I think if the actions hadn't started when they started, it could have been extinct now,
because we saw that many small populations were going extinct as we were monitoring them.
When I started to work on Arctic foxes in Scandinavia just after 2000 it was likely
40 to 80 animals left in Scandinavia.
It was very low. It was critically low.
The Arctic Fox is a small fox.
It's close to the size of a house cat.
I think most of us think of the Arctic fox as the white fox, but in summer they turn to Brown.
They are, of course, cute like all foxes are,
What is special with the Arctic fox, is it's very adapted to the cold.
Having a very thick fur,
and losing very little energy because they have rounded ears and snout.
They could stand starvation for many, many days and live from limited resource availability.
I really love to see them when they are out, especially in the winter, because they are kind of like
air. They jump in a very special way and they look happy.
I am very touched by that.
How they move and how they look and how they cope with these harsh winters.
The Arctic fox was very heavily hunted around late 1800, early 1900.
The fur was it was almost like a year salary for a peasant boy.
So it was very valuable.
The Arctic fox population was protected in 1930, and after that the population has continued to
decline, likely due to that it was very low population when it was protected.
The main problem with climate change is that it's affecting the Arctic fox main prey the lemmings,
because they live in this super-nival space below the snow.
It's very vulnerable to climate changes.
It's a true keystone species, actually, because it's bridging or holding.
So many species in their alpine and tundra ecosystems
We also have the expanse of the red foxes,
Which of the at least the last 30 years has expanded very much into alpine and tundra habitats.
The Red Foxes are the main competitor of Arctic foxes.
We see that Arctic foxes avoid establishing where the density of red foxes is high
and we also see that red foxes could kill both adult and young Arctic foxes.
I think if the actions hadn't started when they started, it could have been extinct now
because we saw that many small populations were going extinct as we were monitoring
them. But in Norway we wanted to try out captive breeding and release of foxes.
So that started in 2005 at first when we started the captive breeding program.
We had them in, in this typical farm situation in the low land,
And then we had no success and then when we moved the station up on the alpine habitat,
it's really it just turned quickly to a very great success.
We had breedings the year after and the year after and the all years to come.
I think all young foxes have a character both in wild and in captivity,And we see that they keep their,
I can say the natural character is still there.
They don't get like typical zoo animals.
They keep their wild nature and they play around.
Some are very bold and some are very shy.
They're always curious.
Foxes are curious.
So. So they come quite close in the fences.
They get some wild carcasses like dead moose or dead deer or a hare or some
birds that are dead.
And of course, some lemmings are coming through the fences.
And we see that they have this stereotypic behavior of hunting mice,
which is very typical for foxes, and they keep that so they don't lose traits or hunting skills.
So we see that they cope with that when they are released in the wild.
Actually the first release I was joining, we were very curious.
It was in the autumn and it was a very nice day with sun,
and it was kind of turning late evening and we had really put the foxes into the den, closing their
entrances
and then we opened the entrances and two of the foxes came out
and it took less than 2 minutes it was having a lemming in its mouth
and then it was kind of, oh yes, this is going to work.
So I think we had never dreamed of that high success of the captive breeding.
I think it's 43% of those that we released that survived to being recruits for the population.
The first population that we released foxes in.
All of a sudden, we got some messages from from our Swedish colleagues
that they had seen blue foxes like in the blue winter fur.
They hadn't had any blue foxes there before.
They realised that they had got some Norwegian teams coming in and that was actually two brothers,
and they established in the Swedish population and contributed to so many new foxes
and that turned out to be a genetic rescue of a very inbred population that was founded on very few
individuals from the start.
They were termed the Blues Brothers because the blue colour, of course.
I mean, the foxes don't see the borders.
And that's what we really have been doing also in Norway, Sweden, Finland,
That we have been working together all the time,
having different projects and programmes that are connected and do different kind of actions in different areas.
We have had the supplemental feeding of the Arctic Foxes and now it's more than 300 feeding stations
altogether in Norway, Sweden, Finland now.
That is meant to kind of boost the population, both in terms of survival and reproduction.
We see that they use these feeding stations more in the years when they are little lemmings compared to years, but are more,
because they prefer the lemmings if they are there.
And that's really a happy feeling for us working so hard to get this population back into a viable population.
All the conservation actions in Fennoscandia is really a success story.
We see now that the population in in Norway is just around 300 and together with Sweden we are close to
500
and the growth rate is still a good growth rate on the population and I think the success is a bit
surprising. I mean, we've been working with this for more than 15 years now.
My estimate is that we have 10, 15 years more to go to reach a viable population,
so we need to get the numbers going up quite much more.
These changes in the climate will affect very many species, if we don't do
anything. So I would hope that we could try to stop it and maybe restore the impact that we have.