by By Gloria Dickie and Lisi Niesner
OPPAL, Norway (Reuters) – One by one, the crate doors swung open as five Arctic foxes entered the snowy landscape.
But in the wilds of southern Norway, the newly liberated foxes may find it difficult to find enough to eat, as the effects of climate change make the foxes’ traditional rodent prey scarcer.
In the Hardangervidda National Park, where the foxes were released, there has not been a good lemming year since 2021, according to conservationists.
That’s why scientists breeding the foxes in captivity are also maintaining more than 30 feeding stations across the alpine wilderness stocking them 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 from 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 brink of survival, disrupting food chains and leaving some animals to starve.
While some scientists say we will inevitably need more feeding programs to prevent extinction, others question whether it makes sense to support animals in landscapes that can no longer support them.
As part of the state-sponsored program to restore Arctic foxes, Norway has been feeding the population for almost 20 years, at an annual cost of around NOK 3.1 million (€275,000) and has no plans to stop anytime soon .
Since 2006, the program has helped to increase 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 maybe get a species above a critical threshold,” said wildlife biologist Andrew Derocher at the University of Alberta in Canada, who has worked in Arctic Norway but is not affiliated with the fox program.
But with the foxes’ Arctic habitat warming around four times faster than the rest of the world, he said: “I’m not sure we’re going to get to that point”.
Hunger Pains
Feeding animals to ensure the survival of a population — known as “supplementary feeding” — can be controversial.
Most cases are temporary, providing food for a few years to help newly released or resettled animals adapt, such as the Iberian lynx in Spain during the 2000s.
In other cases, governments could help animals in dire straits, such as Florida’s decision to feed starving manatees romaine lettuce from 2021 to 2023 after agrochemical pollution depleted their grazing supply.
There are some exceptions. The Mongolian government, for example, has been putting out pellets containing wheat, corn, turnips and carrots for the critically endangered Gobi brown bears since 1985.
But for predators that live close to human communities, that can be dangerous. Bears are known to change their behavior and can associate people with food, said Croatian biologist Djuro Huber, who has advised European governments on feeding large carnivores.
Feeding wild animals can also spread disease in the community, as animals congregate around feeding stations where pathogens can spread.
Bjorn Rangbru, a senior adviser on threatened species at the Norwegian Environment Agency, said that the supplementary feeding – along with the breeding program – was key to increasing the number of Arctic foxes in the wild.
“Without these conservation measures, the arctic fox would almost certainly have disappeared in Norway”.
So far the government has spent NOK 180 million (€15.9 million) on the program – or about €34,000 for each fox released.
Some of those foxes have crossed the Swedish border. After Norwegian scientists released 37 foxes near the Finnish border from 2021 to 2022, Finland’s first Arctic fox litter was born since 1996.
But the program is not even halfway to the target of around 2,000 wild foxes across Scandinavia, which scientists say is the population size needed to naturally withstand small rodent years.
FICKLE foxes
Arctic foxes are not the only species in trouble in the Far North. Polar bears are rapidly losing their hunting habitat as the Arctic sea ice melts. Sometimes migrating caribou come onto a summer pasture only to find they missed the green-up plant due to a warmer than usual spring.
Foxes were almost extinct across Scandinavia by hunters looking for their white winter fur, before they got some help in 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 for both the Arctic Council and Swedish outdoor brand Fjallraven.
In Finnish Lapland, the northern lights are called ‘revontulet’, which means ‘fox fires’. The old story says that the big fox lit the lights by brushing his tail against the snow and spraying it up into the night sky.
But as the rodent population has fallen, Arctic foxes are struggling to recover on their own. And it was a particularly tough year for the captive breeding program.
Normally, Jackson and her project co-leader Kristine Ulvund would have around 20 cubs to release. But of the eight breeding pairs in captivity, only four females were born last spring – and two of them lost their entire litters there.
Nine cubs were eventually raised in the open-air enclosure near Oppdal, a remote location about 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of Oslo. Two cubs were kept to be part of future breeding efforts. The golden eagle then flew for another two weeks before being released on February 8, leaving only five.
Living in the desert can be tough. Although there are now about 300 wild populations in Norway, scientists have bred and released nearly 470 foxes since the program began. Foxes only live three or four years in the wild.
Besides avoiding predators, the foxes have to hunt enough lemmings to make it through the long winter.
This is exacerbated by climate change, as warming temperatures cause precipitation to fall more often as rain instead of snow. When that rain freezes, it can prevent the lemmings from burrowing into burrows for their own warmth and reproduction.
The once reliable population cycles of the rodents – in which rodent numbers rise and fall in regular three to five year periods – are now unpredictable and population peaks are lower.
Foxes seem to prefer to hunt for themselves. “We’ll see them pass the feeding stations with a mouth full of rodents,” said Ulvund – the rodents are probably juicier and tastier than dry dog kibble.
The scientists said the foxes don’t breed very well even when the rodent population is at its peak. But a 2020 study in the Journal of Wildlife Management found that foxes in pits located near the feeding stations are more likely to breed successfully than those further away.
“We need to get the populations up to a sustainable level before we stop feeding them,” said Ulvund.
At the current rate of growth, scientists said it could take another 25 years to reach the program’s goal of 2,000 Arctic foxes running free through Scandinavia – provided the foxes’ bellies are kept full.
“We have come a long way,” said Ulvund. “But I still think we have some way to go before we can say we’ve really saved the species.”
(Reporting by Gloria Dickie in London and Lisi Niesner in Oppdal and Geilo; Editing by Kat Daigle and Daniel Flynn)
