Today, the alpine country of Austria is similar to most western European nations in that its brown bears are completely extinct, with the only sightings being strays from neighbouring countries. But 500 years ago, it was very different. Austria has 1003 buildings, roads or locations named after bears, similarly to California with its extinct Californian grizzly, where places like bear valley, bear canyon, and bear creek are everywhere.

Bears were once spread far and wide in Austria, from mountainous Tyrol in the west to the flat Vienna province of the far east. This was a time of noblemen, clergy and their commoner servants, who eked out a meagre living through farming and livestock.

While the upper class lived in luxury, most Austrians were incredibly poor, with just a couple of goats and a cow to provide income. Large carnivores like wolves and lynx were feared, and brown bears were viewed as the devil, or symbols of evil. The noblemen weren’t invulnerable either: they relied on the commoners’ farming for their own wealth, and found it entertaining to see the bears be shot anyhow.

During the middle ages, the human population of Austria grew rapidly, thanks to revolutionary farming techniques like livestock grazing in the forest, and felling trees to build new land. After 500,000 years of roaming the snowy valleys of the Austrian alps with impunity, brown bears were officially in trouble.

Back then, the rules around hunting would make a WWF employee gasp. All residents of Austria were encouraged to kill large predators by any means imaginable, including guns, poison, pitfalls, nets, snares, and spring-guns.

Austria and its Hapsburg monarchy was often distracted with fighting wars, including the Long War (1593-1606) with the Ottoman Empire, and during these breathers, bear numbers would often rise again in the valleys. However, on June 23rd 1788, the monarchy issued an order calling for the extermination of bears and wolves across the Austrian empire. Bears were widely deemed to be “vermin”, and financial rewards had already been offered since the 1600s.

Surprisingly, precise figures were recorded for the extinction of bears in each Austrian province. In Upper Austria, the last bear fell in 1833, while in Salzburg, the extinction happened in 1838. In Styria, it was 1840, in Lower Austria it was 1842, and in Carinthia, it was 1884. Finally, in 1918, the last Austrian bear was shot dead in Tyrol. The dates were probably off by a few years, with unseen bears hiding in the deep valleys, but broadly accurate nevertheless. They survived a little later than Swiss bears (1904), significantly longer than Germany’s bears (1835), and somehow outlived wolves in Austria, which vanished in the 1860s.

By the 1970s, all was quiet on the bear front in Austria. Four stray bears were shot dead from World War 2 to 1970, and in 1971, a lone male bear was sighted in eastern Tyrol after wandering up from Trentino.

Shortly afterwards though, there was great outcry when the bear was shot dead. History repeated itself one year later, when a male bear travelled 300KM from Slovenia. He settled down in the Ötscher area of central Austria, one of Austria’s largest areas of primeval forest, with only a few human civilians, and was quickly dubbed Ötschi.

At first, the authorities tried to shoot him with a tranquiliser dart and put him in a zoo, but Ötschi was a particularly shy and reclusive bear. Over the years, sightings were consistent yet very rare, each one accompanied by a wave of public obsession.

The only serious damage Ötschi caused was to beehives. He was lucky to settle near a recently planted raspberry farm, and be watched over by a bear-loving forester and an eccentric duke who commonly left out corn to feed the roe deer. This was before GPS collars, and the foresters used to monitor buckets of corn left out for Ötschi, to check whether he was still alive.

He lasted for two decades, going on to become Austria’s greatest animal celebrity. He was even the mascot of an energy drink company whose slogan was “no Ötschi, no energy”.

Ultimately, Ötschi was the inspiration for the entire reintroduction project, with the initial idea coming from the same bear-loving forester who protected him. In 1982, the Lower Austrian government launched an initiative called Aktion Bärwild, in cooperation with hunting groups and farmers. A Slovakian scientist with great knowledge of bears in the Mala Fatra region was hired to conduct a feasibility study, and because of the minimal damage called by Ötschi, who had never killed cattle and only a handful of sheep, everyone was optimistic.

The Slovakian scientist concluded that Austria’s wilderness could support 10 bears at first, including 2 adult males, 4 adult females, and 4 sub-adults. The best part was that because a single bear already existed in Austria, Ötschi, the law stated that they didn’t need permission!

It was all steam ahead until 1986, when at the last minute, the hunting association withdrew its support. The government had refused to make a law guaranteeing compensation for farmers whose animals had been killed.

But it wasn’t over yet: WWF Austria took over the scheme. They found an insurance company who would be willing to look after farmers, and on June 8th 1989, WWF employees captured a female bear in Czechoslovakia, in a forested area covered with heavy paw prints. It took 12 hours for the bear convoy to drive to Austria, and at 0:41pm on June 9th, Mira was released into the Ötscher wilds of central Austria.

By now, Ötschi had resided in Austria for 15 years. It was hoped that he would breed with Mira, but the WWF feared that the lonely old Ötschi had run out of sexual energy. Thankfully, the opposite was true. In 1990, unproven sightings of the couple wandering the woods together came in, and in 1991, Mira was sighted with 3 cubs.

At this point, no male bears had been introduced to Austria, meaning that the father had to have been Ötschi. Only 1 cub survived until the end of the year, but in early 1993, Mira was sighted with another 2 cubs, again fathered by Ötschi. By now Otschi was very old, and the beloved bear was sighted for the last time in 1994, 22 years after his arrival. Luckily, another male was introduced in 1993, plus a female called Cilka in 1992 who was already pregnant when captured in Croatia.

Meanwhile, Mira’s transmitter mysteriously failed in mid-September 1993, and the WWF was worried enough to send a search party into the woods. They found Mira dead, with broken ribs and signs of heavy internal bleeding. There were no gunshot wounds, and it was concluded that a car had probably struck her, or perhaps a rock slide.

Her three young cubs were now orphans, and were soon spotted in strange places like flower orchards. One cub lucked out by discovering a large roe deer carcass, and when winter came, the trio vanished into hibernation. The whole of Austria kept their fingers crossed, and in March, the cubs reappeared, very much alive.

Unfortunately, the cubs had also discovered the roe deer corn-feeding stations, and now, they were losing their fear of humans. By summer 1994, Austria’s bear numbers had swollen to between 20 and 25, and bear attacks surged. 49 damages happened in August alone including dead sheep, beehive raids, and bears approaching the houses of people inside.

A public panic ensued. The media’s attitude swung 180 degrees, and they were now resolutely opposed to the bears. There were so many reports of “nuisance bears” that the term was later voted word of the year for 1994 (in German, it’s only one word).

The most notorious bear was called “Numi”. This 4 year old male had massacred a pair of pet rabbits in the garden just 5 metres away from children camped in a tent, and wrought 50 beehive raids and 20 sheep killings in 1993 alone. Numi was a highly intelligent bear, smart enough to pull the plugs out of ponds to eat the small fish inside.

The panic reached fever pitch, until September 10th 1994, when a hunter shot dead a large bear in self defence from 10 metres away on a forest road, when waving and shouting didn’t work. It proved to be a 4 year old male weighing 400 pounds, and almost overnight, the attacks slowed to a trickle. This created an enduring mystery, because while this bear was dark brown, Numi was described as being light. Around this time, Cilka the mother bear vanished without a trace, a mystery which was solved over a decade later.

The Austrian authorities now had bears coming from all directions. In 1997, a 85 pound female cub was captured rummaging through a roe deer feeding site, which they named Christl. They tagged her ear and subjected her to adverse conditioning to make her fear humans, but soon enough, Christl was approaching human settlements weekly.

In the Austrian alps, rape oil is commonly used as a lubricant in chainsaws by forest workers, and left in canisters overnight. Christl became addicted to the stuff, fearlessly approaching workers in broad daylight. She destroyed chainsaws to get at the oil inside, and broke into huts and houses. One time, she butchered a motorcycle and completely destroyed the driver’s side of a steamroller. Instead of a salmon specialist or an elk specialist, Christl had become a rapeseed oil can specialist.

By spring 1998, Christl was back, and even rubber bullets wouldn’t deter her quest for rapeseed oil. A fresh radio collar was fitted in May, with the bait, of course, being rape oil.

One day in June 1998, Christl’s monitor suddenly went quiet, and forest workers never saw her again. The theory is that she was illegally poached. 20 brown bears remained in Austria at this point, but things were going wrong. Mariedl and Mona each had three cubs, all of which rapidly lost their fear of people. The roe deer corn was a huge problem – the original bears passed this easy food source down to their children, and ultimately their grandchildren.

With the dawn of the new millennium, the Austrian bear project was going truly off the rails. The population had held steady until 1999, but now, it was falling off a cliff. The WWF devised an ingenious tracking method – a mixture of blood and fish scraps with such an overpowering smell that you’d remember it for years.

For bears, however, it was an irresistible mimic of a dying animal carcass in the wild. The bait was set behind a wire fence so that the bears crawling underneath would make it through, but lose several hairs in the process.

Through genetic testing, the WWF revealed that 7 bears disappeared without a trace in 1999, followed by 2 bears each in 2001 and 2002. In 2003, no trace could be found of the female bear Mona who had mothered 11 cubs. What was happening? Illegal poaching was partly blamed, and in 2007, an old mystery was finally solved. Hearing rumours, conservationists headed to the house of a hunters’ widow, and discovered a giant stuffed bear as a decoration. Genetic analysis proved this to be Cilka, the mother bear who disappeared in 1994.

Wildlife biologist Felix Knauer despaired, arguing that Austria had the habitat to support 100 brown bears. Various natural catastrophes were also to blame, including an unlucky avalanche which took out Rosemarie in 2002. 2 more bears disappeared in 2007, and from the bright new dawn of 1972, the Austrian government was scrambling to stop the second extinction of the brown bear.

In early 2012, the WWF declared that the Austrian population of brown bears was extinct. There was still the occasional straggler coming across the Italian and Slovenian border in the far south, but the true central Austrian population in the limestone alps was no more. The last bear was Mortiz, born in 2001 as the son of the Djuro, the first male bear of the reintroduction back in 1993. Djuro himself had lasted longer than most bears, being last sighted in 2009.

Until 2003, Moritz had lived in the Ötscher forests of Lower Austria, before migrating to the Upper Austria/Salzburg region. After 6 years, he moved back to his childhood haunts in 2009. By late 2010 though, the last official sighting of Mortiz was a camera trap image taken on August 3rd which showed the 11-year old bear climbing a tree.

All was calm as Moritz presumably vanished into his hibernation den, which was probably a cave given that the limestone alps of central Austria are packed with them. In 2011, newspaper articles calling him “the last Austrian bear” were common, but in spring, no signs of Moritz came.

Spirits rose when they found some bear hairs on a tree in April, as though he had been scratching an itch, but genetic testing was inconclusive. “We can still hope, but the hope is not great” said bear advocate George Rauer. Ultimately, 2011 saw no pawprints, encounters, fur or dead cattle. Moritz was gone, and so were the central Austrian bears.

Since 2012, however, a new glimmer of hope has emerged. Brown bears never went extinct in the far south of Austria, as the border triangle which spans Slovenia and Italy holds about 7-15 brown bears. These nomads are at risk themselves from higher hunting quotas introduced in Slovenia, but nevertheless, bear experts are optimistic that these southern bears could push northwards into Austria soon, and replenish the central population in a more natural way.

It appears to be happening already, as in 2014, a farmer bumped into a bear in a remote mountain pasture near the town of Lungau in Salzburgerland (central Austria). He moved backwards in a calm manner and fell over, which spooked the bear enough to slash his cheek, before playing dead encouraged the bear to walk off. Officially, there were no brown bears in Salzburgerland. In June 2019, it was the turn of Tyrol in western Austria, when several sheep were killed by a bear in Pitztal and Außerfern.

The main problem with these cross border bears is that they’re all males, which are naturally more adventurous in establishing new terrain, For Austrian bears to flourish more widely again, all it will take is for a couple of bolder females to make the journey northwards, or for the core of female bears in Slovenia to gradually shift northwards. The story of Austrian bears isn’t over yet.

The end… for now.

The post Brown Bears In Austria: The Story So Far appeared first on Bear Informer.

For 100 years since the last one died in 1904, Switzerland had been almost completely free of bears. Like Austria, it was once a notorious bear heartland, with medieval farmers looking over their shoulders constantly, until the population was completely eradicated by government sponsored hunting.

Occasionally though, a bear would stray in from neighbouring Italy, such as the notorious JJ1 of 2005, who was eventually shot dead in Germany for stealing honey. Starting in 2011, M13 continued this noble tradition. He was born in Trentino, Italy in early 2010, but soon strayed into Switzerland, making the border region his home.

The real mischief began in spring 2012, when he was spotted in Schnalstal, Italy, by a farmer’s wife. This was March 31st, and close to the border triangle of Switzerland, Austria and Italy. Because his GPS collar had stopped working over the winter, the appearance took the authorities by surprise. By April 14th, M13 had crossed into east Switzerland proper, and slain a goat. The Swiss authorities captured him almost immediately and fitted a new GPS collar, but it didn’t stop him from ransacking the beehives of two Graubünden beekeepers on April 16th. He greedily stuck his snout in, leaving shattered honeycomb and a trail of dead bees on the ground. It was official – Switzerland was bear country once again.

By April 18th, he had rummaged through a pile of compost, and by the 21st, GPS tracking showed that he was back in South Tyrol. People took to scaring him with firecrackers, and the Italian government promised free cash handouts to help beekeepers build fences.

Panic was building, and on April 25th, a school in Tyrol hosted a hastily organised “bear information event” for farmers and beekeepers. Experts reassured everyone that M13 could cross the German border soon and become their problem instead, but conceded that “We don’t know what’s going on in the animals’ minds“.

In the meantime though, M13 was helping to solve crimes. On April 22nd, M13 had an itchy back, and doing what bears do, he found a tree to scratch it on, in the Austrian municipality of Spiss (home to just 104 people). The tree fell over, smashed into a telephone line and started a small forest fire, attracting the attention of the police, who knew that M13 was nearby. When they arrived, M13 was gone, but they had a better a prize: nearby, they found the corpse of an overweight blond haired man aged 40, who had been dead a few days. He was clad only in his underpants and lying on a steep slope below the Spisser Landesstraße.

Had M13 developed a taste for human flesh? The police discovered that not only was the man murdered by human hands, he was a criminal who had multiple fraud convictions in the Italian region of south Tyrol. While they wouldn’t give details, he was being hunted in connection to another, unsolved crime. They released a mocked up image of a man who had been seen with the dead man, but the 10 sightings they received led nowhere. From that moment, M13 was dubbed “Inspektor Bär” by the German-speaking media.

On April 30th 2012, M13 was still a free bear, but now faced his biggest challenge yet – a 100mph train. Whether a bear can survive a train collision is as old a question as the constantly debated gorilla-bear faceoff, but M13 provided an answer. It happened in Switzerland, in the far eastern province of Graubünden, an area which M13 had really taken to.

At 9:40pm, the driver of a Rhaetian Railway train was approaching Ftan station, when a massive collision caused the whole train to judder. He later told wildlife experts that he thought it was a bear, but wasn’t 100% certain. Experts arrived, and found no bear corpse (or train corpse). There were no traces of blood or fur either, but soon, sightings came in of M13 roaming the Graubünden area with a limp. “The bear is likely to have bruises and possibly pain,” said ranger Hannes Jenny. M13 rose to a whole new level of celebrity overnight, as UK media outlets like Metro covered his exploits. Most importantly, his GPS signal wasn’t flashing anymore.

After pushing the train to a draw on April 30th, M13 wisely changed careers to mountaineering. He was seen climbing towards Fuorcla d’Agnel, a snowy mountain pass almost 3000 metres above sea level, before reaching Julia pass and moving onto the Swiss village of Bivio. Then, after a spring of chaos, M13 inexplicably vanished for a while.

M13 came into the world in early 2010 in the northern Italian alps. Like all bears, he was born in his mother’s winter hibernation den, weighing just 1 pound. And like most bears, he had siblings, which the mother had given strangely similar names of M12 and M14. M12 burst onto the scene with a rampage in the Austrian ski resort of Nauders on April 9th (Easter Monday). At 11:00pm, a piste-basher driver spotted massive bear pawprints (pictures here) on a snowy slope at 1900 metres. Moving ahead, he saw M12 moving on a forest trail as though eating. He flashed his light, causing M12 to flee, but the nearby snowmobile was completely torn apart, particularly the seat. The man followed the pawprints into a snowy meadow to find that M12 had already disappeared, and fur samples proved his identity.

By April 24th, M12 had crossed over to Graubünden in Switzerland, where he finally did the inevitable and joined forces with his brother M13. The two were spotted wandering in the forest together in a heartwarming reunion, but three days earlier, the noose started to tighten. Their fellow sibling M14 was crossing the Brenner motorway north of Bolzano, minding his own business, when a silver Mercedes struck him, having thought he was a calf. M14 dragged himself onto the shoulder, and then collapsed, dead.

By early June, M13 was the last surviving sibling, as M12 was run over by a car on the same cursed Bolzano highway. The bear’s identity was mysterious at first, before being confirmed as M14 in early July.

By the age of 1.5, M13 was already a fearless cub, and the authorities decided to collar him in October 2011. He received a high-powered GPS collar which recorded his location every hour, and sent the data to a policeman’s phone by text message every 7 hours. The GPS remained in place for months, and showed M13 spending the bitter winter months in Trentino, just over the Italian border.

By January 2012, however, M13 had lost his collar, for reasons never revealed. April 2012 saw M13’s first taste of fame, as he destroyed beehives and rummaged through compost heaps, and on Thursday April 12th, he was captured by a police team from Graubünden and fitted with an all new GPS collar. Now they could monitor M13 round the clock and warn farmers in advance.

But this time, the collar only lasted 2 weeks. On April 30th, M13 had his famous train battle, and the signal died immediately. At first, the authorities hoped that M13 had retreated to a cave which was blocking the satellite signal, but it soon became clear that the train had shattered the machinery beyond repair. The bear crew prayed that the VHF tracker was still working, the radio-operated backup which most GPS trackers are equipped with, but luck wasn’t on their side.

Finally, the same Graubünden police squad managed to recapture M13 using a tube trap on June 30th 2012. This time, the collar would remain on the bear’s neck until his untimely death on February 19th 2013.

A month and a half of silence passed. M13 hadn’t been sighted since May 12th. He was high in the mountains, away from contact, on epic bear quests which we’ll never know. 

Then on June 23rd, multiple drivers high on the snowy Julia Pass saw M13 running side by side with the road. M13 was officially back! At first, M13 was 400 metres away galloping through a snowfield, and suddenly, he was only 80 metres away. There was pandemonium among the children as shouts of “a bear, a bear” rang out. Nobody could believe their eyes in this tranquil mountain scene – it might have been the highlight of M13’s career.

The bear ate some grass, before lying near a rock and dozing for half an hour. He looked healthy and seemed to be 40 pounds heavier than in late April. “It was huge!” said one driver. “I saw the transmitter clearly on the bear’s neck”. Little did she know that the GPS was still smashed by the train – it was now a mere decorative collar. When the authorities captured him for his new collaring on June 30th, M13 was healthy and had recovered from his train collision 2 months earlier.

July was mostly quiet for M13, with one sheep mauling. By August 16th, he was photographed in Italy, with the hump on his back looking seriously huge. Before long, he had mauled two sheep on high alpine pastures, killing one. The storm clouds were drawing in, and September saw the real mayhem begin.

September 12th started like any other day in Graubünden. The weather was turning slightly cooler and farmers were watching the berries and cows for hints about the upcoming winter. But this calm scene changed when M13 descended from the hills and mauled a pregnant donkey, which was in an enclosure alongside 11 other animals. The bear had dodged an electric fence, which was positioned too high above a stream bed – the crafty bear sneaked under it.

The authorities announced that because goats were on a bear’s natural menu, they weren’t concerned, but on October 11th, M13 turned his attention to a school. From between 4:30am and 6:00am, he stole some beehives which were being used for lessons, forcing the school to erect an electric fence, in case he decided that scaring schoolchildren was a fun hobby. Two days earlier, he had massacred two sheep. He was in the full throes of hyperphagia, a brown bear’s mad autumnal feeding season where they pack on the pounds for hibernation.

The ominous facts were that in Switzerland, the law is tilted more heavily towards shooting problem bears, whereas in Austria, capture is always prioritised first. Environmentalists were growing concerned, and in mid-October, 6 rangers pelted M13 with rubber bullets and commanded their dogs to bark loudly, to ingrain a fear of human settlements in the bear’s mind.

But it didn’t work, as on November 15th, the most notorious incident of all happened when M13 broke into a Graubünden holiday home on a 1700 metre high mountainside. The bear smashed down the glass door, before gobbling up their stash of potatoes. Worse, he came back later for more! This was the first time M13 had broken into a building, and the owners found the house completely destroyed. This was the final straw – M13 was officially a nuisance bear who associated human buildings with food. He’d be back soon.

An online petition appeared on facebook opposing the shooting of M13, while the authorities mulled capturing the bear and shipping him back to Italy.

M13 supporters argued that as a young male bear, he would probably spread his wings soon and travel 100s of miles in search of new territory to dominate. His detractors argued that because of the abundance of human-related food, M13 was now unusually tied to the Graubünden area in Switzerland’s far east, and that the same rules as inner Alaska couldn’t be applied. But just as the walls were closing in, M13 entered hibernation on November 19th.

January was a quiet month for M13 the bear – ominously quiet, perhaps. There was heavy speculation that he was in an alpine cave, but the Graubünden authorities refused to admit it, despite knowing the truth due to the GPS tracker. The first news for M13’s fans came on February 9th, when his GPS tracker sparked back to life. The bear had awoken from his hibernation early, and went for a brief stroll in Italy’s southern Poschiavo valley before returning to his winter den. M13 was now a 3 year old bear weighing 330 pounds.

On Saturday February 16th, M13 was spotted again on the shores of Lake Poschiavo, but his next move would prove to be his death sentence. 14 year old Emina Piana was walking through a hamlet in the Val Poschiavo valley on February 19th, when she spotted a confident looking bear walking through the streets. The next minute, he was only 10 metres in front of her, on the opposite side of a bridge. She left when she felt ready, but the bear followed. When she arrived home, Piana fainted from shock, and was driven to hospital. “I was super scared” she later said. Apparently, spring was M13’s favourite time of the year, the perfect opportunity for mischief.

M13’s fear of humans was now all but gone, and on February 19th, he was shot dead once and for all, in the Graubünden region where he had spent so much time. The last of the winter 2010 siblings had fallen, and outcry erupted in Switzerland and across the world. The authorities called it necessary, but others called the slaying of M13 a cheap, lazy and easy way out.

The WWF said that the shooting was extremely disappointing and that “His death is the result of a lack of acceptance of bears in Poschiavo”. They said that taking precautions like garbage-proof bear cans would have prevented the problem. Across his 3 year existence, M13 had never once harmed a human.

There was one last positive development to remember M19 by, as February finally saw the truth about the “Inspektor Bär” corpse come to light. His name was Peter W, and his 36 year old wife Tanja B had reported him missing, but she and her secret lover were arrested in May. It transpired that they had drugged Peter, kicked him, and strangled him, dumping the body in the woods. Rather than a connection to Peter’s criminal past and heavy debts, it was a simple lover’s tiff.

The post M13 The Swiss Mayhem Bear: 2011-2013 appeared first on Bear Informer.

France generally isn’t the first country that comes to mind when you think of bears. The first thought is normally a Canadian bear hunting a moose, or a Russian bear sitting at the dinnertable with its family, but there’s one exception to the rule: the high mountain chain of the Pyrenees. These hills straddle the border between France and Spain, with Andorra tucked away as an island in the middle. They range in height from 800 metre lowlands to the 3404 metre tall Mount Aneto.

Rather than a unique subspecies, the Pyrenees bears are simply Eurasian brown bears (ursus arctos arctos) like in Bulgaria or Finland. In France, they’re the only surviving brown bears, but Spain has a separate endangered colony in the northwest, residing in the Cantabrian mountains hundreds of miles away.

The Pyrenees has two clearly divided subpopulations of bears. As of late 2019, 46 bears were located in the central Pyrenees, while 6 live in a pool in the western Pyrenees. Being separated by the treacherous Pic du Midi de Bigorre and Néouvielle ridges, these pools rarely interact, except for truly epic migrations by male bears.

In the late 1990s, the Pyrenees almost lost its entire bear population. Only 4 bears remained, until the government reintroduced a dozen from Slovenia. Today, the reintroduction scheme is still ploughing ahead, but so too are battles with protesting farmers.

Brown bears have existed in the Pyrenees for as long as the species has existed. In 1923, a cave was discovered near Montespan containing a treasure trove of fossils, dating back an estimated 25,000 years. It’s rumoured that the Pyrenees themselves were named after an ancient bear tale, where a beautiful princess called Pyrene lived along a towering mountain range dividing France and Spain. One day, she fled into the mountains and was mauled by a savage bear, causing Hercules to name the range in her honour.

By the 1800s, individual bears were being given their own names. In Vallée d’Ossau in the high western Pyrenees, a plaque dedicates itself to a 3 year old bear named Dominique: “Farewell poor Dominique, killed on the farm of Estibère on the 7th June 1848“. This Pyrenees bear was given a funeral, and had a helmet placed on its head like a soldier. On the Spanish side, Pyrenees bears were viewed as God’s dogs, who could understand everything a human said perfectly.

By the 1850s, a famine had struck Ariege, and to get the economy moving again, the Pyrenees became a global hub of dancing bear trainers, who commonly exported their bears to America. This was such a thriving trade that by 1863, the French Interior Ministry created an official registry of bear trainers, issuing 515 permits over the next 50 years. Bowling, juggling, and playing dead were all part of the bears’ repertoire.

By the 1880s, the Pyrenees village of Ercé boasted 50 certified bear trainers, and eventually created a special bear academy to teach young cubs. The first downside was the extreme cruelty involved, including helmets that clasped down on the bear’s jaws and metal rings inserted into their noses. The second was that defensive mother bears had to be slaughtered to seize the cubs.

One fantastical but true story happened in 1905, after the official separation of the French church and state. This division enraged traditional villagers, and when a state official arrived on March 6th 1906 to inventory the church’s wealth, 3 righteous priests joined forces with 300 angry villagers and 3 gigantic chained bears to block the entrance. The pictures can still be seen in a bear museum in Ercé village hall.

Thanks to the dancing bear trade, there were only 150 bears left in the Pyrenees by the turn of the 20th century. By now, bears were a distant memory in other French mountain ranges like the Alps and Massif Central. Apart from hunting and kidnapping, the main death knell was urbanisation, as roads were built in formerly remote valleys which were once perfect for bears, and mining colonies were constructed high on rugged hillsides.

By 1954, only 70 bears remained in the Pyrenees, and by 1970, they were down to an estimated 40. The French government half-banned bear hunting in 1962, before outlawing it for good in 1973. Were they too late?

In 1993, both France and Spain signed up to the EU’s Life Program, which intended to restore lost animal fauna to the European countryside. They wasted no time, and between May 1996 and May 1997, three brown bears were captured from Slovenia, and released in the French Pyrenees near the sleepy village of Melles. The first female was called Ziva, meaning “Life” in Slovenian, while the second was named Mellba after the village. Joining them was an intimidating hulk of a male bear called Pyros, who weighed 550 pounds and whose name was a combination of Pyrenees and the nearby village of Fos.

To alleviate farmers’ worries, the French government promised a generous system of compensation for lost sheep, and a free Patou dog for all, a particularly ferocious breed used to protect livestock. Who could say no to that? But while Ziva was a calmer, shier bear who still survives in the Pyrenees today, Mellba embarked upon a sheep-devouring rampage within weeks.

The slogan Non Au Ours (No to Bears) was commonly sighted on roads and signs, occasionally with teenagers spraying “oui” over the “non”. Demonstrations in Foix called for every last bear to be shot, and recommendations of electric fencing by bureaucrats in Paris were mocked by farmers who mostly used high altitude pasture. In 1997, Mellba charged a pig hunter who came between her and her cubs. It may have been a bluff, but the man shot Mellba dead, and her cubs vanished into the mountains.

The next big drama came in 2004, when the last surviving native female bear was shot in the head, at a close range of 5 metres. Her name was Chanelle, and the perpetrators were 6 wild boar hunters, who were prosecuted, but ultimately judged to have acted in self defence.

Making matters worse, the three Slovenian bears had failed to breed enough. The Pyrenees government announced that they would release 5 new bears, and chose the village of Arbas near Ariège as the grand release site. April 1st 2006 was the date, but instead of a joyous celebration, the town hall exploded with vicious protests. Hundreds of angry farmers descended from the hills and smashed everything in sight. It took 80 gendarmes to control the furious crowd, who hurled deer blood at the walls and even the local mayor.

Even the celebratory wooden bear structure was knocked over and burnt. 10 protesters were fined 7000 Euros each, and the bears were set loose anyway, which this time were 4 Slovenian females and 1 Slovenian male called Balou. The most extreme protesters had taken to placing jars of honey by roadsides, laced with glass shards and labelled with “Caution: anti-bear poison”. However, the only bear death that did happen was accidental, as Palouma the bear plummeted off a high cliff just a few months later.

The protesters won a temporary victory, as the French government abruptly cancelled 14 of the next 15 bears scheduled for release. Before the fresh 5 were released, it was estimated that 14-18 bears were now living in the Pyrenees.

Over 25 years of the big Pyrenees bear comeback, no bear has earned more publicity than the 550 pound Pyros, who was born in Slovenia in 1990 and transported to a whole new mountainous playground on May 2nd 1997. He was the original Slovenian male, while the other two 1997 bears were females, and from day 1, he was already a feisty bear.

The video of his release shows him charging out of his cage, instantly breaking through a wooden fence, and vanishing into the murky woods. He was rapidly spotted near villages, with no fear of human beings, and in 2000 he faced accusations of massacring 7 sheep in a pasture near Bordères-Louron (though he never stood trial). In 2002, Pyros wandered into a field of 200 sheep and devoured one on the spot, and his other favourite hobbies included scratching his back against a tree (2011 camera footage).

But his main boast was his sexual dominance, which was so unbreakable that Balou, the 2006 male bear, was forced to roam the central Pyrenees all alone. From 1997 to 2014, Pyros fathered almost 100% of the Pyrenees’ new bears cubs, reaching 20 cubs between his offspring and their offspring. These included Medved and Néré, whose mothers were the original female Ziva.

Pyros also mated with his own daughter. Genetic testing showed that he was both daddy and granddaddy to one cub, and there was heavy speculation in 2014 that Pyros would have to be castrated to protect the gene pool diversity. Pyros has now been missing since April 2017, at which point he was 28 years old.

From 2006 to 2016, no new bears were released in the Pyrenees, but newborn cubs continued to rise nicely, from 4 in 2009 to 10 in 2016. The overall population rose to 29, and now, the government announced that a new male bear would finally be imported from Slovenia to counteract the genetic dominance of Pyros. On July 6th, a 10 year old, 450 pound bear was released on the Spanish side of the border. His name was Goiat, which translates to “bachelor” in the local Catalan dialect.

Within one week, Goiat had crossed into France, and despite being 100 pounds lighter than Pyros, Goiat turned out to be a particular maniac. In September 2016, farmer Hugo Jauze found two of his sheep dead, close to Goiat’s last known location. On April 14th 2018, Goiat hunted a horse near the border of Spain, having killed three horses in 2017 – he seemed to have found a nice hunting niche for himself. Three weeks earlier, he had done what bears do best and raided 2 beehives, just days after exiting hibernation. Goiat “seemed to ignore the borders”, and by July 2018, there were calls for him to be removed from the Pyrenees altogether. That summer, Goiat was responsible for 30-40% of all brown bear attacks across the Spanish-French border.

By 2018, something worse happened: his GPS collar started to weaken! Footage was uploaded to youtube of a helicopter stalking Goiat on a mountainside, and on July 16th 2018, Goiat was captured in France and fitted with an all new GPS collar. As of 2021, Goiat is still roaming the Pyrenees.

2016 was the year when the steadily simmering protests finally came to a head. The final straw came in 2018, with two new female bears called Claverina and Sotrina, whose names translate to “heiress” and “little sister”. Instead of the 10,000KM bear convoy by car, these bears were forced to be airlifted into France in order to circumvent a roadblock installed by 150 rifle-wielding farmers.

Protests reached a new level of bitterness. Farmers took to dropping dead sheep carcasses outside of government buildings, leaving red trails of blood as policemen watched on. Signs were planted everywhere saying “no to bears, safety for the Pyrenees”, and “bears, ruin of the rural world”. Many farmers pledged to shoot bears on sight, even though that had been illegal since 1962. Environment minister Francois de Rugy was caught in a farmers’ roadblock and threatened with guns. One of the largest protests took place in the Spanish town of Ainsa in August 2019, where the sound of ringing cowbells was deafening. Some erected STOP roadsigns with sad-looking teddy bears tied to them.

In the first seven months of 2019, French farmers requested compensation for bear attacks 214 times, compared to 167 times in the same period of 2018, and 53 in 2015. At one point, 20 local mayors banned “wandering bears” from their municipalities, which the French high court overturned. The bear wars were well and truly heating up.

One of the most enraging incidents for farmers happened in July 2017, right on the French-Spanish border. A farmer living in Couflens, France walked over to his 209-strong sheep flock one morning to find them lying at the foot of a 200 metre cliff over the Spanish border. 169 were dead, and 40 more dead sheep were found below a cliff in France.

It turned out that a bear had charged and devoured one of the sheep, spooking the rest of the flock into fleeing and flying off the cliff at high speeds. Bear fur was discovered on one of the dead sheep, but infuriatingly for the farmer, many of the sheep didn’t quality for bear damage compensation. The distraught farmer was forced to euthanise many of his twitching, barely alive sheep with his own knife.

At first, Goiat the maniac bear was blamed, before his GPS tracking collar proved that he was elsewhere in the Pyrenees. The exact same thing happened on July 2nd 2016 when 125 ewes were chased off a cliff in the Hautes-Pyrenees province. It was caused by the sheep’s natural herd instinct, to follow their fellow sheep unquestionably. Turkey had its own incident back in 2005, where 600 sheep plunged off a cliff, but the majority were saved by the cushioning dead bodies of the first few. The moral of the story: keep your sheep away from cliffs.

Where do the Pyrenees bears stand today? 2020 was a year of both happiness and misfortune, as in April, it was announced that the Pyrenees bear population now numbered 52, the most since 1970 and a strong increase of 12 on 2018.2019 saw 10 cubs enter the world from 5 separate mothers, and while proof is difficult to come by in the vast and treacherous mountain terrain, the last year with no new cubs was believed to have been 2008.

2009 saw 2 cubs, 2011 and 2012 saw 4 each, before 2016 and 2017 saw 10 apiece. The protests calmed in January, when President Macron visited the Pyrenees and promised farmers personally not to introduce any more bears.

By June though, the bullet-ridden corpse of a 5 year old male bear had appeared near a ski station in Ariege, close to the Spanish border. Authorities vowed to press charges, but on November 29th, two bears were shot dead in Spain on the very same day. The killer of the first was a hunter who claimed to have mistaken the bear for a wild boar, while the second bear was Sarousse, a 21 year old female, who was shot by hunters when she advanced in an “aggressive manner”. In January 2021, wildlife organisations ordered Macron to replace the dead bears, forcing him to break his promise. Farmers then became even angrier when the high court ruled in February 2021 that shooting was illegal even to scare bears.

The story of the Pyrenees bears isn’t over yet – we’re only living through the middle chapters.

The post The Pyrenees Brown Bears Of France and Spain appeared first on Bear Informer.

Brown bears have been roaming Italy for as long as Italy has existed, and the first solid references started with the notorious colosseum battles and their gladiators. Commodus was a Roman emperor who was brought up by his father Marcus Aurelius to be a wise and stoic ruler, but went in completely the opposite direction. His vice was gladiatorial combat, and he would often stride into colosseum dressed in golden lion pelts like his idol Hercules, or even completely naked.

Soon, he longed to become an animal fighter, or a bestiarius. Alongside shooting the heads off ostriches, he was said to have commanded the whole of Rome to watch as he leaned over the balustrade railing and picked off 100 bears in an hour with a bow and arrow. To celebrate the bears’ deaths, he grabbed a cup of chilled wine from a nearby woman and drank it in one gulp, causing the whole (terrified) colosseum to shout “long life to you”.

Another bear incident involved a beastiari who was sentenced for his crimes to be killed by a boar. Unfortunately, this mad boar gored its handler, forcing the guards to shoot it. So instead, they brought a hulking brown bear to the colosseum, but this bear refused to leave its cage. Ultimately, the prisoner had his throat torn out by a barbary leopard. Carpophorus the bestiari was said to have slain a bear, tiger and lion all at once.

In the 1700s, the Apennine regions of central Italy like Tuscany were desperately poor, selling cheese and chestnuts to scrape out a meagre living. So one day, they looked to the local woods and decided to became bear trainers, AKA orsanti, a phenomenon which continued until the 1920s.

These bear tamers travelled Europe, charging people to see their act. Apparently, London alone had 600 orsanti working as “street artists”, particularly from villages from the foot of Mount Pelpi. One village called Cavignaga had 60 bear trainers among a population of 200 – this mostly consisted of old women, daughters, and abandoned “bear widows”, as the sons were also dragged away for bear training. This tiny village alone created 4 bear circuses, including the Volpi family bear circus which performed in London, and another which performed in Athens to mark Greek independence in 1843.

At one point, 85% of all migrants from the Appenines were leaving for “exhibition of animals in foreign lands”. They walked with their bears on foot and reached Hamburg after 1 month, which was the most popular orsanti rerouting centre to other European cities. Ultimately, many of the orsanti moved on to more exotic animals like parrots, monkeys and camels – Antonio Bernabò was one orsanti who bought a small circus, and ended up filthy rich. 

By the 1930s, the bears of northern Italy were in a bleak state, so few in number that Emperor Commodus would be shocked (although he would probably take credit for it). 19th century hunters were offered 40 florins for bear kills, and proposals in 1919 to create a national park in the alpine region of Adamello Brenta were protested by impoverished, bear-fearing farmers, who had just faced World War 1. Hunters were banned from targeting bears in their winter dens, but only in 1923 and 1931.

Things improved slightly in 1939, when Mussolini banned bear hunting across the whole of Italy. A crack squad of fascist goons called Milizia Nazionale Forestale massively increased their surveillance of the alps (perhaps these guys should have been fighting the war for them), and consequently, only 1 Italian bear was shot from 1938 to 1943, compared to 6 in 1936 and 1937. Protecting bears was possible, but in 1945, 5 bears were killed again. Flashy webcams and GPS collars didn’t exist in the 1940s – there were no other defences.

By 1950, the Italian regions of Brenta and Adamello massif were the only surviving bear colonies in the Alps. By 1980, there were 14-16 bears left in northern Italy, and after 1989, no evidence was found of reproduction.

The nadir came in 1996-97, when a professional, intensive monitoring program only spotted 3 bears. By 2000, a single elderly native male bear remained. Not even the most wildly optimistic bear biologist would argue that they could recover now. Something had to be done. 

In May 1999, a hungry female bear sniffed out some meat in the forests of Slovenia. Just when she’d located her prize, she was shocked to feel an indestructible metal door slam shut behind her. She was caught in a tube trap, and on May 28th, she and a second bear called Kirka were released into the forests of Adamello Brenta national park 1000 miles away. Bleary-eyed and confused, they took their first tentative steps in Italy. 8 more Slovenian bears were introduced over the next 2 years.

Now the conservationists could only wait and see. Would they breed or would they be shot dead by angry farmers? In spring 2002, the first two cubs appeared, followed by one in spring 2003. Then in 2004, conservationists erupted in rapturous applause when Daniza and Jurka emerged from their winter dens with 3 cubs apiece.

From 1999 to 2005, a total of $170,000 in bear compensation was paid to farmers, less severe than the Pyrenees reintroduction. A 21-strong bear management team patrolled Trentino firing rubber bullets into bears that stubbornly wouldn’t give up, and farmers were granted mobile electric fences to protect their ever-wandering sheep herds on the high alpine meadows.

Jurka was a particular troublemaker. She developed a taste for garbage and chickens early on, and ventured into towns to get them, but was spared due to being such a cub-making machine. 

Many characters have come and gone in the saga of the Italian bears, but one of the original reintroduced females was Daniza. Just weeks after her release in 2000, she was already up to some mild mischief, relaxing for two days in the town park of Riva del Garda before being escorted out by a police guard. In spring 2004, she performed a magic trick and emerged from her den with 3 cubs.

By 2012, Daniza was the mother of 5 bear cubs, and her home range was estimated to be 346 km². That’s not too shabby for a female bear, which are less adventurous than males – it’s an area slightly smaller than Dublin. In 2012, Daniza achieved a new high score of 15,400 euros worth of damage, which made up 16% of total Italian bear damage that year. She was a particularly feisty bear, and unfortunately, that sparked the chain of events that led to her demise.

On August 15th 2014, Daniza badly mauled a mushroom forager called Daniel Maturi on a mountainside near the village of Pinzolo, while defending her cubs. The authorities spent weeks trying to entice Daniza into a tube trap, but when they succeeded, the 19 year old Daniza died after being injected with an anaesthetic. Her heart must have stopped, and there was uproar from environmentalists. Normally, defensive mother bears are spared by rangers, like the popular mother bear 399 from Yellowstone, who attacked a teacher in 2007 but has been peaceful ever since.

The South Tyrol bears aren’t the only bear population of Italy. The country has 2 fully divided brown bear pockets. The alpine Trentino bears roam the far north and occasionally stray into Switzerland and Austria, and belong to the common Eurasian brown bear (ursus arctos arctos) subspecies. Then there’s a secretive colony of bears in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, just 40km east of Rome. While many scientists disagree and place them in ursus arctos arctos, these Abruzzo bears are believed to be their own subspecies which diverged 5000-1500 years ago –  the Marsican brown bear (ursus arctos marcicanus). If true, they would be the 2nd most endangered subspecies in Eurasia after the gobi bear. Only 40 remain, all within the 190 square mile Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park.

This region tends to be ignored by tourists, considered to be a rural backwater, yet it’s a lush environment of forests, valleys and swamps which boasts 63 protected species. It’s part of the Apennine mountain range, which stretches down the entire spine of Italy from north to south. The Marsican bear’s skull shape is slightly different, and it’s a particularly peaceful bear, with not a single recorded attack on humans. It’s said that because of the park’s close proximity to nearby villages, the most aggressive Marsican bears died out long ago.

100 Marsican bears were recorded in the 1980s, and in 2010, only 13 healthy breeding females remained, which is just on the precipice of sufficient genetic diversity to avoid inbreeding.

By 2012, the Trentino bears back up north had recovered to 38-43 bears. This was below the viable level for a population of 40-60, but exceeded the 1999 prediction of 5-10% yearly growth. Not all had survived, but 53 cubs had been born in 10 years. Most importantly, a 1250km2 swathe of Trentino had a stable population of breeding females. By 2017, the official estimate was between 52 and 63 bears

If we do some calculations briefly, then the mean average of the bears in 2012 and 2017 were 40.5 and 57.5 respectively, an increase of 41.9%. Now let’s extrapolate this to centuries ahead. The calculations clearly show that if current trends persist, Italy’s Trentino region will have 1902 bears by 2067, and 62,950 by 2117! It’s all steam ahead for Italy’s bears.

Unfortunately, one statistic wasn’t so rosy. In 2003, two thirds of the Trentino public favoured the reintroduction of bears, but by 2011, this had swung round to two thirds being opposed. Farmers received 80,000 euros in bear compensation in 2017, but one happier statistic is that not a single death has occurred during the reintroduction. There were only two attacks from 2000-2015: the mushroom hunter incident involving Daniza in 2014, and a runner who was attacked on June 10th 2015, by a bear called KJ2. Unfortunately, this bear was soon to spark more negative controversy.

On July 22nd 2017, 69-year-old Angelo Metlicovec was walking his 18 month old dog Cirar in the Mt Bondone area when he heard a rushing sound behind him. He span around, only to be confronted by KJ2, defending the safety of her cubs. She stopped her bluff charge 1 meter away, but Metlicovec made the mistake of whacking her with a stick. In a frenzied attack lasting just 30 seconds, KJ2 went for Metlicovec’s throat and was only blocked when he thrust his arm in the way, which she almost ripped off, before the barkings of his loyal dog scared her away.

Doctors worked furiously to restore movement to the man’s fingers, while conservationists pointed out that the man was walking his dog without a lead and that he’d provoked KJ2. WWF Italy stated that “bears must not pay the price for human errors”, but nevertheless, JK2 was shot dead on August 12th with a single bullet, the first legal shooting since the 1999 reintroduction.

She was 15.5 years old, and was caring for her 6th litter, two cubs which would now be forced to survive the snowy alpine winter by themselves, with no hibernation training.

By now, the bears still co-existed more peacefully than in the Pyrenees, where protesting farmers dragged carcasses of sheep all the way to government buildings. However, pillaged beehives and slain sheep had become a regular occurrence.

One particular nuisance was Papillon the escape bear, who was responsible for 80% of all large carnivore livestock damage in early 2019. After being captured and taken to Casteller Wildlife enclosure in July 2019, he escaped in just 2 hours. He jumped four electric fences, leaving tatted remnants of fur. His escape lasted 9 months and his antics sold thousands of tabloid newspapers.

June 2020 saw the sensation of 12 year old bear fanatic Allessandro, whose wishes were fulfilled when he stumbled into a brown bear in the bushes while hiking in a sun-drenched Trentino. He stayed perfectly calm, and after following the boy for a whole minute, standing on its hind legs occasionally, the bear lost interest and strutted down the mountainside.

The world’s media cheered at the boy’s nerve, but one month later, the reintroduction story took a darker turn when 59 year old Fabio Misseroni and his son Christian were attacked on Mount Peller. The bear broke Fabio’s leg in 3 places before his son scared it away. 15,000 people signed a Worldwide Fund for Nature petition to save the bear, but a “death sentence” was slammed down by Trentino governor Maurizio Fugatti, who had earlier been keen on having Papillon shot. Rome’s environment minister Sergio Costa called for mercy – this bear lover had been a supporter of Papillon.

No update was ever given on this June 2020 bear. Either it escaped or was quietly dealt with in secret.

In northern Italy, the most recent bear data (2019) shows an estimated 50-68 bears compared to just 3 in 1997. The breeding grounds are heavily concentrated in western Trentino, while central Trentino has a large nonbreeding area where adventurous males commonly stray. Northeast Italy has another hub due to cross-border migrants from Slovenia.

The Marsican bears of central Italy are also plotting their comeback, aided by the humans who they so wisely never attack. Salviamo L’Orso (save the bears) has been busy fencing beehives, installing Yellowstone-style bear proof bins, and vaccinating dogs to prevent them from transmitting infectious diseases.

The nearby roads have been lined with special headlight-reflecting lights, designed to warn bears when cars are coming. 6 water tanks have been renovated, to avoid a repeat of a 2018 tragedy where a mother Marsican bear and cubs plunged into a tank and drowned.

One priority is to plant beech trees over deforested mountains, to create natural corridors of wilderness, part of a master plan to link the scattered pockets into one giant bear habitat. This would massively increase their range and ability to breed. Beech trees are perfect because they also have the nuts which Marsican bears love to feed on. 2019 alone saw 24km of dangerous barbed wire removed, 61 electric fences installed, 3 bear-proof chicken houses built, and 14 bear proof metal doors installed.

It’s now estimated that 60 Marsican bears inhabit Abruzzo. There is a fighting chance that this (possible) subspecies may survive yet.

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