Erkki Pulliainen, Värriö Subarctic Research Station, University of Helsinki, and University of Oulu, Department of Biology, FIN-90014 Oulu, Yliopisto, Finland

The wolf was exterminated in southern, central and western parts of Finland in the 1880s. The last Finnish wolves were killed in Lapland in the 1970s. Since that time practically all the wolves occurring in Finland have come from the east constituting western edges of East-European wolf populations. From the initiative of the author the daily patrols of the Finnish Border Patrol Establishment have now recorded crossings of the frontier between Finland and Russia by wolves for more than three decades. These data have indicated immigration waves from the east with intervals of about seven years. Recently, however, this rather regular fluctuation has become more unclear. During the last decade rather few crossings have been recorded from the Russian Kola Peninsula into Finnish Lapland, where these few immigrants have been very soon killed. The fate of the wolves entered into the area south of this reindeer husbandry area has been a little better, since the new "1993 Hunting Act" says that they should be dealed with as game animals according to the sustainable use principle. The species has recolonized eastern and southeastern parts of the country where pups are borne (about half a dozen litters a year) and packs are recorded, whereas the occurrences in other parts of the southern half of Finland have still been rather sporadic. There were at least a part of the year about 100 wolves in Finland in 1999. They were vey clearly isolated from those few wolves occurring on the Scandinavian Peninsula (Sweden and Norway). Therefore "a wolf corridor" has been suggested by Scandinavian wolf lovers into Finnish Lapland where protests against it arise from the reindeer herders' side.