Barentsøya

Sun
27 Jul
2014

A dark land­s­cape, and dark wea­ther. It fits nice­ly tog­e­ther, in a way. A Sunday morning on Bar­entsøya. We paid a visit to the local gos­pel choir, which pro­du­ced an arc­tic sym­pho­ny from thousand beaks with a lot of gus­to.

The­re is hard­ly a more lush tun­dra than here in the sou­the­ast, on Bar­entsøya and Edgeøya. You could pro­bab­ly keep sheep here. Someo­ne is alrea­dy doing it. The sheep have got ant­lers here.

Click on thumb­nail to open an enlar­ged ver­si­on of the spe­ci­fic pho­to.

And if the­se sheep-rein­de­er have real­ly got bad luck, then their ant­lers get ent­an­gled in plastic ropes and nets careless­ly thrown away from fishing ves­sels. Such as the 3 or 4 rein­de­er who­se ant­lers we found as a big knot wound up with green plastic rope. Parts of the skulls were still atta­ched to the ant­lers. Shame on zivi­li­sa­ti­on! The idea that most likely a polar bear shor­ten­ed the suf­fe­ring from weeks down to days (only … only days! We are tal­king of real­ly ter­ri­ble suf­fe­ring!) does not real­ly make the thought more beara­ble.

By the way, my new book is in print and it can now be orde­red 🙂 it is a pho­to book with the tit­le “Nor­we­gens ark­ti­scher Nor­den (1): Spitz­ber­gen – vom Polar­licht bis zur Mit­ter­nachts­son­ne”, with Ger­man text Click here for fur­ther details!