instead of Uggs, mukluk boots

[lph]

Llamas are awesome creatures in the first place, and they just gained another ten points of awesomeness.

We don't have that many wolves, but some, and they cause a great deal of conflict, especially in rural sheep-farming areas. We now have a pair of wolves with pups in our next-door forest area, which is right outside Oslo. They've already had som run-ins with dogs, and have killed one, but so far the sentiment is still wolf-friendly.

[Crankin]

Geez, I have never seen a wolf...
I *did* see a moose when we were in the Maine Wilderness about 3 years ago. We were mountain biking back to Little Lyford Pond on a dirt road and one crossed right in front of us. It was scary and almost unreal, like peering down at the Grand Canyon and it looking like a picture.

[Irulan]

lol, I was wondering how long before Wolves entered the conversation. lph, I find your post interesting because in US North America, the reintroduction of wolves and the delisting of them from the endangered species list is a Really Big Deal and very controversial. We never hear much about what is going on in other countries in regards to this issue.

Shooting star, it might be beneficial to clarify the differences between black/ bears, and grizzlies. They can live in the same ecosystems, but they fill different niches and have different behaviors. Grizzlies are huge and very dangerous. They can be extremely aggressive and fill more of a predator role than its cousin the black bear. Black bears are much more numerous, smaller, less predatory and less aggressive. While you never want to provoke any bear, with black bears you can get away with scaring them off by throwing sticks and banging pots where you would never ever want to attempt this in the vicinity of a grizzly bear.

[malkin]

Were the Oslo suburban forest wolves (re)introduced by humans?

[lph]

The wolves weren't actively re-introduced, they wandered there on their own accord, but they are definitely still there due to human involvement. Østmarka ie. "the East woods" which we live right up against is very much used for recreational purposes, skiing, hiking etc, but there's a small nature reserve in the middle which is extraordinarily hard to get to or through. No roads, virtually no paths, thick forest and hard to navigate. In winter you can traverse it on skis over some small lakes, but the wooded parts are then even more inaccesible. The location of the wolves is kept a secret, but I'm pretty convinced they're in there.

Nationwide there's a big controversy over wolves. Norway has very few, but we have a policy of xx pups a year, I forget how many. Problem is that how many we have on our side of the border is rather random, we share a long border with Sweden which has lots of uninhabited forest and quite a lot of wolves. Our side is inhabited farmland, woodland and grazing land due to a determined policy of subsidizing the rural districts. Sheep farmers regularly have wolf attacks on their sheep (as well as lynx and eagles), but according to a farmer friend we just visited they can get a permit to shoot an aggressive wolf, but it takes too long. The most aggressive ones are often young males, loners who travel long distances, and by the time someone had got a permit the wolf is long gone.