It was a somewhat strange winter this year with sometimes quite difficult tracking conditions. Cold for a long time without any mild weather, made the snow loose and deep to walk in. Then came the rain!
I got to track all three predators we work with, both wolverine, lynx, and wolf. It was nice! In recent weeks, everything has been about golden eagles. Here, too, the weather has been difficult, gray and hazy instead of sunshine and fresh wind. But I think we will still succeed in the end.
A lynx tracking was unexpectedly exciting. I tracked two lynxes, a female, and her cub. It was wet snow, dense forest, and steep and difficult terrain, just as usual in other words. At one point the tracks led off a steep slope and I followed, unaware that the rock beneath the snow was full of ice. It became a whirlwind trip on the ass.
The journey stopped at a cliff shelf, where even the lynx realized that they could not continue straight ahead. They instead followed a narrow cliff edge up the mountain, far too narrow for me, did not dare to take the same route. For a moment I wondered if I was stuck on the cliff shelf, but I finally managed to scramble up a slope under a windfall.
After several fruitless days behind the wheel of the work’s four-wheel-drive pickup, which is deadly boring when you can’t find any tracks, one day came when I got the most. It started with a tracking of a wolverine during the morning.
The weather alternated between cloudy and sunny, and the temperature was pleasant with a few minus degrees. The tracks pushed on like a train through the terrain, over ridges with sparse forest and along marshes and lakes. The wolverine marked its territory, so I got the DNA samples I needed. It was even up a pine and clawed at the bark, all around the tree and up to between two and three meters high!
Everything flowed perfectly and when I suddenly look up, I see two golden eagles playing in the fresh breeze. I was in our southernmost golden eagle territory, so it was immediately confirmed as active.
Happy for the unexpected golden eagle bonus, I turned for home. About 5 km from our farm, I suddenly found lots of wolf tracks. It turned out to be a pack of 7-8 wolves from Norway, which made a trip into our area. In future, this wolf range will probably be on both sides of the national border.
There was a short tracking as it turned out that they immediately found a moose lying and resting near the road. The hunt was short and efficient. There wasn’t much left of it, even though it hadn’t been that many hours. With such a large pack of hungry wolves, it makes for quite a bloody story.
