Norway’s institute for wildlife research could really claim a “scoop” on Tuesday, when it published video featuring the country’s “Big Four” animals, all captured on the same wildlife camera mounted in the woods of Østerdalen.
Researchers at the institute, known as NINA (Norsk institute for naturforskning) started mounting wildlife cameras several years ago, as a means of charting local animals in the area. You never know who might wander by, unaware that they were being captured on candid camera.
Now one of NINA’s cameras, mounted on a tree south of Rena, has taped all of Norway’s most famous wildlife: a moose, a bear, a wolf and a lynx. Plus some wolverines and few foxes for good measure.
“It’s unusual to see all four of our big wildlife species in the same place,” researcher John Odden of NINA wrote in a text message to Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) this week. “This is one of the few areas in Norway where it can happen.”
And happen it did. The area in eastern Hedmark County, which runs along the border to Sweden, is full of forests and largely untouched wilderness. The spot where the camera was mounted, near a forest road, was also chosen by a local expert from the Norwegian hunting and fishing association (Norsk Jeger og Fiskeforening) in Hedmark, who had observed lots of wildlife in the area himself.
All the pictures and video captured on the camera are sent only to researchers at NINA. Any people who might unwittingly wander into the camera’s field of vision are removed automatically by a data program that only categorizes wildlife.
NINA has a total of nearly 400 cameras mounted in forests and mountains all over the country, mostly to register family groups of lynx, reported NRK.
newsinenglish.no/Nina Berglund
