The Swedish fauna (65)

Once upon a time there was a moose standing at a waterhole drinking water. He felt a little solemn and vigorous, looking at himself in the water surface. Suddenly he said: “Well, one is the king of the forest, splendid as I am”. But the moose hadn´t noticed the bear standing beside him. The bear, very calm, said: “What did you say?” The moose somewhat embarrassed, not knowing where to go, answered: “Well, You know, I speak too much when I drink…” Yes, we have bears and moose´s in our fauna, but I don´t think they talk like this. To be serious, our fauna is such as it is in a country that makes much use of its forest. This and the agriculture has done that many species have disappeared from our fauna. But some have returned and are rather numerous, for instance the wild boar (that I´ve described in an other episode) and the wolf. Let us begin in the North. There are reindeer, but they are not wild reindeer, only the Laps tame reindeer. There are wild reindeer in Norway. The reindeer is the only species (deer) where the bull and the cow have antlers. We also have got fox. The red fox, spreading further to the North because of the greenhouse effect, and the arctic fox, that has problems to survive in a warmer climate. The number of arctic foxes varies with the existence of lemmings. The lemming is a little rodent that is very numerous every four year. Then the arctic fox has got a lot of food. But between the periods with lemmings it has to eat carcass from reindeer, killed by wolfs, but since there aren´t so many wolfs it´s short of carcass. In the North we have “brown” bear, moose´s and wolfs. There is moose in the rest of the country too and the wolf is spreading further to the South. We´ve got around 2.500-3.000 bears in Sweden. And they think we have about 200 wolfs. There is a battle between hunters on the one hand and those who want to have many predators of all species on the other hand. The predators eat moose, deer, bucks and reindeer. The hunters chase moose, deer and bucks and the Laps breed reindeer. Here is a conflict. There is also an animal named glutton in the North. They belong to the family mustelidae. This family has got some representatives in our country. The most common is the badger. You very often see it run over in the roads. It´s a nocturnal animal. Very beautiful in black and white. It lives on the ground. The mink is an immigrant from North America. It has escaped from mink farms and is a problem in the nature because it has no enemies here. It lives on the ground and in the water. The marten is an elegant animal but not so common. It feeds on rodents and squirrels and rabbits, birds eggs and insects and berries. To this family belong polecat and otter, which live in the water and are not so common, weasel and ermine. The ermine is the animal the kings had on their collars. It´s its winter coat that is so beautiful, white with a little black on the tail. In the trees lives the squirrel, a little rodent, in older times hunted for its fur. It feeds on nuts and fir seed. It´s very common to see a squirrel with a cone in its paws eating seeds. There is a Swedish song that deals with the squirrel: ”Sitting in the spruce the squirrel peeled its cones when he heard the children he got in a hurry. Jumping from the pines branch hit his little leg – o dear and the long tail very hairy” (I haven´t tried to rime it, maybe I could but it´d take too long time….) The last years we´ve seen the beaver return in the nature. The beaver one doesn´t see very often, but the trees it has cut down one sees more often. When I was a child the hedge hog was very common. Not today. They discuss why it is so. The traffic is partly to blame but also the lack of piles with leaves, where it uses to live during the winter. We used to give them milk and it was very cute with a mother hedge hog that drank milk with its children in the garden. At the coast there are seals. They were very close to extinction as a result of toxins from the agriculture like DDT, because they are animals that eat fish and they get poisoned by this toxin. But now they live a good life and sometimes they annoy the fishermen who say they take fish out of their nets. Well, this was some about the animals in Sweden. Of course, there are other animals too, rabbits, hares and small rodents like rats and mice of different kinds. I leave those to be described by others.