Pictures from a 10 day visit to Finland. I joined wildlife-photographer Magnus Elander and his group at The Kuikkan Camp. Here 60 km east of Kuhmo Lassi Rautiainen has built his famous bear-watching centre.
We spent 5 nights in small hides/cabins (70 hours!!)in very hot summer-temperatures. With 27 degrees Celcius outside it was near sauna-feeling inside the hides.
Some of the hides are situated inside "No man`s land" the zone between Finland and Russia which means you need a special permission to enter.
Three species of mammals are of special interest:
Brown Bear (Ursus arctos)
A large bear distributed across much of northern Eurasia and North America. It weighs 100 to 680 kilograms (220–1,500 lb) and one of its larger subspecies, the Kodiak bear, matches the polar bear as the largest member of the bear family and as the largest land based predator.
While the brown bear's range has shrunk, and it has faced local extinctions, it remains listed as a least concern species by the IUCN, with a total population of approximately 200,000. Its principal range countries are Russia, the United States (especially Alaska), Canada, the Carpathian region (especially Romania) and Finland where it is the national animal.

Wolf (lupus canis)
The grey wolf or gray wolf, also known as the timber wolf or simply wolf, is the largest wild member of the Canidae family. A number of other gray wolf subspecies have been identified, though the actual number of subspecies is still open to discussion. Though once abundant over much of Eurasia and North America, the gray wolf inhabits a very small portion of its former range because of widespread destruction of its territory, human encroachment of its habitat, and the resulting human-wolf encounters that sparked broad extirpation. During last years the wolf has been a regular visitor to the areas around Kuikkan Bear-camp.

Wolverine (Gulo gulo)
The wolverine is distributed primarily in remote reaches of the Northern boreal forests and subarctic and alpine tundra of the Northern hemisphere, with the greatest numbers in Alaska, Canada, the Nordic countries of Europe and throughout western Russia and Siberia. Their populations have experienced a steady decline since the 19th century in the face of trapping, range reduction and habitat fragmentation, such that they are essentially absent in the southern end of their European range and are quite rare in the continental United States.