24 May 2009 A visit to "The Arctic Zoo of Lapland"

Today a vanload of us went on a field trip to Lapland to visit the Ranua Wildlife Park, also known as the "Arctic Zoo of Lapland.”

It is a small zoo that features only animals from Finland and/or the Arctic.

Most of the birds and animals were being lazy the way zoo animals usually do, but this capercaillie was trying hard to kill us through the wire fence.  A capercaillie is sort of like a Finnish wild turkey.  I found some capercaillie feathers in the woods on May 15 – see my post from that day.

Did you know that the **Arctic** was named after the constellation called the **Great Bear**?  You probably know this constellation as the **Big Dipper**.  It is named after the Brown Bear (***Ursus arctos***) that lives in the northern regions of Europe, Asia and North America.  Most of the world’s arctic and subarctic cultures associate that star pattern with a bear.  So "Arctic” really means "Brown Bear land.”

After looking at the birds and animals we went to the all-you-can-eat buffet at the park and had plenty of reindeer meat and meatballs.  Traditional Finnish food is substantial.  It’s like eating Thanksgiving Dinner with reindeer meat in place of turkey, and lingonberry sauce in place of cranberry sauce.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a zoo that only has North American animals?  Owls, eagles, wild turkeys, bison, bears, mountain lions, bighorn sheep, elk, foxes, raccoons, skunks, etc?  I think it would.  You could eat Buffalo burgers with fries afterwards. 

I’m glad we went.  It’s always more exciting seeing the same animal in the wild, of course, but getting to see them up close like this helps you to understand what you see when you glimpse them in the wild.

On the way home we saw the first snow of this expedition.  We drove right into the tail end of a freak snowstorm (on May 24!) and saw the results on the ground.  I guess it wouldn’t be a PolarTREC trip without some snow.

Tomorrow it’s back to work.