1 |Beyond Donner and BlitzenOnly Santa’s reindeer are “tiny” and have “little” hooves. All the rest are large (occasionally reaching 600 pounds) with huge, paddle-shaped hooves useful for shoveling away deep snow to uncover lichens (a winter staple) and for swimming during migrations that are under way now and can cover 1,600 miles in a single year. No other land mammal moves this far. Migrating reindeer (also called caribou) indeed “prance,” especially when pursued by wolves, but not all migrations are triggered by falling and rising temperatures or shrinking and expanding daylight. When mosquitoes swarm over the tundra a reindeer can lose a pint of blood in 48 hours. To escape these and other biting insects herds will move to windy hilltops or snow and ice fields. Reindeer have a circumpolar, mostly Arctic and sub-Arctic range. But that range is shrinking. While they still abound in Alaska, they’ve been extirpated from New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont...