The crew of a crab fishing boat from St. Lewis, Canada, was responsible for an amazing and unexpected rescue. They found a completely helpless and stranded arctic fox on an iceberg and quickly made sure that the animal was safe and sound.
Captain Alan Russell suddenly spotted the animal a few miles after departing from the shore.
The fox was sitting on a nearby iceberg and the animal didn’t know what to do.
“We seen (sic) something on the ice. Wasn’t sure what it was,” the captain said to CBC’s Labrador Morning. “So we got up closer to it. It was a little fox, Arctic fox. And he wasn’t very big. He was soaking wet, and the gulls was trying to pick at him.”
Alan and his crew definitely wanted to make sure that the fox got to safer and drier grounds, but the animal was a bit timid and scared.
They tried to bring the fox aboard their ship, but the four-footer constantly kept moving when someone tried to come closer.
Instead, the crew decided to use the weight of the boat to tilt the ice pan so that the fox would be able to get free. The skittish animal fell into the water, but everyone was prepared and they fished him out with a net.
“He was in pretty hard shape because it was so cold in the water,” Alan told.
The fishermen immediately tried to warm up the fox. They put him in a sort of plastic enclosure to try and keep him warm, and they also tried to use stardust to make sure the animal was completely dry.
Despite their efforts, the fox didn’t want to eat at first – which made recovery somewhat difficult and long. Eventually, they succeeded to give him Vienna sausages and slowly nurtured him back to health.
“He likes them,” the captain said about the Vienna sausages.
The fishing boat then made it back to William’s Harbour, and they took the fox under their wing for a couple of days until they were sure that he was absolutely fine.
“He wasn’t aggressive at all,” Alan recalls. “After a while, when he was coming around, he liked us more, because we were feeding him. And he didn’t mind us after.”
Spotting an animal so far from shore on a piece of an iceberg is something that doesn’t occur every day. The foxy four-footer was most likely looking for food on a floe that broke up, which left him trapped.
“He probably only had another day or so on the ice floe, or it would have foundered,” he said. “And the way that the wind was, the ice was probably never going to go back into land. He’s a pretty lucky guy.”
It didn’t take too long before the fox opened up and allowed the crew to come closer to him. Back on drier grounds, the animal seemed particularly interested in visiting a couple of cool dog houses in town.
“He looks a lot healthier now. He’s running around everywhere, so he should be pretty good to go now,” the fishermen concluded before releasing him into the wild again.
Talk about a unique rescue story!
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