The Right To Roam With Muskox Safari Guide, Kaspar Rønningen

Photo by Kaspar Rønningen, Muskoxen in Dovrefjell National Park

Kaspar Rønningen, member of the MuskOx Herd, is a Norwegian Muskox Safari Guide. Kaspar grew up half of his life in Madagascar and has traveled extensively since. He’s lived in Brazil, Reunion Island, and back to Norway where he is studying biology and leads guided tours to view muskox in Oppdal and Dovrefjell National Park, Norway. Kaspar has a degree in Intercultural Communication and Collaboration. He also has military experience with the Norwegian Armed Forces as a submariner, specifically as a sonar operator, firefighter, and torpedo specialist. Kaspar has also worked in the health sector for five years as an auxiliary nurse.

In this blog, Kaspar shares the typical ‘day in the life’ as a Muskox Safari Guide, inspirations that lead him to his line of work, the uniqueness of the muskox species, and herd-mentality of the animal. In addition, Kaspar shares the history and significance of Dovrefjell National Park and Norway’s Right to Roam law.

Can you explain the typical day as a Muskox Safari & Field Guide?

Every day I wake up at around eight o'clock, quite late. I typically eat breakfast at home. I then go down to the office, boil some hot water for tea and then make some coffee. Take some cinnamon buns from the nearby baker and pack it all together in my backpack together with optics. One pair of binoculars and one telescope, extra clothing, first aid kits and nuts. I usually take nuts with me because I don't eat a lot when I walk and have to talk a lot as a guide. I don't have that much time to eat.

At 10:00am I meet my guests. We take a short introduction before we drive about 30 minutes southwards to the beginning of the national park. Then we walk and walk and walk and walk depending on how far the muskoxen are away. We walk through the Birch Forest, and there we see plenty of different plants such as wolf’s bane, bistort, gentians and campions. Many different fungus as well, like tinder fungus and chanterelles, sometimes. Different plants and insects.

I show them to my guests how they can be used. Some of them are used to make fire. Some of them were used to stop bleeding. Some of them were used against bacteria. Some of them just taste nice. Some of them are dense in calories, and some of them are incredibly poisonous.

Whenever we're above the tree line, everything changes. All the plants change, the birds and animals alike, and there we hope to find muskox.

I then try to track as best of my ability. We don't know where the muskoxen are because they are not tracked. They are wild animals and they're free to walk wherever they wish. And yeah, then we find them, hopefully, it's only been one day in my career where I have not found them.

When we find them, I set up my telescope, we eat and talk a little bit about the history of the muskoxen in the national park, and their biology.

I approach the animals in the most respectful and safe way possible. Which is really important. We do collaborate and communicate with other guides in the fields and also tourists who are walking on their own. It's to the best of our interest and also the interest of the animals that we all cooperate. We don't want to stress the animals. And if we don't cooperate, we risk circling the animals or not finding them. So it goes both ways. Even competitors cooperate in the field.

The day usually ends around three to six o'clock. It varies when we return home. Yeah, it varies greatly from day to day, how long we walk can be from all the way from 7 to 20 kilometers.

Photos by Kaspar Rønningen

How did you get into muskox field guiding? Was there an experience that really inspired you?

Suppose it’s a bit random, I had a botany course, on the top of Hjerkinn. The botany overall is quite bizarre and different from everywhere else in Norway and Scandinavia, because it was the one of the first places in Norway that melted away from the first ice age, which makes a lot of the plants there endemic. That's why we had a botany course there.

Every evening during that course, I was jogging out into the National Park and trying to find these animals, and I did. The last evening I did find them. That was really inspiring and really epic. I remember listening to the Norwegian Viking Band Wardruna, while jogging and meeting a family of four muskoxen alone. I didn't really think much about it until the year after and I found a poster for a job in the corridors of NTNU, which is my university. I applied and got the job.

What have been some of your most fascinating muskox experiences, in terms of their behavior and their herd-mentality?

Muskoxen are very predictable animals but they have quite bizarre behavior. So if you approach a moose, elk, deer, or bear in nature, even if they're scared or angry, most of the time they will walk away. Muskoxen are different, they choose to fight over flight, and therefore choose to stay put. This can be challenging sometimes for people who think they are tame. This is why accidents happen, because people are uninformed. They approach muskoxen thinking they are tame and they want to give it a biscuit or touch them. They don't want to be touched at all. That is when you get gored. I've never experienced anything similar to that but I have gotten warnings.

Walking in fog in the middle of winter. The muskoxen actually snowed down completely, they get covered in snow. They look like a bunch of rocks, especially in fog, it can be quite hard to see. Then out of nowhere, one of the rocks decided to stand up, look at me, and I was very close at this point. I was about 20 meters away. I got a bit scared obviously. It looked at me, stared at me, stomped and snorted with its nose and gave me a sign to walk away. And me knowing their basic singles I walked away, and the muskoxen went back to sleep.

I've been warned another time as well. This has to do with the herd mentality when approaching a huge group of muskoxen. Quite recently it was a warm summer day. On summer days, the muskoxen gather on the snow to cool down and you can see calves play in the snow. It's really adorable. From a distance of course. You don't want to be too close to a mother with her calves.

I then approached slowly and respectfully. There was another group which was also in the snow, and I was about 200 meters away, which is pretty safe regarding their behavior, but then also 200 meters away there was a bull that was showing signs of distress or giving me reasons to leave. He was swinging his horns and digging in the ground with his horns. This is a classical example, it's not a threat, but it's a warning. So he wanted me to get away.

And I was very surprised because his snort sounded very loud. I was surprised that he was warning me because I was such a distance away. But it turned out that right beneath the hill, about 15 meters away was another muskox. And we didn't see it. So that bull was warning us to get away from his peers or his friends essentially. So they are incorporating the muskoxen, they are very open in the way they communicate and warn predators, essentially humans as well.

Photos by Kaspar Rønningen

Other ways you can find muskoxen protecting themselves are by the strongest bulls and cows standing shoulder to shoulder. Sensing that they’re facing a threat they then push the calves behind them. If the threat persists, the strongest one, runs out and attacks the predator, or whatever is annoying them at that specific time.

This happens very rarely normally, because in Norway, we don't have predators. The muskoxen here just die of sickness, or maybe sometimes they get on the train tracks and they try to fight a train and that doesn't work with the train.

Can you share specifics of the muskox population in Norway and their habitat of Dovrefjell National Park?

I will compare them to Northern countries like Canada, Greenland, and Russia. They have some different behavior. Here in Norway, they tend to sometimes go in groups, but that is sometimes very randomized. So if there's only one patch of snow, they all end up at that place, but they're not really coordinated as a group. A lot of males go out there alone, actually, and the females go with their calves, the calves follow their mother, essentially, but it’s random.

But in Norway, the muskoxen are both an introduced species and have lived here for millennia, as well (weirdly defined place in Norwegian nature). They were introduced from Greenland after the 1500s. In the last century, after the Second World War, they were introduced again, and that makes up the entire population we have today. Because they were introduced after the 1500s and didn't live there before the 1500s, naturally, they are considered an alien species. Norway only wants 200 animals in Dovrefjell National Park and nowhere else even though they can live all over Norway. In the mountains, the state doesn't want them to move because we have no predators and the population is ever growing. If the population reaches over 200, in winter, which is different from 200 in summer, right now, there are about 240. It's expected to drop because cough deaths are very common on some die of old age as well or disease like pneumonia. But if the population is over 200, in winter, hunters go in and shoot down on target groups. In a specific manner, we don't shoot one by one in one group, such as open hunting in Russia has allowed that, for example, and it has always been a case in Greenland, for the local people of Greenland. We don't do that because then the rest of the group witnesses the hunt and will learn that humans are dangerous. So instead of that, just from the state go in and shoot down and target groups of animals. All the meat from farms are sold on the open market and the revenue goes back to the National Park.

Population control/culling is a necessary evil that has to take place for megafauna to thrive in places where predators have been removed. If the population of muskoxen is not culled, they will leave the national park due to population density stress. The alternatives they meet then are pneumonia (if leaving west/north, due to wetter climate) or euthanasia due to being close to human settlements (south, east). The Dovrefjell tribe of muskoxen is culled by state rangers, who are trained professionals that go to great lengths to make the cull as fast and ethical as possible, with no muskoxen witnessing the practice.

Their habitats differ from low to middle to high alpine zones. High alpine in Winter because there’s less snow, low and middle alpine in spring and summer. Now low in summer and Fall because that's where their favorite plants are. And sub/under alpine under the tree cover and Birch Forest because that is one where the snow melts first.

Muskox in Dovrefjell, Photo by Kris-Mikael Krister

We don't guide in the month of May because that is when the muskox cows give birth. Though calves surviving in the winter is already difficult enough for the muskoxen. But sustaining a pregnancy on top of that renders the cows very vulnerable. And if you approach a cow with her calf in May, typically she will leave the calf and the calf will die.

The calf will stay with its mother for about three years and only gets milk the first year, from May until the first snowfall, say in October the calf learns to eat grass and herbs very quickly after they're born. In the first year, they grow tiny horns that go out of their skull. The second year, their horns spin down and in the third year they tilt up again. In the fourth year, they have a full set of horns. Both males and females have horns. But the males use them to clash together and for that they don't use the tip of their horns to use the base, which makes the base very thick. The females don't use the base at all to fight, they just use the tip to defend themselves and their calves. That is how you differentiate biological sex from a distance.

These animals are restricted to this national park and are not allowed to leave. There are natural barriers and the muskoxen don't like to cross rivers. This has to do with their inability to tolerate wetness. Their inner wool is not water resistant, such as sheep's wool even though it's really warm and can sustain negative 40 degrees celsius.

As long as it snows and not rains, but the minute it rains or they go for a swim and it's 15 or 20 degrees outside celsius, they're in big trouble and they turn cold and they develop pneumonia.

Can you share insight into Dovrefjell National Park and the restoration project that took place after the land's original mining and military use?

Dovrefjell National Park was one of the first places in Norway to get exposed after the Ice Age. The ice age has filed the mountains down, they are flatter than other places such as Lofoten. A lot of the plants there are actually endemic to this specific place of Norway because of it becoming sort of an island once the ice melted. It was used for military purposes. Some of my peers or mates in the military were picking up bombs when I was serving as a submariner. In the park you find some bombs every now and then. I found an unexploded artillery shell last week, and also a mortar base. Yeah, so bomb squads are called quite routinely if we find anything like that, which is also part of our work, taking care of nature.

But the reason why it was restored … The military practice stopped because of its botany and the reindeer population. The reindeer population of Dovrefjell is the only reindeer tribe in Norway, which has never been domesticated and has been hunted for 1000s of years, which also makes it very, very shy. So to take care of that, and the plants, military activity stopped and telecommanded excavators restored nature over the previous military roads.

There weren't people in the excavators, once they were using them to refill the roads with vegetation, because they were afraid of bombs. So people were commanding them from afar, and soldiers were picking bombs and destroying them. And yes, taking some time and it's been quite expensive, but seems to have been worth it.

A lot of the National Park is now restored and is expected to be fully restored in a few years once the plants settle and the previous road and military buildings are what's left for them to share the significance of the ‘Right to Roam’ and Norway and their respective rates.

The Right to Roam is a law that is placed in our lives and it's also heavily ingrained in our culture. Every human being in Norway has the right to be in nature, camping in nature, fish for free, harvest mushrooms, plants, berries, nuts, whatever, for free, which is especially true for children that they have more access to lakes and rivers than adults do.

I have to pay if I want to fish trout but anyone 16 years olds or under doesn't need to pay. The ocean is free for everyone though. If I'm picking mushrooms and berries, it's free. So I've grown up picking cloudberries, blueberries, fishing trout, hunting, etc. The respect it creates is that if you learn to love nature, from an early age, you learn to take care of nature. Also from an early age, and a lot of Norwegian culture is centered around nature, you'd like to be outside.

A lot of us do skiing, ice fishing, and walking in the mountains no matter the time of the year. And I encourage all of my guests and any tourists I meet that are visiting Norway to use the Right to Roam. But it comes with an asterisk, and that is that there is a duty that is associated and that is to clean up after yourself. Don't destroy living trees. Don't burn down the forest. Don't throw trash. Clean up after yourself and clean up after others if others have been inconsiderate, and don't harvest more than you need. Don't kill animals for fun. If you're going to fish you're fishing to eat, you're not fishing to release them again.

And yes, there is also a third thing. You have to know what you're doing. Every year people get attacked by wildlife. People will eat deadly webcaps or destroying angel mushrooms. And those are not giving you pleasant experiences. They will kill you. So using the Right to Roam is something I encourage everyone to do, but you have to know what you're doing.