By Peter Jackson  Local Journalism Initiative Reporter THE TELEGRAM When the province’s senior wildlife biologist, Wayne Barney, was asked a few months ago how Labrador’s George River caribou herd was doing, he said the latest survey put the number of animals at 8,100. But that was conducted in 2020. This week, that number has gone down again. The seventh biannual census, conducted in July by Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec and the Nunatsiavut, has the herd at 7,200. That’s an 11 per cent drop since 2020, and a staggering 98 per cent drop since 2001. In releasing the figures, however, the province did see positive signs. “Although overall population size decreased, the adult proportion of the population increased an average of seven per cent per year from 2018 to 2022, which

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