Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Photos from Finland as requested

As requested in another thread, here's some personal hunting photos from Finland. Most of the time I've been to lazy or too excited to take pictures when hunting so this is pretty much what I've got at the moment. Also, apologies for the quality. Many photos were taken with an old 3.2Mpix Sony DSC-P32 or my Nokia 6630 cell phone camera. So there's really no quantity nor quality, but it's still better than nothing, right?

Just in case someone cares, the following is a copy & paste from the Finnish official hunting website (www.riista.fi) :

Finland is about 1 200 km long and 600 km wide. Finland�s area is 338,145 km2, 69% of which is made up of forests, 8% of farmland, 13% of other land and 10% of water. While most of the country�s forests are part of the coniferous forest zone, those in the southernmost part belong to the deciduous zone, and in the north to the tundra zone.

Finland features countless bodies of water, 188 000 of which are lakes. The archipelagos off the coast of Finland are beautiful, and the islands numerous. There are 81 000 islands altogether in the archipelagos of the Gulf of Finland and the Gulf of Bothnia.

Finland�s northern location and length mean that the living conditions of game vary greatly in the different regions of the country. Only relatively few game animal species can endure the rugged landscape and severe winters. The game densities are much smaller than, for example, in Central Europe. There is great variation at regular intervals, especially in the population densities of small game species.

The main game species are the capercaillie, black grouse, hazel grouse, willow grouse, northern hare, brown hare, moose and white-tailed deer and, among waterfowl, the mallard. Fur game include the fox, racoon dog, badger, mink, beaver, muskrat and pine marten. Bears, wolves and lynx belong to large predators.

There are around 300 000 hunters in Finland who pay the annual game management fee (i.e. hunting card). Women make up three percent of this number. A total of six percent of the population of Finland hold a hunting card, which is more than anywhere else in Europe when compared to the size of the population.



First time hunting waterfowl in the Finnish Gulf:




Hunting trip to Taivalkoski with some spaniel owners and a couple of my personal friends:











Pheasant hunting on a nearby farm, two seasons:

[img]http://img484.imageshack.us/img484/9572/pheasant8yz2.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img484.imageshack.us/img484/5908/pheasant7ki5.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/8888/pheasant6rh9.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img373.imageshack.us/img373/17/pheasant5ds7.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/2436/pheasant4ty6.th.jpg[/img]

( wife does 90% of the training, I do 90% of the shooting. I'm happy with that)

[img]http://img358.imageshack.us/img358/1885/pheasant3zy1.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img358.imageshack.us/img358/4357/pheasant2cs8.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/4121/pheasant1gm5.th.jpg[/img]

Meltaus, Northern Finland in October 2006. We went for a grouse hunt but stumbled upon some mallards.

[img]http://img362.imageshack.us/img362/4057/meltaus7pm2.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img362.imageshack.us/img362/1236/meltaus6gv3.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/9992/meltaus5lz4.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/6405/meltaus4fi5.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/1935/meltaus3xb1.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/6913/meltaus2wx7.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/5460/meltaus1zm2.th.jpg[/img]

These pictures were taken just early this week, I was helping out a friend. They raise pheasants on this farm and foxes are giving them a hard time. There's a stand where I spent almost two nights shivering. It's always warm when you start and damn cold when you finish, especially when you can't really move around. My bad.

[img]http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/8792/foxfield1dx7.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/9086/foxfield2wl4.th.jpg[/img]

I also took a quick shot in a treestand at another spot, but I didn't feel lucky over there, having no carrion like there was on the other field. Nevertheless, the foxes were being careful and I went home empty handed aside from observing a white-tail and a pair of moose. I'll give it another go late July / early August once the cubs have left their nests.

BTW -- the pictures below were taken around 11pm. It's the midnight sun of the Finnish midsummer. Got to love it.

[img]http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/9964/foxfield8we4.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/4846/foxfield7si6.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/8722/foxfield6lc4.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img359.imageshack.us/img359/4602/foxfield5wr9.th.jpg[/img]

[img]http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/8061/foxfield4hf9.th.jpg[/img]