On a frigid day last January, government biologist Leo DeGroot led a team deep into the southern Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia on a rescue mission. Between 2017 and 2018, the mountain caribou herd native to these rugged mountains had dwindled to just two cows. DeGroot and his team set out to save the animals, part of a two-stage plan that included capturing four others—two bulls and two cows—from the equally imperiled South Purcell herd, which had experienced a precipitous drop from 60 animals in the early 1990s to just four last year. “These animals had no future. The herds are extirpated, functionally extinct,” DeGroot said from his office in Nelson, on the west arm of Kootenay Lake between the Selkirk and Purcell Mountains. | 
