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.

We have the honour of housing a theatre on the second floor of The Arctic Fox Centre next summer. There will be, for the first time, a piece on The Arctic Fox as the only native land mammal in Iceland, it´s battle with harsh weather and scarce food during the hostile weather in the most remote corners of Icelandic nature. The story of the war between the foxes and humans who settled in Iceland over 1100 years ago will also play an important role in this story.

We look forward to see the multi-skilled actor, Elfar Logi, perform on the attic of our beautiful old house of Eyrardalur in Sudavik. He has a great experience with such a form of acting and is a key person in the famous Act Alone project in Iceland, see: www.actalone.net

Last summer, Tobias Mennle filmed an arctic fox family in Hornstrandir Nature Reserve. He also took some photos of the foxes and the magnificent landscape and birdcliffs of Hornvik. Here are few of the arctic fox pup photos he has donated to the centre. We thank Tobias for his great contribution to our online photo gallery, dedicated to arctic foxes.

The Arctic Fox Center´s director is now in Faroe Islands on a meeting with other participants in the nordic project The Wild North.
The project he main objective of the Wild North project is to contribute to the sustainable development of wildlife tourism in the Northern Periphery, and thereby ensure the trade's foundations, the livelihood of its workers and the long term integrity of natural resources.
On the meeting, all the participants work on further development and future plans for the project. We also briefly introduce the results of their research programmes of the summer. All of which conduct some research on tourists and their effect on their target wildlife. Partners come from Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway and Greenland and the main animals involved are whales, seals, birds and foxes.

Saturday 3. October we invited the people of Sudavik to the house where we will open the exhibition of the Arctc Fox Center next spring. 
The house is still being reconstructed and is now raw and cold but very promising. It was pretty cool to introduce our future plans and ideas in the house itself and allow people to use the imagination themselves. 
We got the feeling that people were proud of the house, which is amongst the oldest house in this little village, and excited about the ideas of the center and café.
One guest offered us a precious old shooting gun for the exhibition, a gun owned and used by his grandfather who, as many other farmers in this area, used to shoot foxes to protect his live-stock. We were honored to accept this gift as a large part of the exhibition will mainly be built up by personal belongings of the old fox-hunters. We also presented other objects we have been offered from descendants of old fox hunters in the region. It is inspiring for us to have the locals with us and that they believe in what we are building up in the house of the old farm Eyrardalur.

We got this nice picture sent from Ralf Trylla in Isafjordur, with the following text:
This is me trying to get sleep in Nésdalur (Westfjords) but is was not possible....
(photo: Árni Þór Helgason)

 
We thank Ralf for this great picture and for sharing his story with us. 

Marie-Héléne at Ecomedia film in France just sent us a link with the promo reel of her film of the arctic foxes.
It's a short sequence of 2'58 with some of the shots that were made in Hornvik last summer. It was Philippe Garguil at Pygargue Productions who was behind the camera but those two will continue with the story by shooting in Canada and Northern Norway next winter.
For technical reason the foxes look a bit tall and long legged: The film was copied in 4/3 format (square screen) but shot in 16/9 format (wide screen) but this will be arranged in later procedure.
We look forward to see the full film and wish Marie-Héléne and her crew all the best on their work in the „Far North".

The sequence can be seen HERE
-just click on the title "the arctic fox heating up".

 

We already got the first response from our quest for arctic fox photos. Jim Lamont from Ottawa, one of the photographers we met in Hornvik this summer, just sent us these beautiful photos of arctix fox pups. These were taken in July near to a den in Hornvik, all the pups on the photos are of the blue morph, as well as the parents.
We thank Jim for those great photos and wish him all our best on his future work with wildlife photographing.