Norway's wildlife is shaped by the calendar more than by anything else: orcas follow herring to the coast in autumn and winter, puffins and other seabirds pack the cliffs from spring to late summer, wild reindeer move across the Hardangervidda plateau to calve, and lemmings and brown bears sit out the snow. The country records about 90 mammal species, roughly 450 birds (about 250 of which nest), six land reptiles and six amphibians. Its best-known animals are the moose, wild reindeer, the muskox of Dovrefjell, the Arctic fox, the white-tailed eagle, the Atlantic puffin and, on Svalbard, the polar bear and the walrus.
Mainland Norway runs from about 58° N to beyond 71° N, with some 50,000 islands off its coast and 32% of its land above the tree line. The warm North Atlantic Current keeps the coast ice-free, so marine life stays close to shore all year, while the mountains stay cold enough for Arctic species unusually far south. That combination is why the same month can mean breeding on one side of the country and hibernation on the other.
December to February: Herring, Orcas and Svalbard's Polar Night
Winter is the season of the sea. Some orca populations in the Norwegian and Greenland seas specialise in Atlantic herring and follow the fish's autumn migration to the Norwegian coast. Surveys show the highest orca densities in the north-east Atlantic around Norway, with roughly 500 to 1,500 animals off the country. These orcas hunt with a technique called carousel feeding: they herd herring into a tight ball with bursts of bubbles and flashes of their white bellies, then slap it with their tails, stunning up to 15 fish at a time. The term was first used for a similar technique among bottlenose dolphins in the Black Sea.
On land, the Norway lemming spends the winter in nests under the snow. It is the only vertebrate endemic to Fennoscandia, ranging from western Norway east to the Kola Peninsula, and its numbers swing on a three- to four-year cycle, rising to unsustainable peaks and then crashing. Brown bears, of which Norway has only around 100, den through the cold months. One of their habitats is Øvre Pasvik National Park, 119 km² of Siberian-style pine taiga in Finnmark with the Norway–Finland–Russia tripoint inside it, which also holds a large moose population.
Far to the north, Svalbard lies in polar night. Only three land mammals live there naturally: the Arctic fox, the Svalbard reindeer and the polar bear, which hunts seals on the sea ice. The bears are protected, but heavy hunting from the 1870s to the 1970s killed around 22,000 of them on the archipelago before the international agreement of 1973. People leaving Svalbard's settlements must now carry scaring devices and are advised to carry a firearm as a last resort.
Seven national parks and 23 nature reserves now cover about two-thirds of Svalbard. In February 2024 Norway tightened the rules further, limiting ships to 200 passengers in protected areas, restricting vehicles on sea ice after 1 March and controlling traffic near walrus haul-outs.
March to May: Lemmings on the Move and Reindeer on Hardangervidda
The spring thaw is a dangerous time for small mammals. When the snow begins to collapse, Norway lemmings have to leave their winter nests and move, usually down to lower ground where they spend the summer.
The bigger spectacle is on Hardangervidda, the largest plateau of its kind in Europe, about 6,500 km² at an average height of 1,100 m, all of it above the tree line. Its wild reindeer herd is among the largest in the world: some 15,000 animals were recorded in 1996 and about 8,000 in 2008. The herd winters on the eastern side of the plateau, grazing on lichen, and moves to its breeding grounds in the more fertile west. Several hundred Stone Age settlements found on the plateau are thought to be linked to hunting along those migration routes. The core is protected as Hardangervidda National Park, Norway's largest at 3,422 km², designated in 1981; our Hardangervidda guide covers the plateau itself.
Further north on the Dovrefjell plateau, the native wild reindeer of the Snøhetta and Knutshø areas are one reason Dovrefjell–Sunndalsfjella National Park was created in 2002, replacing a smaller park of 1974. Together with the herd in Rondane, they are considered the last wild Fennoscandian reindeer of possible Beringian origin; most other Norwegian wild reindeer have mixed with domesticated stock. In total, about 20,000 wild mountain reindeer remain in Norway. The park covers 1,693 km² across Innlandet, Trøndelag and Møre og Romsdal, rising to 2,286 m on Snøhetta. Add eight adjoining landscape protected areas and two biotope protected areas, and the protected block reaches 4,365 km². Wolverines, golden eagles and gyrfalcons hunt the same ground.
June to August: Puffin Cliffs at Røst and Runde, Muskoxen in the Driva Valley
Summer brings the seabirds. Norway's north and west coasts are among the main breeding grounds of the Atlantic puffin, which raises its chick in a burrow and in Norway feeds it mainly on herring. Røst, at the tip of the Lofoten chain, has one of the largest bird cliffs in the North Atlantic; a 16,000-hectare Important Bird Area there holds large colonies of puffins and European shags, and the island celebrates the birds with a puffin festival every June. Further south, the island of Runde in Møre og Romsdal hosts an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 seabirds, protected as part of the Runde Ramsar site.
The colonies are not secure. Puffin numbers in Norway, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland have fallen sharply since 2000, and when Norwegian herring stocks dwindled, puffin numbers followed. In 2015 the IUCN moved the species from Least Concern to Vulnerable, and on current trends the European population could fall by 50 to 79% between 2000 and 2065. The coast is also the stronghold of the white-tailed eagle: coastal Norway is one of its main European breeding areas, and Norwegian birds measured in one sample averaged 2.26 m in wingspan for males and 2.37 m for females.
Inland, summer is when Dovrefjell's muskoxen are easiest to find. They are not native: after two fossil vertebrae turned up during railway building in 1913, ten muskoxen from Greenland were released on Dovrefjell in September 1932. That herd was hunted out during the Second World War, and new animals were brought in from 1947. The herd is managed over about 340 km² and numbered roughly 300 in the summer of 2012; in summer the animals move down towards the Driva valley for the grass. A small group crossed into Sweden in 1971 and founded a herd in Härjedalen. On Svalbard, meanwhile, the endemic Svalbard reindeer fattens on summer tundra; hunted to near extinction by 1925, it numbered about 22,000 in 2019.
The Arctic summer is short but crowded. Nearly thirty species of seabird migrate to Svalbard each year to breed, joining the snow bunting and the northern wheatear, while the rock ptarmigan is the archipelago's only bird that stays all winter. Back on the mainland, summer is the active season for Norway's six land reptiles: the viviparous lizard, the sand lizard, the slow worm, the European adder, the grass snake and the smooth snake. Leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles occasionally drift up the coast.
Summer also brings wanderers. Walruses live year-round on Svalbard but occasionally reach the mainland, and a young female nicknamed Freya, seen off the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, Denmark and Sweden from October 2021, was shot in the Oslofjord on 14 August 2022 over safety concerns.
September to November: Moose Season and the Arctic Fox Comeback
Autumn is the moose rut, which runs through September and October, when bulls fight over females. Hunting tallies show the scale of the population: Norway had a winter population of around 120,000 moose in 2009; hunters shot 31,131 in 2015, against a record 39,422 in 1999. As the days shorten, the lemmings must time their move back up to sheltered high ground before the snow settles, and on Røst autumn now draws birdwatchers looking for rare migrants resting on their way south.
The Arctic fox was common on Dovrefjell a century ago, but hunting driven by high fur prices crushed the Scandinavian population, and around 1997 Norway held only about 50 adults. Across Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula the total was put at only about 140 breeding adults that year. On Dovrefjell the fox died out around 1990, and a reintroduction there from 2010 has been described as successful. From 2010 the joint Norwegian-Swedish project Felles Fjellrev, joined by Finland in 2017, released foxes bred at a facility in Oppdal, vaccinated cubs, put out supplementary food and culled red foxes, which take over Arctic fox dens. When the project ended in 2026, the population in its area had grown from 40 to 60 foxes around 2000 to 400 to 500.
Large predators remain contested. Norway's last native wolves were killed in the 1970s; wolves recolonised central Sweden from 1978 and later spread into southern Norway, where they are partially controlled rather than fully protected as in Sweden. Lynx and wolverines share the same mountain and forest country. How the seasons themselves change across the country is covered in our guide to the seasons in Norway, and Svalbard's ice and glaciers are explained in our Svalbard geography guide.