The Westfjord association of tourism helds a conference on Environmental Certification for Westfjords, Saturday, April 17th. The conference is held in connection to the head meeting of the association. The conference is held at Hotel Nupur in Dyrafjordur and begins at 11.00. It is open for everyone but all material is in Icelandic, amongst speakers is the Icelandic Minster of Environment, Svandís Svavarsdóttir.
Of course The Arctic Fox Centre takes active part at the conference and we look forward to listen to interesting talks and share interest with other people. We encourage everyone to show up.
The schedule of the conference is found at the association´s web page: www.vestfirskferdamal.is

Yesterday, our helpers arrived again to work at the house in Eyrardalur.
It was Alan, Astrid and Óli, all from The University Center (www.hsvest.is) who were willing to help around with cleaning old
boards which will be used in making a new wall upstairs, for the office and WC.
As before, the group didn´t hesitate but started working already. We managed to get some photos
but they hardly looked up from their jobs.
How lucky we are to have such helpers around, giving us some of their valuable time.

- Ahead are more projects, for example isolating the ceiling and when spring arrives, we will start with outdoor work.

Uri Golman, our photographer, came to Iceland few days ago to start on The Arctic Fox Project in Westfjords. Tobias Mennle, who was working a lot with us last summer, filming arctic foxes and other Icelandic nature phenomenon, also arrived to continue with his filming project. The plan was that Uri and Tobias would head to Hornstrandir Nature Reserve, with the wildlife-biologist Frank Drygala, to collect material about the life of the foxes during spring, e.g. pairing, mating and establishing territories.
This time they didn´t get to Westfjords since, as most people know, a volcanic eruption started in Eyjafjallajokull area, south of Þórsmörk. Uri and Tobias have been there for the last days and Uri sent us these magnificent photos. Uri just arrived from his last project in India, photographing tigers, you can see all about Uri´s projects on his web page: www.urigolman.com

French tourists who hiked in Hornstrandir Nature Reserve last summer, have published two great videos of the tour on youtube.
On these videos, you see the magnificent landscape of the area and sense the strength of the weather and nature.
The wildlife you see is the characteristic fauna of the Nature Reserve: in the huge birdcliffs you see kittiwakes (also those bathing in the lake), guillemoths, brünnich guillemot, even puffins (rare in fox area), razorbills and fulmars. The arctic fox´s female with the pups is of the blue colour morph and look how tame they are - this is because The Hornstrandir Nature Reserve is a sanctuary for the arctic foxes, they are protected there as well as the other wildlife in the region.
Hornstrandir Nature Reserve is the arctic fox paradise in Iceland and for all who wish to enjoy wildlife and magnificent landscape, we recommend a hiking tour out there.

We hope it´s ok for us to set the link to the videos on our web page, it looks as the owner is Julian Vallette and we just wish to thank him. The music played with the video is from the Icelandic band Sigurros and fits quite well.

you can see the former video here
and the latter on (with the foxes) here

The Arctic Fox Centre will open at 12 o´clock on June the 12th next summer. The Arctic Fox Café will also open and it will be nice for everyone to sit at the Café, indoors or outdoors, and make further plans of the tour, or just enjoy the beautiful landscape of Álftafjörður.

At the Café we will have some room for little exhibitons and the first will be of a stamp and postcard collection from Helgi Gunnarson, who has collected stamps, postcards and envelopes from all over the world, decorated by various arctic foxes. It is an honour for us at the centre to be able to show the collection to our guests and we look forward to have it.

We at The Arctic Fox Centre are now setting all our strength into designing and preparing the exhibition. We hope it will become as great for you all as we dream of making it the very best. We have got a lot of nice comments and ideas besides our own, this is all developing now.

For example would we like to hire a good "reader" to educate on the biology and adaption of the arctic fox and tell the story of the foxhunters. Then we could allow the guests to "listen" while walking through the exhibition. To make this possible, we need some equipment, e.g. ipods or mp3 players and headphones....
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We visited the future house of The Arctic Centre today and met the busy carpenders, Ragnar and Einar who, with the help of their collagues Arnar and Magnus, the chair carpender, have been rebuilding the house. They were covering the walls of the first floor with the old panel boards. The house looks great and it is so exciting to plan the interiors of the Arctic Fox Café and the exhibition.
Last week we had the exhibition designers, Finnur Arnar and Auður Alfífa, who syncronized the ideas of the various fields of the exhibition and discussed the general look of the project.

Monday, February 22th we signed a contract with The Westfjords Economic Growth Agreement on a project called „Wildlife as an economic resource".
The project is a joint effort between The Arctic Fox Centre, The Westfjords Natural History Institute (NAVE), Westfjords Research Centre of University of Iceland (UN-West), West Tours and Borea Adventures. The main goal is to develop sustainable wildlife tourism with the focus on the specialties of Westfjords.
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Our neighbor, Þórður K. Sigurðsson, gave us this beautiful photo of the old house Eyrardalur, which will house our future exhibition and café. We can use this photo in all terms such as on products we sell to finance the center´s activity.
We are grateful for this beautiful gift and wish Þórður best luck in future photography. You can see the magnificent landscape in The Arctic Fox Center´s area on the webpage of Kristalmynd

there are also other photographer´s pages on our page www.melrakki.is/tenglasafn 

The Arctic Fox Centre (AFC) and The Nature History Institute of Westfjords (NAVE) have, in a collaboration with University of Iceland (UNIS), carried out a project to examine the arctic fox population of Westfjords by dissecting hunted foxes in the region.
The first 38 foxes were collected by Sudavik municipality, in collaboration with the local hunters and they were dissected by Pall Hersteinsson and Ester Rut Unnsteinsdottir in a brand new autopsy facility in NAVE´s house in Bolungarvik, last February.
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