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Iceland, as an isolated island far from other land cannot be expected to have many wild terrestrial mammals, this is also the case. The only original land mammal to live there when the first settlers came was the arctic fox. Man has added deliberately and unintentionally to the number found today. The first one was probably the field mouse which is now found all over Iceland. Another is the Reindeer brought to the island in the 18th century. The most resent and annoying addition was the American Mink, which has since 1930 spread throughout the country with a dramatic effect on many seabird colonies. The marine mammals are on the other hand many and some very common, apart from the two native seal species which bear pups on the Iceland coast, all the other arctic seal species and the walrus can be considered common vagrants if not winter guests in the waters surrounding the island. Another arctic vagrant which occurs on the island during pack-ice years is the Polar bear, but fortunately both for bear and man these cold years with pack ice have been few in the past decades. Whales are common around the island today but were almost certainly even more common in centuries gone by. Hunting by various nations depleted many of these species to the brink of extinction. One is with certainty gone forever, the atlantic race of the Gray whale, this species only lives on in the descriptions in a 17th century book. The Icelanders themselves only hunted the great whales for about 40 years after the second world war, but the smaller species were probably always taken to some extent, more often as an occasional catch, rather than by direct hunting.
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