WildView™

October 16, 2015

Muskoxen Are Still Here

- as seen by -

Joel Berger

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I’ve been really, really lucky.  

For the last eight years, I’ve been studying muskoxen. They have to be among the coolest animals on the planet.

Muskoxen used to live with wooly mammoths in the Arctic. The mammoths died out, but the muskoxen are still here. They are so very different from most of the earth’s nearly 5,000 species of mammals. Their hugely thick fur coats drape to the ground like long skirts. They form defense herds, and stand together with heads and horns ready to collectively take on whatever threatens them – wolves, bears, or humans.

But the muskoxens’ biggest enemy may be climate change  – something that my Wildlife Conservation Society colleagues and I are studying. We hope our work will make a future for muskoxen.

Nikon D7000

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