‘Like a giant bird box’: the volunteers building huge snowdrifts for Finland’s pregnant seals

As warmer winters melt the snow drifts that endangered Saimaa ringed seals use to raise their young, humans are giving them a helping hand

• Words by Phoebe Weston. Photographs by Samuel Bloch

Eight hours shovelling snow in -20C might not sound like the ideal day out, but a committed team of volunteers in Finland are working dawn to dusk building enormous snow drifts for one of the world’s most endangered seals.

The Saimaa ringed seal was once widespread across Finland but is now confined to Lake Saimaa in the south-east of the country, where just 495 of them remain.

Clockwise from top: volunteers check the suitability of the ice to build a snow cave under the supervision of Heikki Härkönen, coordinator at the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation; Riikka Alakoski, from the Finnish forestry agency inspects an artificial den; and records the location of a breathing hole (the image has been altered to obscure its location); a small den in the ice