{"id":652,"date":"2013-05-16T19:24:19","date_gmt":"2013-05-16T19:24:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/?p=652"},"modified":"2013-05-16T19:26:11","modified_gmt":"2013-05-16T19:26:11","slug":"bring-in-the-reinforcements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/?p=652","title":{"rendered":"Bring in the reinforcements"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s been some recent developments on the muskox front in Sweden. A two-year-old female, Idun, was released into the wild to join the Swedish muskox herd at the beginning of April. She was born at the Myskoxcentrum in 2011 to two parents taken from the Ry\u00f8ya herd in Norway.<\/p>\n

\"Idun<\/a>
Idun running free to join the Swedish muskox herd. Photo from the Myskoxcentrum i H\u00e4rjedalen Facebook page<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Idun’s release is intended to broaden the genetic pool of the herd as well as introduce a breeding female – the females currently in the herd are too old. Five muskox originally migrated across the border with Norway in 1971. Since then, the population has swung up and down, getting to a high of 34 or 35 in the 1980s and at the beginning of this year down to 6. So Idun’s addition, which brings the wild number to 7, is critical for the herd.<\/p>\n

Usually these kind of species reintroduction or population reinforcement projects take place under a species action plan (\u00c5tg\u00e4rdsprogram f\u00f6r hotade arter<\/a>). This is the case, for example, with the white-backed woodpecker I discussed previously<\/a>. But the muskox has no action plan.<\/p>\n

Not that people haven’t tried to get one.\u00a0In 1990, a motion was made in the Swedish\u00a0parliament\u00a0(Riksdag) to investigate opportunities to strengthen the Swedish muskox herd numbers and develop a conservation plan for them. The decision on this motion came as part of a larger statement on Swedish Environmental Politics (1990\/91: JoU30):<\/p>\n

Musk oxen have been extinct for so long\u00a0in Scandinavia that they can no longer be considered as part of\u00a0our natural fauna (‘v\u00e5r naturliga fauna’). However, they are without doubt a particular\u00a0interest in the tourism industry. The existing herd in\u00a0H\u00e4rjedalen is so small that there is a risk of\u00a0degeneration and extinction.\u00a0A strengthening of the herd \u00a0would,\u00a0according to the experts, be costly and cumbersome and take a\u00a0disproportionate share of the available conservation funds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On grounds of the length of time muskox had been gone from Sweden (perhaps as recent as 9 to 10 thousand years ago), it was deemed not natural and thus not worthy of protection given the cost. Thus, nothing was done at the State level to protect the herd.<\/p>\n

In spite of that decision in 1990, another parliamentary\u00a0motion was made in 1999 for basically the same thing. According to the legislative record, it wasn’t acted on, although\u00a0Naturv\u00e5rdsverket actually proposed a species protection plan for muskox in 2000. I have found out that the WWF made an official comment on the proposed plan, which was for the most part in favor of it. But that’s all I can find. It doesn’t appear the plan was approved in final form. An archive visit to Naturv\u00e5rdsverket will be necessary to figure out what really happened, but I can say that the muskox currently has no species action plan.<\/p>\n

Idun’s release–like so many of the other reintroductions I’ve written about on this blog–has been organized from the bottom up. The Myskoxcentrum and the west H\u00e4rjedalen chapter of the Nature Protection Association (Naturskyddsf\u00f6rening) were the financiers of the project. According to the Center’s blog, the J\u00e4mtland county administration and Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Naturv\u00e5rdsverket) were involved, but clearly this was not a top-down project. Just as the beaver reintroduction was spearheaded by interested individuals in J\u00e4mtland with support from like-minded individuals from elsewhere in the country, the muskox reinforcement is being pushed forward by locals with a vested stake in the muskox herd. Whether they want to keep the muskox around for aesthetic, emotional, scientific, or economic reasons really doesn’t matter. They want them to stay, so they’ve sent out the call for reinforcements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s been some recent developments on the muskox front in Sweden. A two-year-old female, Idun, was released into the wild to join the Swedish muskox herd at the beginning of April. She was born at the Myskoxcentrum in 2011 to two parents taken from the Ry\u00f8ya herd in Norway. Idun’s release is intended to broaden the genetic pool of the herd as well as introduce a breeding female – the females currently in the herd are too old. Five muskox originally migrated across the border with Norway in 1971. Since then, the population has swung up and down, getting to a high of 34 or 35 in the 1980s and at the beginning of this year down to 6. So Idun’s addition, which brings the wild number to 7, is critical for the herd. Usually these kind of species reintroduction or population reinforcement projects take place under a species action plan (\u00c5tg\u00e4rdsprogram f\u00f6r hotade arter). This is the case, for example, with the white-backed woodpecker I discussed previously. But the muskox has no action plan. Not that people haven’t tried to get one.\u00a0In 1990, a motion was made in the Swedish\u00a0parliament\u00a0(Riksdag) to investigate opportunities to strengthen the Swedish muskox herd numbers and develop a conservation plan for them. The decision on this motion came as part of a larger statement on Swedish Environmental Politics (1990\/91: JoU30): Musk oxen have been extinct for so long\u00a0in Scandinavia that they can no longer be considered as part of\u00a0our natural fauna (‘v\u00e5r naturliga fauna’). However, they are without doubt a particular\u00a0interest in the tourism industry. The existing herd in\u00a0H\u00e4rjedalen is so small that there is a risk of\u00a0degeneration and extinction.\u00a0A strengthening of the herd \u00a0would,\u00a0according to the experts, be costly and cumbersome and take a\u00a0disproportionate share of the available conservation funds. On grounds of the length of time muskox had been gone from Sweden (perhaps as recent as 9 to 10 thousand years ago), it was deemed not natural and thus not worthy of protection given the cost. Thus, nothing was done at the State level to protect the herd. In spite of that decision in 1990, another parliamentary\u00a0motion was made in 1999 for basically the same thing. According to the legislative record, it wasn’t acted on, although\u00a0Naturv\u00e5rdsverket actually proposed a species protection plan for muskox in 2000. I have found out that the WWF made an official comment on the proposed plan, which was for the most part in favor of it. But that’s all I can find. It doesn’t appear the plan was approved in final form. An archive visit to Naturv\u00e5rdsverket will be necessary to figure out what really happened, but I can say that the muskox currently has no species action plan. Idun’s release–like so many of the other reintroductions I’ve written about on this blog–has been organized from the bottom up. The Myskoxcentrum and the west H\u00e4rjedalen chapter of the Nature Protection Association (Naturskyddsf\u00f6rening) were the financiers of the project. According to the Center’s blog, the J\u00e4mtland county administration and Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Naturv\u00e5rdsverket) were involved, but clearly this was not a top-down project. Just as the beaver reintroduction was spearheaded by interested individuals in J\u00e4mtland with support from like-minded individuals from elsewhere in the country, the muskox reinforcement is being pushed forward by locals with a vested stake in the muskox herd. Whether they want to keep the muskox around for aesthetic, emotional, scientific, or economic reasons really doesn’t matter. They want them to stay, so they’ve sent out the call for reinforcements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-muskox","category-reintroduction-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=652"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":662,"href":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652\/revisions\/662"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dolly.jorgensenweb.net\/nordicnature\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}