Finnish Lakeland Nature Nonprofits

Finland has something on the order of a hundred and eighty thousand lakes, and in the southeast they run together into a maze of water and forested island and glacial ridge that makes the map look shattered. This is a young landscape, released from the ice only ten thousand years ago and still rising slowly as the crust rebounds from the weight that was lifted off it.

In Lake Saimaa lives the Saimaa ringed seal, a freshwater seal cut off from the sea when the land rose, numbering only a few hundred animals, one of the rarest seals in the world. Its pups are born in snow dens on the lake ice, and in warm winters when there is no snow, the dens cannot be built, so volunteers now shovel snowdrifts by hand along the shore to give them somewhere to breed.

The organizations here protect that seal, defend the old-growth forest that survives in fragments among the plantations, and restore the peatlands drained for forestry across vast areas of the country.