A rehabilitation program to save arctic foxes in Norway

Brut America

Preserving arctic foxes in Norway is the mission of this rehabilitation program. A few days ago, 14 of them were released into the wild.   Brut nature went to visit the area in Norway.

Transcript

00:00No, we are in the breeding center for the arctic foxes of Norway.

00:05That is the one of a kind as far as we know in the world.

00:09We have got a lot of foxes back to the nature we have released, more than 400.

00:30Around 2000, it was only a few individuals left in total in Final Scandia, we are talking

00:48about maybe 50 adult individuals.

01:07Then we go to the next enclosure.

01:22Hard snow, a lot of it.

01:26This is the fox food, it's made for the foxes, so they got the right energy level and things

01:33for to produce fur and for the breeding season and making everything that's important for

01:42the fox life.

01:57As you can see, we have an indoor camera, you have the blue or dark one there and you

02:02have the white one.

02:03And we have also some other web cameras that goes on the outside and as you can see on

02:09the screen, we have a lot of wind and snow following until the foxes have read the forecast

02:18and listen to it and stay inside to keep warm and dry.

02:34I have used some days in the last week to collect the foxes and try to take advantage

02:43until when the weather is like so it's possible because when it's windy like this, it's not

02:49possible to trap them because there's no one out.

03:06Now we are going to see the places where we store them temporarily.

03:09This is normally a fox farm that is used for that for a few days.

03:35We are waiting for the veterinarian to have a check on them and check if everything is

03:40okay and with all the papers and things like that before we start the loading and transport.

04:05It's a two day trip.

04:06We are also setting animals out into nature, so we need to be sure that we are giving them

04:11the best start possible.

04:12So we want to make sure they are healthy and what we want to be sure is that we don't take

04:16anything north and put it out in nature with these guys, any sort of contagious disease.

04:22And they look very good to me and what I am doing now is a double check to be sure that

04:27we have the individuals identified correctly because that's also something that we need

04:32to be very careful with when we cross the border that we have all of our foxes identified

04:39and that the paperwork is in order and they look ready to go in my opinion.

04:45So we are done for tonight.

04:47They have gotten their food and their water for the evening so it is just to let them

04:54sleep and we will go in and finish some more paperwork but otherwise we will be up early

05:00in the morning to load them up so they are ready for their trip.

05:21We are loading the trailer with the foxes in these transport boxes.

05:30The foxes are in the window inside these boxes, one for each.

05:39Just doing a final check to make sure they all look ok.

05:50It's going to be some long days of driving the next days.

05:54We have a lot of kilometres to take.

06:00This is Turovian speaking and we are far northeast in Norway to releasing the foxes

06:18and we have 15 degrees below zero and it's almost perfect winter conditions.

06:30I think the foxes are really happy for getting released from the transport the last days.

06:52Goodbye.

07:00We have been releasing in many mountain areas and we have seen that we have managed to re-establish

07:09populations in Togolfjärl, in Finnsa and in other places we have managed to strengthen

07:19the local populations that were very few in numbers.

07:23So the project has been quite successful so far.

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