Snow flurries

After a week of scouting for the elusive Arctic foxes, winter once again descended on the Svalbard archipelago at the end of May and began to powder the pale brown early spring tundra in pristine white. As luck would have it, on the way back from another half-day scouting expedition, we spotted a young male Arctic fox in his already changing spring coat rushing in our direction through the snow flurries. In his search for a fitting shelter from the blustery tempest, he obviously couldn't resist shortly stopping next to me while I was lying on my stomach to allow me to take this expressive photo of this small and yet impressively tough animal in one of the most extreme climate regions on the earth.