By Gloria Dickie and Lisi Niesner
OPPDAL, NORWAY (Reuters) – The crate doors open one by one and five Arctic foxes fly out into the snowy landscape.
But in the wilds of southern Norway, newly released foxes may struggle to find food as the effects of climate change make the foxes’ traditional rodent prey even more scarce.
Environmentalists say there hasn’t been a good lemming year since 2021 in Hardangervidda National Park, where foxes were released.
That’s why scientists who breed foxes in captivity maintain more than 30 feeding stations in the mountain wilderness, stocked with dog food kibbles; This is a rare and controversial move in conservation circles.
“What do you do if there is no food for them?” said Craig Jackson, a conservation biologist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, who manages the fox program on behalf of the country’s environmental agency.
This question will become increasingly urgent as climate change and habitat loss push thousands of the world’s species to the brink of survival, disrupting food chains and leaving some animals to starve to death.
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 on landscapes that can no longer sustain them.
Norway has been feeding the population for nearly 20 years, at a cost of around NOK 3.1 million (€275,000) annually, as part of a state-supported program to reintroduce arctic foxes, and has no plans to stop anytime soon.
Since 2006, the program has helped increase the fox population from 40 in Norway, Finland and Sweden to around 550 in Scandinavia today.
With feeding programs, “I’m hopeful that maybe you can push a species above a critical threshold,” said Andrew Derocher, a wildlife biologist at the University of Alberta in Canada who has worked in Arctic Norway but was not involved in the fox program.
But with foxes’ Arctic habitat warming roughly four times faster than the rest of the world, he said: “I’m not sure we’ll get to that point.”
HUNGER PAINS
Feeding animals to ensure the survival of a population (known as “supplementary feeding”) can be controversial.
Most specimens are temporary, providing food for several years to help newly released or relocated animals adapt, such as the Iberian lynx in Spain in the 2000s.
In other cases, governments can help animals in acute danger, such as Florida’s decision to feed lettuce to starving manatees from 2021 to 2023 after agricultural chemical pollution eliminated the seagrass supply.
There are some exceptions. For example, the government of Mongolia has been releasing pellets containing wheat, corn, turnips and carrots for critically endangered Gobi brown bears since 1985.
But for predators that live close to human communities, this can be risky. Croatian biologist Djuro Huber, who advises European governments on the feeding of large carnivores, said bears are known to change their behavior and associate humans with food.
Feeding wild animals can also cause the spread of diseases in the population, as animals congregate around feeding stations where pathogens can spread.
Bjorn Rangbru, senior advisor on threatened species at the Norwegian Environment Agency, said supplementary feeding combined with a breeding program was crucial to increasing Arctic fox numbers in the wild.
“Without these conservation measures, the arctic fox would definitely become extinct in Norway.”
The government has spent NOK 180 million (€15.9 million) on the program so far; This works out to approximately 34,000 Euros for each fox released.
Some of these foxes crossed the Swedish border. Finland saw its first litter of Arctic foxes born in the wild since 1996 after Norwegian scientists released 37 foxes near the Finnish border from 2021 to 2022.
But the program hasn’t even reached half its target of nearly 2,000 wild foxes in Scandinavia; scientists say this is the population size needed to naturally survive low rodent years.
Undecided Foxes
Arctic foxes aren’t the only species in trouble in the Far North. As Arctic sea ice melts, polar bears are rapidly losing hunting habitat. Migrating caribou sometimes arrive at summer pastures only to find that they missed the plant’s blooming because the spring was warmer than normal.
Foxes were nearly driven to extinction in Scandinavia by hunters seeking their winter-white fur, before gaining some reprieve from hunting bans and protections introduced in the 1920s and 1930s.
The arctic fox has since emerged as a symbol of the Far North. It appears in the logos of both the Arctic Council and Swedish outdoor brand Fjallraven.
In Finnish Lapland, the northern lights are called ‘revontulet’, which means ‘fox fire’. According to legend, the lights were ignited by the great fox spirit that swept its tail through the snow and sprayed it into the night sky.
But as rodent populations declined, arctic foxes struggled to recover on their own. It’s been a particularly difficult year for the captive breeding program.
Normally, Jackson and fellow project leader Kristine Ulvund would have about 20 cubs to release. But only four of eight captive-breeding pairs gave birth last spring; two of these subsequently lost all of their offspring.
The resulting nine cubs were raised in a fenced clearing near Oppdal, a remote area about 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of Oslo. Two cubs were kept as part of future breeding efforts. The golden eagles then snatched up two more just weeks before their Feb. 8 release, leaving just five left.
Surviving in the wilderness can be difficult. While the wild population in Norway currently stands at around 300, scientists have bred and released around 470 foxes since the start of the programme. Foxes only live three to four years in the wild.
In addition to avoiding predators, foxes need to hunt enough lemmings to survive the long winters.
Climate change is making this difficult, as rising temperatures cause precipitation to fall more frequently as rain rather than snow. When rain freezes, it can prevent lemmings from entering burrows for their own warmth and breeding.
Rodents’ once reliable population cycles, in which rodent numbers rise and fall regularly at three- to five-year intervals, have become unpredictable, with lower population peaks.
Foxes seem to prefer hunting for themselves. “We will see them pass through the feeding stations with their mouths full of rodents,” said Ulvund; rodents were probably juicier and tastier than dry dog food.
Foxes can only reproduce really well once the rodent population peak is reached, scientists said. But a 2020 study in the Journal of Wildlife Management found that foxes in dens located near feeding stations were more likely to breed successfully than those located further away.
“We need to get the populations to a sustainable level before we stop feeding them,” Ulvund said.
Scientists said that at the current growth rate, it could take another 25 years for the program to reach its target of 2,000 Arctic foxes roaming freely in Scandinavia, provided the foxes’ bellies are kept full.
“We’ve come a long way,” Ulvund said. “But I still think we have a long way to go before we can truly say we’ve saved the species.”
(Reporting by Gloria Dickie in London and Lisi Niesner in Oppdal and Geilo; Editing by Kat Daigle and Daniel Flynn)