re built to handle sleighs and carry all those toys around the world,” Howard said.
The scientific term for Santa’s reindeer is “Saintnicolas Magicalus” and they are similar to the common reindeer found at the conservation center.
Reindeer stand out from other deer species: They have the largest and heaviest antlers of all deer species and have hair completely covering their nose.
Reindeer are also the only cervids (deer) where the females have antlers, although they are smaller than the antlers sported by the males. They are creatures of the far north, a circumpolar animal, meaning that they inhabit all of the far-northern lands from Scandinavia to Alaska to Canada. Our rather larger versions here in Alaska we call caribou, but they are all cold-adapted, and all members of the genus Rangifer.
“That’s really beneficial for when they’re out there in the cold, especially when they’re in high altitudes, flying through the air,” she said. “They need to have hair on their little nose so they don’t get super cold.
As Christmas approaches, keep an ear out for any hooves on the roof. Howard says you’ll know it when you hear it.
“When you hear that up on the rooftop, ‘Click, click, click.’ There are tendons in their feet that actually click,” she said. “You’re going to know when you hear that click, click, click, sound, that Santa is there and you should go back to bed and be quiet.”
Reindeer (and caribou, as we call them here in the Americas) are actually members of the species Rangifer tarandus, and they are interesting animals. An Ice Age leftover, they are superbly cold-adapted. As described, their noses are completely covered with hair, as are the rest of them, and what hair it is! A prime winter caribou pelt is the warmest thing you can wrap around yourself, save perhaps a bison robe. Caribou hair is wonderfully insulated; each hair is hollow, providing millions of tiny vapor barriers, making for fur that is not only warm but light.
Also, reindeer are much friendlier animals than some traditional Christmas beasts I could (and did) name.
Reindeer also play a key role for people living in those high latitudes. They provide food, fur for clothing, and, yes, they pull sleighs. So it comes as no surprise that they were woven into the Santa Claus legend; there’s really no other critter as well-suited to be given some magic dust so that they might not only fly but will pull Santa’s sleigh at the nearly three million miles an hour required to make his Christmas Eve rounds.
Fortunately, Santa is magic, so we don’t have to trouble ourselves about such things. And that’s just as well; given some of the troubles people are having with holiday travel, maybe the airlines should look into getting some of Santa’s magic reindeer.
Kids can track Santa and his reindeer, as always, here.
