Fishing couple save starving Arctic fox stranded on iceberg

'It had probably got stuck out there looking for a meal'

A couple fishing off the eastern Canadian coast have rescued a shivering Arctic fox that was stranded on an iceberg and which they initially mistook for a baby seal.

Mallory Harrigan and her boyfriend Cliff Russell were recently up to four miles off the coast of Labrador in William's Harbour. They were fishing for crabs in their boat, The Northern Swan.

Looking ahead to some icebergs, the couple spotted when appeared to be a seal. But when they looked closer, they realised it was an Arctic fox, alone and in trouble. It was drenched and under attack from seagulls.

“It had probably got stuck out there looking for a meal,” Mallory Harrigan told the website Bored Panda. “Cliff says he thinks he got out there to check out a bit of meat on the ice and it broke apart, sending him out to sea.”

The couple were able to manoeuvre their boat alongside the iceberg and coax the fox onboard.

“He was trying to run away from us at first we had a really hard time getting him aboard,” said Ms Harrigan, who lives in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. “We had to break the ice he was on and get him with the dipnet. He fought and fought to get away until he literally couldn’t move anymore.”

Once they got the animal on board, they were able to begin the task of trying to help it regain its strength.

“We scooped him up and he retreated to the corner. He was too weak to do anything when we brought him aboard, he slept most of the way,” she said.

“When we came to he was a bit nervous but once we fed him he was pretty calm. He wouldn’t eat at all for the first 5 or 6 hours. We gave him chips and crackers but he didn’t want anything until he woke up and we fed him a tin of Vienna sausages.”

Back on land, the couple decided to let the animal rest further in an old dog kennel in William’s Harbour. They then released him, filming the creature’s return to the wild.