Norway’s Arctic fox making a slow, steady comeback

First, the bad news: the Arctic fox is still an endangered species in Norway. Though it is otherwise widespread in the Arctic, the population in Norway, and indeed throughout all of Scandinavia, is so low that without human intervention to reverse the population losses due to overhunting, habitat encroachment and other problems prior generations caused, the species would likely be extinct, despite being granted protected status in 1930. 

At the end of 2021, the number of breeding Arctic foxes in mainland Norway was perhaps just 300, or more than half of the Scandinavian population, according to the most recent survey, published by Nina, an independent nature-research outfit that does work for the Norwegian state.

The good news is that its current status is, in fact, an improvement on the previous assessment, conducted in 2015, which found Arctic foxes to be critically endangered in the wild in Scandinavia, based on surveys that estimated there were fewer than 50 breeding adults.

What happened in the interim is that the benefits of a re-introduction programme begun in 2005 started to pay off. One of the aspects of the effort, a captive-breeding programme, this year saw the release of 25 kits into the wild (pictured above and below), or twice as many as last year. That, combined with the 54 wild litters registered in the 2021 survey, the second highest since re-introduction began, suggests that the effort is indeed working, albeit slowly.

Part of the reason for the slow pace of improvement is that, while the number of litters — which can range in size from three to 16, depending on the availability of rodents that are the main source of food — is on the rise, they need to be in order for the species to overcome a natural mortality rate for kits of 70% or more. Other measures, such as establishment of habitats in the wild and setting out food depots, are designed to improve survival rates, while also luring foxes to spread out across a wider area.

The long-term goal of a sustainable population in Norway and Scandinavia remains realistic, according to Ellen Hambro, the head of the national environmental authority, but she reckons that it is still a long ways off. The real good news, then, is that there will be more good news to come. 

Kevin McGwin, PolarJournal

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