Misplaced muskox

Because the archive didn’t open until noon today, I stopped by the Frösö zoo, a local privately-owned zoo which opened in 1960. The zoo has a “Nature room”, which the owners label as the only biological museum in northern Sweden. So I wanted to pop in and see if they happened to have beavers or muskox in their display, since I knew that they did not have live specimens of either one in the zoo.

I had expected to see the beavers. They are a common component of museums in Sweden as far as I can tell. At Frösö, the group of beavers inhabiting the “Middle Northland” (basically meaning ‘local’) section of the packed-to-the-teeth diorama was pretty standard, happily chewing on wood. No surprises there. More interesting was the muskox, whose placement was much more surprising.

Muskox in the Frösö zoo’s Biologiska Museum, Sweden. Photo by Dolly Jørgensen, 2013.

The muskox stands in the last section of the exhibit in the area labelled as ‘Svalbard’. A sign upon entering said that the exhibit was set up as a journey from ‘Skåne to Svalbard’ — which is a nice alliteration but kind of silly since Skåne and Mid-Sweden are in, well, Sweden and Svalbard is not. In any case, that’s how they set up the exhibit and the muskox appears as one of the largest animals in Svalbard (there is also a polar bear which is standing so it looks exceptionally large).

What’s exceptional about this is that the exhibit was opened in 1986 … and the last known sighting of muskox on Svalbard was in 1985. The first reintroduction of muskox had taken place in 1929 with the release of 17 calves captured in Greenland. The herd appeared to thrive: according to reports in 1936, the herd had grown to 30, and by the mid-1960s, there were anywhere from 50 to 100. Suddenly the population declined in the 1970s and the whole group died out by 1985. At the same time, the breakaway herd of muskox from Norway had come over to Härjedalen (the adjacent county) in 1971 and stayed. So in 1985, there were actually muskox in the neighborhood, so to speak.

Thus when the exhibit opened, this muskox was placed in exactly the wrong place. Although muskox had been reintroduced to Svalbard, they were no longer there, so did the muskox belong there? At the same time, live muskox were currently inhabiting mid-Sweden, so did the muskox belong in that part of the exhibit instead?

The three beavers in the Frösö zoo’s Biologiska museum, Sweden. Photo by Dolly Jørgensen, 2013.

Some reintroduced animals, like the beaver, have quickly been integrated into exhibits. I’ve seen them in lots of museums in Sweden. But clearly the muskox wasn’t seen as a Swedish animal by Rune Netterström who set up the exhibit. In the Biologiska Museet in Stockholm, muskox appear only as part of the ‘Greenland’ diorama rather than in the Swedish landscape because they were not in Sweden at the time the museum was designed. Nothing has been changed since that initial design even though the animal’s ranges have changed.

More broadly, this should make us think harder about how animal exhibits are put together. Where do we place animals whose geographies have changed, whether by our doing or theirs? If animals move to new places because of climate change (and let’s hope they do so that they don’t die out), will we be willing to relabel our exhibits? Because our named places (like Mellan Norrland) are associated with particular habitats, are we going to have to rethink which habitats and animals we show in the future? Are we willing to place ‘exotic’ species that are a common occurrence in the landscape in our dioramas so that we show what’s really out there?

The Frösö zoo muskox stands among Svalbard’s animal life as the last muskox, gazing toward the Mid-Sweden exhibit where muskox currently live. It is a misplaced specimen without a home.

— Dolly Jørgensen, The Return of Native Nordic Fauna

Written in stone

Some of the rock carvings at the Namforsen site in Näsåker, Sweden. Photo by Dolly Jørgensen.

Today on my way to Östersund, where I will start working in the archive tomorrow, I took a detour to Namforsens Hällristiningsmuseum (Namforsen’s rock carving museum). There are around 2300 rock carvings on the boulders at the rapids. I was hoping to find that they had carvings of beaver, or possibly even muskox.

The visit to the accessible areas revealed that the Stone Age inhabitants were most interested in moose: male moose with big antlers, female moose, moose calves, hunting moose – lots and lots of moose! In the visitor’s center, the other other animals mentioned were one potential bear and foxes/dogs.

Questionable ‘lizard’ in the Namforsen Hällristningar online catalog

At the museum, I found out that there is a digital version of the rock art site through HumLab at my university. So when I got to my hotel and to a decent internet connection, I checked it out. The list of animals was pretty much the same as in the museum. But I took a closer look at the one identified as “a lizard”, which seemed to me like an odd thing to put on a rock carving in mid-Sweden. And what do you know? I’m pretty sure it is a beaver. Unlike the other animals which are shown in profile, the beaver is shown from above, with the head to the left and obvious fat, long tail to the right.

Close up of the Kanozero Lake site section containing a beaver, which next to the green line near the top of it. Section of Figure 225 from J. M. Gerde, Rock art and landscapes, PhD thesis, Univ of Tromsø (2010)

The image of beaver shown from above seems to be the way it appears in rock carvings of the European north. According to Jan Magne Gjerde’s PhD thesis on Fennoscandia rock art, beavers have been identified at several sites in northern Russia. One of those is a site on Kanozero Lake on the Murmansk coast of northern Russia, where the beaver looks remarkably like the image from Namforsen. Beavers have also been identified at a couple of Norwegian sites, like Møllerstufossen. The beaver form shown from above has likewise been found in Karelia (shared by Finland & Russia), according to an article about folklore in rock art.

Considering that beavers were supposedly quite numerous and that according to archeological finds, early hunters regularly ate them, it’s surprising to me that beavers don’t appear more often. Was it because of the beaver’s small size as prey? Was it because of the potential methods for hunting? Was it because there aren’t herds of them? We’ll never know.

It could be that more beaver have been carved, but they have been misidentified. That could be a reasonable historical assumption since many of these sites were ‘discovered’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when beavers were no longer present in the area of the carvings. Nikolai Spassov has made a similar argument about misidentification of muskox as European bison in French caves (thanks to Dr. Spassov for sending me his articles!). Spassov found that scholars working on these continental caves didn’t think of muskox as a continental animal and thus almost always classified the drawings as bison, even though the horns and body configuration are clearly showing muskox. Although these drawings have lasted millennia, our scholarship is rarely written in stone.

— Dolly Jørgensen, The Return of Native Nordic Fauna