Norway gives Arctic foxes a helping hand amid climate woes
OPPDAL, NORWAY (Reuters) – One by one, the crate doors swing open and five Arctic foxes bound off into the snowy landscape.
But in the wilds of southern Norway, the newly freed foxes may struggle to find enough to eat, as the impacts of climate change make the foxes’ traditional rodent prey more scarce.
In Hardangervidda National Park, where the foxes have been released, there hasn’t been a good lemming year since 2021, conservationists say.
That’s why scientists breeding the foxes in captivity are also maintaining more than 30 feeding stations across the alpine wilderness stocked with dog food kibble – a rare and controversial step in conservation circles.
“If the food is not there for them, what do you do?” said conservation biologist Craig Jackson of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, which is managing the fox program on behalf of the country’s environment agency.
That question will become increasingly urgent as climate change and habitat loss push thousands of the world’s species to the edge of survival, disrupting food chains and leaving some animals to starve.
While some scientists say it’s inevitable that we’ll need more feeding programs to prevent extinctions, others question whether it makes sense to support animals in landscapes that can no longer sustain them.
As part of the state-sponsored program to restore Arctic foxes, Norway has been feeding the population for nearly 20 years, at an annual cost of around €275,000, and it has no plans to stop anytime soon.
Since 2006, the program has helped to boost the fox population from as few as 40 in Norway, Finland, and Sweden, to around 550 across Scandinavia today.
With feeding programs, “the hope is that you can perhaps get a species over a critical threshold,” said wildlife biologist Andrew Derocher at the University of Alberta in Canada, who has worked in Arctic Norway but is not involved in the fox program.
But with the foxes’ Arctic habitat now warming roughly four times faster than the rest of the world, he said: “I’m not sure we’re going to get to that point.”