Are Arctic Foxes Endangered? Status and Threats Explained

Global status: Least Concern

The Arctic fox has a huge circumpolar range, covering the Arctic tundra of North America, Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Scandinavia and Russia. Across most of this range it is still common, and the IUCN Red List has assessed it as Least Concern since 2004, most recently in 2014, with a stable overall population trend.

Counting such a widespread and mobile animal is difficult. Estimates rely on den surveys, tracking and historical harvest records, and numbers rise and fall sharply with the lemming cycle, which peaks every three to five years. Even so, the total is generally put at several hundred thousand foxes, with the largest numbers in Russia, Canada and Alaska.

Scandinavia and Finland: a population on the brink

The most famous problem area is Fennoscandia, the mountains of Norway, Sweden and Finland plus Russia’s Kola Peninsula. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fox fur fetched extremely high prices, and Arctic foxes there were hunted heavily, even in years when lemmings were scarce and fox numbers were already low.

The population crashed. Sweden protected the species in 1928, Norway in 1930 and Finland in 1940, but it did not recover. By the late 1990s only about 140 breeding adults were estimated to remain in the whole region, and foxes had disappeared from some mountain areas, including Dovrefjell in Norway, where the last known wild litter was born in 1994. Breeding in Finland had become very rare.

Today the Arctic fox is listed as Endangered on the national red lists of Norway and Sweden and Critically Endangered in Finland, even though it is Least Concern worldwide.

Why the Scandinavian foxes did not recover

Several problems kept the population low long after hunting stopped:

• Competition with red foxes. The larger red fox has spread higher into the mountains, helped by milder climate, extra food from human sources such as carcasses and garbage, and fewer large predators like wolves to keep its numbers down. Red foxes take over Arctic fox dens and kill Arctic foxes and their pups.
• Fewer lemming peaks. In the 1980s and 1990s lemming cycles in the Scandinavian mountains faded, and good breeding years became rare. Later research linked this partly to warmer, wetter winters that damage the snow layer lemmings need.
• Small, scattered groups. With so few foxes left, they had trouble finding mates, and some areas risked inbreeding.

How conservation is helping

Since the early 2000s, Norway, Sweden and Finland have run large conservation programs for the Arctic fox, some of them as joint cross-border projects. The main tools are:

• Captive breeding and releases. Norway has run a breeding station for Arctic foxes at Sæterfjellet in Oppdal since 2005. Pups born there have been released in mountain areas where foxes had disappeared or were very rare, including Dovrefjell.
• Supplementary feeding. Feeding stations near dens give foxes extra food in poor lemming years, and they are designed so that the smaller Arctic foxes can enter while red foxes cannot.
• Reducing red fox numbers in some key breeding areas to give Arctic foxes more room.

These efforts have worked. The Nordic population has grown several times over since its low point and is now counted in the hundreds of adults, with record numbers of litters in good lemming years. It is still small and vulnerable, though, and depends on continued management.

Mednyi Island and other small populations

The other well-known threatened population lives on Mednyi Island in Russia’s Commander Islands, in the Bering Sea. These foxes belong to a distinct island subspecies. In the 1970s an ear mite infection, introduced with domestic dogs, caused mange that killed about 85–90% of them, leaving only around 90 animals. The population has remained small and isolated.

Arctic foxes are also locally extinct in some places where they once lived, such as the island of Jan Mayen in the North Atlantic.

Threats to Arctic foxes worldwide

Most of these threats affect the species everywhere, even where it is still common:

Climate change is seen as the biggest long-term risk. Warmer winters can weaken the lemming cycles that inland foxes rely on, shrinking sea ice limits the long journeys that connect populations, and less snow reduces the value of the white winter coat, as explained in why Arctic foxes change color.

When foxes were the problem

In a twist, Arctic foxes have also been a conservation problem themselves. From the late 19th century into the 20th, fur farmers released them on dozens of islands in Alaska’s Aleutian chain, where no foxes had lived before. The foxes devastated ground-nesting seabirds and helped push the Aleutian cackling goose close to extinction. After the foxes were removed from many islands, the goose recovered and was taken off the U.S. endangered species list in 2001.