While hangout out in Whitehorse, I visited the Yukon Wildlife Preserve. It’s actually around 30 minutes north of Whitehorse, real close to Bean North Coffee Roasters, how convenient!!
The wildlife preserve offers bus tours or you can walk the 5 km route through it on your own. I did the bus tour and while I enjoyed it, if I had known ahead of time what the area looked like, I probably would have walked it instead. Although it was real hot outside this day, so maybe the bus was better!
This preserve takes in injured or orphaned wildlife and nurses it back to health. It is then released back into the wild if possible, or if not it then it stays and lives at the preserve. Apparently there is a lynx living here that only has three legs after getting one caught in a trap, so it can’t hunt properly anymore.
Some friendly elk at the beginning, near the reception cabin:
And here’s someone coming to investigate us:
Good ol’ deer:
A muskox and its prairie dog friend:
Lots of sheep! These guys were difficult to capture without the fence in view. Funny how their enclosure is HUGE (all that stuff in the background is theirs including the hill) yet they sit right here by the fence where you could reach out and touch them, except that’s not allowed of course:
So many of these guys were just chillin’ by the fence. Maybe it has something to do with their food trough being nearby, who knows…
Caribou… Apparently both males and females can have antlers:
Goats!
This hilly picture below is just a small area of what the goats and sheep have access to:
Some of the enclosures contained wildlife that were not visible while I was there. There were lynx, red fox, and arctic fox. There was also a huge area for bison which we saw a herd of, but they seemed to be in exactly the middle of their meadow which was very far away and made it difficult to capture a picture. The moose was similar, far away. There was a summer camp or something with kids that had closer access into the enclosure, so the moose was more interested in them. We had to watch from afar!
More about the Yukon Wildlife Preserve: yukonwildlife.ca
