A Norwegian nature institute has charted the daily lives of reindeer in the snowy mountains in the south of the country over four years.
The Norwegian Institute of Nature Research, known as NINA, attached cameras to the necks of nine reindeer.
The auteur reindeer then captured 140,000 stills and almost fifty hours of video.
Much of what the reindeer shot was just repetitive images or video of fur and snow, but a few creatures managed to provide a real insight into life in the herd.
"What we're concerned with in our research is to find out how the reindeer use this mountain area and why. We're especially interested in learning how we humans effect the reindeers' use of the area," said NINA researcher Olav Strand.
Southern Norway is host to the last population of wild mountain reindeer. Previously researchers relied on randomly spotting reindeer from a distance, but with modern technology they are able to monitor the herd's movements year round.
"One of the most important tools that we have in this work is a sender like this, which is a GPS sender and that means that there are antennae at the top that receive the signal from the navigation satellite so we can find out where the sender is and the position. Information is stored in the necklaces and it's sent to us and we store it in a database," said Strand.
Strand and his colleagues attached the cameras to the reindeer in 2011. Over the next four years they were given a glimpse into the lives of the animals in the frigid mountain range.
The imagery taught the researchers a great deal about how the reindeer use the landscape, and how infrastructure like roads and hiking trails formed barriers that closed the animals off from their old migration routes.
The best images captured by the reindeer were collected in a book entitled 'Midt i flokken,' (In the Midst of the Herd), which was recently published in Norway. Whether Santa himself will be ordering a copy isn't known.
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