By Gloria Dickie and Lisi Niesner
OPPDAL, NORWAY (Reuters) – One by one, the crate doors swing open and five arctic foxes run into the snowy landscape.
But in the wilds of southern Norway, the newly released foxes may struggle to find enough food as the effects of climate change make the foxes’ traditional rodent prey scarcer.
Hardangervidda National Park, where the foxes were released, has not had a good lemming year since 2021, conservationists say.
That’s why scientists who breed the foxes in captivity also maintain more than 30 feeding stations in the alpine wilderness, filled with dog food kibble – a rare and controversial move in conservation circles.
“If the food isn’t there for them, what do you do?” said conservation biologist Craig Jackson of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, which manages the fox program on behalf of the country’s environmental 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 it is inevitable that we will need more feeding programs to prevent extinctions, 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 the Arctic foxes, Norway has been feeding the population for almost two decades, at an annual cost of around NOK 3.1 million (275,000 euros), and there are no plans to stop anytime soon.
Since 2006, the program has helped the fox population rise from just 40 in Norway, Finland and Sweden to around 550 across Scandinavia today.
With feeding programs, “the hope is that maybe you can get a species over a critical threshold,” says wildlife biologist Andrew Derocher of 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 about 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 a population’s survival – known as ‘complementary feeding’ – can be controversial.
Most cases are temporary, providing food for a few years to help newly released or translocated animals adapt, such as the Iberian lynx in Spain in the 2000s.
In other cases, governments could help animals in immediate danger, such as Florida’s decision to feed romaine lettuce to starving manatees between 2021 and 2023 after agrochemical pollution wiped out their supply of seagrass.
There are some exceptions. For example, the Mongolian government has been distributing pellets containing wheat, corn, turnip and carrots for the critically endangered Gobi brown bears since 1985.
But for predators that live close to human communities, that can be risky. Bears are known to change their behavior and can associate humans with food, says Croatian biologist Djuro Huber, who has advised European governments on feeding large carnivores.
Feeding wild animals can also spread disease among the population, as animals congregate around feeding stations where pathogens can spread.
Bjorn Rangbru, senior advisor for endangered species at the Norwegian Environment Agency, said the supplementary feeding – together with the breeding program – was crucial for increasing the number of Arctic foxes in the wild.
“Without these conservation measures, the Arctic fox would certainly have become extinct in Norway.”
The government has spent NOK 180 million (€15.9 million) on the program so far – 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 between 2021 and 2022, Finland saw its first Arctic fox nest born in the wild since 1996.
But the program is not even halfway to its target of around 2,000 wild foxes across Scandinavia, which scientists say is the population size needed to naturally sustain low rodent years.
WICKY FOXES
Arctic foxes aren’t the only species in trouble in the Far North. Polar bears are rapidly losing their hunting habitat as Arctic sea ice melts. Migrating caribou sometimes arrive in summer pastures to find they have missed the plant green due to a warmer than normal spring.
The foxes had been hunted to extinction across Scandinavia by hunters seeking their winter white fur, before being given some respite thanks to hunting bans and protections introduced in the 1920s and 1930s.
The arctic fox has since become a symbol of the Far North. It appears in the logos of both the Arctic Council and the Swedish outdoor brand Fjallraven.
In Finnish Lapland, the Northern Lights are called ‘revontulet’, which means ‘fox fires’. According to legend, the lights were ignited by the spirit of the great fox moving its tail against the snow and spraying it into the night sky.
But now that rodent populations have disappeared, arctic foxes are struggling to recover on their own. And it has been a particularly difficult year for the captive breeding program.
Normally, Jackson and fellow project leader Kristine Ulvund would have released about 20 pups. But of eight captive breeding pairs, only four females gave birth last spring, two of which lost their entire litter.
Nine puppies were eventually raised in the fenced country estate near Oppdal, a remote spot about 400 kilometers north of Oslo. Two puppies were kept as part of future breeding efforts. Just weeks before their release on February 8, the golden eagles took two more, leaving only five.
Surviving in the wilderness can be difficult. While the wild population in Norway now stands at around 300, scientists have bred and released almost 470 foxes since the start of the program. Foxes live only three to four years in the wild.
In addition to avoiding predators, the foxes also have to hunt enough lemmings to survive the long winters.
Climate change makes this difficult, because global warming causes precipitation to fall more often as rain instead of as snow. When that rain freezes, it can prevent lemmings from burrowing into burrows for their own warmth and reproduction.
The rodents’ once-reliable population cycles — where rodent numbers swelled and fell at regular three- to five-year intervals — have become unpredictable and population peaks are lower.
The foxes seem to prefer to hunt themselves. “We will see them passing the feeding stations with their mouths full of rodents,” Ulvund said. The rodents were probably juicier and tastier than dry dog food.
According to the scientists, the foxes still only breed well when there is a peak in the rodent population. But a 2020 study in the Journal of Wildlife Management found that foxes in dens near feeding stations were more likely to breed successfully than foxes further away.
“We need to get populations to sustainable levels before we stop feeding them,” says Ulvund.
At the current growth rate, scientists say it could take another 25 years to reach the program’s target of 2,000 Arctic foxes roaming freely across Scandinavia, provided the foxes’ bellies remain full.
“We have come a long way,” Ulvund said. “But I still think we have a long way to go before we can say we have truly saved the species.”
(Reporting by Gloria Dickie in London and Lisi Niesner in Oppdal and Geilo; Editing by Kat Daigle and Daniel Flynn)