The Arctic Fox Centre and Westfjords Natural History Institute have signed a contract on the project Westfjords Botanic Gardens. The Natural History Institute has already established a botanic garden in Bolungarvik of Westfjords but now the plan is to disperse the gardens in a wider context and the next step is to develop a botanic garden with plants of Westfjords around the beautiful old house where The Arctic Fox Centre is located in Sudavik. 
We hope that the garden with the collection of plants from Westfjords will become a delight attraction for people who wish to increase their knowledge on the Icelandic flora and fauna by visiting the Arctic Fox Centre in Sudavik.

The Westfjords Cultural Committee fund granted The Arctic Fox Center, as well as 36 other cultural projects in Westfjords, yesterday, the 4th of Desember. We received 600 thousand IKR for the exhibition of the historical and traditional foxhunting and foxhunters in Iceland. This support is wery important for us while building up the exhibition in the old and historical house Eyrardalur in Sudavik. We are grateful to the Cultural Committee to choose to support our project and make us better capable of developing the exhibition in accordance to our plans.

The Arctic Fox Center gratefully received a support from The National Heritage Fund yesterday. We received 600.000 IKR for the fox hunting part of the exhibition that we will open in Eyrardalur, Sudavik next summer. What could be more National Heritage than the story of the battle between the man and the only native four-legged carnivore in Iceland?

We visited the future house of the Arctic Fox Center today (1. December). There has been some activity lately and we met Magnus, the chief of the rebuilding project and Bjarni, who takes care of the electrical installation. There were also Friðfinnur, who takes care of the heat system, with his colleagues. 
The house is slowly developing into the state were we can take over and start constructing the exhibition. Besides that, we will fit up a small and cosy café on the first floor, decorated by old furniture and crockery to fit the style of this old and historical house. On the top floor (cock loft) we will house an excellent theater monologue and other special events.
We took some photos on the visit, as you see the house is still far from ready but we are optimistic that they will make it ready for us before soon...

The Arctic fox Centre is now undertaking a strategic planning process, where board members engage in the work of identifying the core elements of the business, its mission and objectives, as well as conducting a SWOT analysis, where strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are identified. This work is being led by the West fjords Business Development Company (atvest).

We believe that this is important for us at this point since the plan we are currently using was made in September 2007. So far, the centre has been on the planning stage. Now, the first summer of the exhibition is ahead and thus it is important for us to reconsider and strengthen our strategies.

Kjartan Sigurdsson, a photographer and tourist guide, sent us photos of arctic fox pups at a den in the highlands of Iceland. 
The pups are all of the white color morph, indicating that the parents were probably also white (but we can never be sure since the white is recessive and the blue can carry white genes).
It is amazing how tame these pups were, and people were approaching them quite close to the den for photographing. There were no news of the parents but most likely the mother was not far away, watching and waiting for the people to leave so she could nurse the pups. More photos can be seen here on our web gallery, just click on "Photos" here on the left.
Kjartans webpage is www.photo.is

The Arctic Fox Centre is participating to the Icelandic Biological Conference 2009 - Friday 6th and Saturday 7th of November.
Our contribution is a poster with the results of the first summer of our study, regarding tourist effects on the arctic foxes in Hornstrandir Nature Reserve. This study was conducted in collaboration with University of Iceland, Research Centre of The Westfjords. We have presented these results before, on an Arctic Fox Conference, held in Sweden in February 2009.

This conference is the largest held from the beginning and the majority of all biologists of Iceland are participating more or less. We have a great variety of fields and lots of interesting seminars in three buildings of the University Campus.
You can find more information on the conference web page

Last summer we met a few photographers who visited Hornstrandir Nature Reserve for photographing arctic foxes and cliff birds in the magnificent landscape of the area. We have been so lucky to get photos for our web gallery from some of these, for example from Italy and Canada. Besides photographers, film producers from France and Germany have also sent us photos of the foxes in the area. All agree that Hornstrandir, especially Hornvik is one magnificent place, a paradise for nature and wildlife lovers.
Now we just received beautiful photos from Jeroen Vermeulen, a Belgian photographer. He has been to various places to photograph wildlife and nature and HERE you can view his photo collection online.

We just received great photos from fox friends in Parma, Italy who visited us in Hornvik in August. The photos were taken at the roots of Cliff Hornbjarg and the fox is a female from the blue morph, our friend during the summer monitoring. It was Davide Zerbini and his brother Isacco who sent us the photos and a link to a website where he hosts beautiful nature photo gallery. On the web page you can hear Italian wolves howling loudly - this howl was played in Hornvik last summer and it is probably the only time you could hear wolves in Cliff Hornbjarg.
Davides photos can be seen in our web gallery from the summer, his web page is HERE

The Arctic Fox Centre has already been given some old things related to foxhunting and skin preparing in the old days. For example a drying board and a foxtong, used to hold foxes from biting while handled but many foxhunters kept young foxes during the summer and fall in gages or islands and fed them until the winter fur was suitable for the market. In those days the price was quite high for a good fur and many of the foxhunters made a good money out of foxhunting. Nowadays the fur of wild foxes is almost valueless since „farmed" fur has overtaken the market.
We were also sent a beautiful guest book, made of fish skin and fox fur by BETA, a leathersmith in Reykjavík.