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.

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Brooks Falls, Katmai National Park, Alaska is home to the famous bear cam, a globally popular webcam operated by rangers where enthusiasts can watch the bears hunting for salmon 24/7.

For a few months each summer, you can watch the local bears’ antics every day, including various returning cast members. But few have the time or energy to glue their eyes to the screen all day, so here are some of the most memorable events from Brooks Falls over the years of webcam monitoring.

Normally, a bear’s daily routine consists of catch salmon, eat salmon, rinse and repeat, but in September 2015, 273 and her cub Velcro experienced a few days where nothing seemed to go right. It started on September 20th when Velcro bit into a sign by Brooks River, thinking it was food. To his immense confusion, his teeth landed on hard metal.

Velcro then changed his mind, and tried to knock the sign over, thinking it was an enemy predator, while the amused 273 let him get on with it. 2 days later, Velcro was feeling confident enough to fish for salmon without his mother, but his bravery evaporated when the live fish started flapping around in front of him.

The confused Velcro stared at the fish for a while, wondering what to do. Then he used his mysterious bear language to call for motherly assistance, and 273 promptly showed him how to tear the fish apart into bite sized chunks. However, she was so distracted with Velcro that her own large portion dropped out of her mouth, vanishing into the fast flowing river.

Then the signpost came back to haunt the duo. 273 had listened to her cub and was convinced that signposts held some sort of nutrition. On September 23rd, she was filmed ripping a piece of paper off the sign and devouring it, while Velcro investigated the closed doors to a wooden bridge. Ranger Mike Fitz struggled to hold back laughter as he watched on.

Little did he know it, but July 15th 2019 was to be one of the most fateful days in 775 Lefty’s 14 year career as a bear. He was born in 2004, and soon gained a reputation among bear cam followers as an enthusiastic grizzly who gobbled down every salmon as though it was his last meal on death row.

Lefty was minding his own business in the deep waters of the falls by the central log, eating a rightfully caught salmon, when 747 mozied over (video). 747 is a well known beast of a bear, who won the 2020 fattest bear competition and was estimated by x-ray imaging to be 1407 pounds. Without a single blow landing, he pressed his body against 775 Lefty and forced him to give up his fish. No force was required – this was mafia style, protection racket intimidation tactics.

747 walked off, leaving Lefty starving. Later that day, 775 was captured in another video. This time he was staring into the leaping, jumping schools of salmon attempting to bypass the falls. Normally, he would be trying to catch them, but this time Lefty’s expression was forlorn. It was as though he was reconsidering his entire path in life, whether the struggle was all worth it. Yet another video from July 15th showed him standing in the fast-flowing shallow water, doing nothing, pondering deep questions.

Like every year, September 24th 2015 marked the anniversary of Katmai National Park’s creation, the vast stretch of coastal wilderness where Brooks Falls lies. It started after the biggest volcanic eruption of the 20th century (Novarupta 1912) bathed the region in chocking ash and dust, creating the valley of Ten Thousand smokes. This put yet more pressure on the bears, who were already at risk from logging, mining and road construction. President Woodrow Wilson therefore created the park in 1918, measuring 1 million acres, before Jimmy Carter slapped on another 1.2 million acres in 1978 in order to ensure “a viable gene pool population of the Alaska brown bear“.

Despite officially being part of Alaska, Katmai National Park is as close to a bear-run kingdom as we’ll get, and in 2015, 32 Chunk 409, Beadnose and bear 410 celebrated in style. They took part in an official fat bear parade, as captured in this youtube video. They walked in perfect formation down Spit Road, located next to Brooks River downstream of the falls, surrounded by tall wild grass. For the sake of occasion, the bears kept their usual squabbles to the minimum. The parade lasted for 3 minutes and a fight never once broke out.

The most amazing part of the parade is that rangers didn’t even give them the idea, thus proving that bears are more intelligent than we think and have eyes and ears everywhere – it’s possible that they secretly control Wikipedia.

868 Wayne Brother was a rare bear to have been monitored his whole life by Brooks Falls rangers, as he was first identified in 2002 as the tiny young cub of his mother 434 Flo. On October 24th 2015, his life ended where it started, in mysterious fashion. The 800-900 pound bear seemed perfectly fine on October 11th when he was filmed strolling along the spit road casually. In retrospect, he looked lethargic, but nobody could have guessed at serious illness.

Yet 14 days later, a large brown blob was spotted on a lush Brooks River island covered with vegetation. Closer inspection revealed it to be 868 Wayne Brother. Rangers battled their way through the grizzly minefield and performed a medical examination. They found no evidence of physical trauma, no battle wounds, and at 13, he should have had many years of longevity left ahead of him.

Eyes turned to a small cub which had mysteriously died 3 days earlier. It was the offspring of 451, who had returned to mourn over the corpse, and the corpse tested positive for canine distemper, a disease which causes lethargy and seizures. Could the same fate have befallen 868 Wayne Brother? All tests came up negative, as did tests for rabies and parasites.

The only physical abnormality biologists noted was high levels of abdominal fluid. Despite samples being taken from the heart, lungs, liver, small intestine contents, blood and hair, no cause was ever established, but several bears like bear 94 and 435 Holly wandered over to the body as though to pay their respects.

A battle with mysterious motives took place on June 25th 2016, when two of Brooks Falls most prominent mother bears were filmed trying to ascend a steep forest trail leading from the river.

Being the good mother she is, 409 Beadnose sent her cubs up a tall spruce tree to safety. The problem: 128 Grazer sent her cubs up the exact same tree. According to ranger Mike Fitz, “This is something I never witnessed before, cubs from two litters in the same tree“. For the next few minutes, Beadnose and Grazer stood around each other in suspense. Beadnose managed to climb higher by skirting around Grazer, but then a show of aggression scared her into the undergrowth.

Grazer took her chance, and one by one, her large blond cubs descended from the trees. The family dropped back onto the rocks of Brooks River, and in the background, one of the Beadnose’s cubs managed to escape. But suddenly, Grazer started to make sharp popping noises with her jaw. She dashed back up the trail, and when she noticed Beadnose’s second cub descending, she charged and sent the small bear scrambling back up, with no apparent motive.

Beadnose’s head can be seen floating in the thick bushes, watching on. She opts for a wise course: instead of direct confrontation, she waits patiently for Grazer to lose interest, which she does 90 seconds later. The stand off ends and Beadnose’s cub rejoins its family. The only possible motive was Grazer feeling unusually paranoid about her cubs’ safety.

The world of bears is an unpredictable one where anything that can happen will, despite the normal rules which are vaguely followed. 284 Elektra (born 2011) is a particularly unpredictable bear, sliding down river slopes for fun, balancing pumice on her nose, and breaking out dance moves on the beach.

In July 2020, rangers were amazed when she allowed the cubs of another prominent female bear, Holly 35, to play with her own cubs. Normally, a mother would roar and most likely maul the younglings, but instead, Elektra kept a watchful eye over 1 cub for over an hour on a gravelly island downstream of Brooks Falls.

Meanwhile, Holly relaxed with her head bobbing around looking for salmon. As longterm Katmai ranger Mike Fitz put it, “Holly appeared to have an almost casual disregard for the situation“. Interestingly, Holly shot to headlines in 2014 when she adopted an orphaned cub, another almost unheard of act. Perhaps she instinctively trusted other mother bears to be as generous as her?

The cubs chased each other back and forth playfully, and didn’t bat an eyelid when a floatplane landed on the water 4 minutes into the video, probably thinking it was a rare species of whale.

Finally, Elektra grew tired of babysitting and bluff charged the small sandy brown cub, sending it fleeing. The charge was clearly intended to scare rather than kill, which we can ascertain from the fact that the cub survived. Afterwards it ran frantically to a forested lakeshore, while Holly’s head casually bobbed towards it.

June had been an uneventful month for 634 Popeye so far. He had relaxed on a green luscious island, washed his feet in the river while looking around aimlessly. Most importantly, it was early season, and he mostly had Brooks Falls to himself. Except for one uninvited intruder.

On June 22nd, the Brooks Falls bear cam captured a 30 second video of a dark, large mass dropping over the falls and into the deep pools below, while 634 Popeye watched on. It wasn’t a salmon, it wasn’t a bear – it was an otter. Specifically, it was a sea otter (Enhydra lutris), a species common to the Alaskan coast which are normally too fast and furry for grizzlies to snack on.

Popeye didn’t care though, and having registered the otter’s subtle movement, he quickly disappeared off camera in pursuit. Quite what happened next is a mystery. When he returned, rangers were uncertain whether Popeye had succeeded, but their questions were answered 5 minutes later when a queasy looking Popeye vomited in plain sight of everyone. It was a black furry mass, which was visibly different to the vomit when bears gorge on too much salmon.

People say that the otter had unleashed vengeance from beyond the grave. The otter had been seen multiple times in June 2017 and was just as entitled to use Brooks Falls as 634 Popeye. It’s possibly that a faint chuckling sound came from the vomit.

Brooks Falls was once the site of a great bear bromance, albeit with many twists and turns on the way. The stars were 32 Chunk, runner up in the 2020 fattest bear competition (defeated by 747), and ScareD Bear, who was named in his fearful younger years when he constantly fled from tougher bears.

On July 11th 2017, ScareD, 273, and 700 Marge were filmed milling around in the deep pools directly below the falls for about 8 minutes, when they suddenly exited stage left.

Seconds later, 32 Chunk charged in from the right, taking control with sheer aggression. 8 days later, 32 Chunk and Scare D were filmed having a heated argument, not outright fighting, but standing close to each other with edgy undertones. Eventually, the duo separated without resolving their differences.

Three weeks past without serious interactions. Apparently, 32 Chunk knew how to control bear turf, but not how to fish in it, as in this August 5th video, he was seen climbing up the waterfall and begging for fish. ScareD didn’t even react, and 32 continued to beg on August 6th to no avail.

Was ScareD taunting him? Possibly, but 4 days later, ScareD decided that 32 Chunk had learned his lesson, as the rarest sighting in the bear kingdom was filmed: the pair were play fighting! They stood on their hind legs and locked paws, pushing each other back into the water, but without any aggression.

13 days later, 32 Chunk followed ScareD up the waterfall, and watched him from the higher forest trail for 2 minutes, as though uncertain about their friendship status.

With the bountiful schools of salmon forcing multiple bears to converge at one time, it’s said that the Brooks Falls bears are among the most cooperative in the world. They communicate using growls, they have a rudimentary hierarchy. If a newer, less solitary species of brown bear evolved, it would probably happen at Brooks Falls.

But with the bear cam operating 24/7 during the summer months, many brutal battles have been observed as well, and one took place on September 9th 2017. The contestants were 32 Chunk again, and 474, a bear who mainly shows up during fall.

About 10 bears were scanning the river for fish when 32 Chunk began to invade 474’s space aggressively. Instead of backing down, 474 immediately pushed forward. The two titans stood on their hindlegs, biting and wrestling with all their might while other bears watched on. It was 32 Chunk who weakened first, and after turning around to flee, 474 managed to sink his mighty jaws into 32 Chunk’s shoulders.

474 refused to left go, his jaws firmly in place. It’s amazing that a fountain of blood wasn’t shooting up. After wriggling free, the two bears stared for a while, before 474 felt satisfied that he’d made his point. He wandered off, leaving 32 Chunk looking chastened.

Rangers were shocked that despite the brutal blows, 32 Chunk appeared to have no visible wounds. They expected to have witnessed a real time case of a bear being scarred, the types of scars that later distinguish them. Ranger Mike Fitz declared that 474 was more dominant in the hierarchy than 32 Chunk.

469 Digger is a less known Brooks Falls bear, but easily recognisable by a diamond-shaped patch of blond fur below his left shoulder, which people originally thought was scar tissue.

His age is unknown, as he was already a fully grown adult when identified in 2001, perhaps making him one of the oldest surviving bears at Brooks Falls. But does he survive? That was a question for a while in 2013, when Digger limped into Brooks Falls on July 10th with a badly swollen left hind foot and leg. It was so crippled that his speed was reduced to 5mph and the other 3 legs acted as crutches. He couldn’t put his weight on the leg even while stationary. He had likely been in a duel with a fellow bear somewhere in the deeper Alaskan wilderness.

Within 2 weeks, Digger regained some mobility, but rangers’ fears strengthened in 2014 when the KNP&P monitoring program came up empty. He still appeared in the official “bears of Brooks River” handbook, and there was a single unconfirmed sighting, but it was feared that a fishless Digger had starved to death in his winter hibernation den. Not so! On June 19th 2015, the first confirmed photograph of Digger was taken for 2 years, blond patches evident, walking properly. He was standing by a riverside forest trail, plotting his next move.

The mystery lives on, with no official photos for years, but a strongly suspected photo of the now elderly Digger was taken in October 2020, with the diamond-shaped blond patch in plain vision.

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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.

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Japan has an estimated 2200-6500 brown bears as of 2021, and except for zoos, and pet bears which the police haven’t noticed, they’re all located on the large northerly island of Hokkaido. Meanwhile, the main island of Honshu has no brown bears, but a huge amount of Asiatic black bears.

The reason for this split is a simple quirk of the ocean floor. Despite Hokkaido and mainland Japan being extremely close together, the Tsugaru strait which divides them is extremely deep. Not Marianas trench deep, but deep enough that when sea levels plummeted during the last ice age, no land bridge would have formed between them. However, a land bridge did form between Hokkaido and the far east of Russia, whose remnants survive today as the scattered islands of Kuril.

The black bears, meanwhile, migrated across the South Korean land bridge which fused with Japan in the far south. The species came from totally different directions, but ended up in the same modern day country. It’s theorised that brown bears did migrate to Honshu at one point, but went extinct thousands of years ago, around the late Pleistocene period.

It was this split which helped to foil a classic internet hoax from 2016, when an Australian snowboarder girl was filmed being chased by a brown bear, which anyone below the age of 65 would realise instantly was CGI. She was foiled by poor geographical knowledge – the ski resort was Hakuba47, located on Honshu.

The Hokkaido wolf has been gone since the 1950s, although strange rumours still persist of howling in the thick woods of Honshu. In 2020, wolves finally returned to the soil of Japan, with one caveat – they were robots running on electricity.

The city of Takikawa, population 40,000, had seen a surge of brown bear sightings in 2020, far above the normal rate of 1 every few years. So city officials did the logical thing, and installed motion sensitive metallic wolves, complete with flashing red eyes and 60 different howling sound effects. They were installed by the Japanese machine maker Ohta Seiki, who claimed that not a single bear attack had occurred since they were installed in September.

Their sales of “Monster robot wolves” had risen to 70 since 2018, and better, there was no evidence of them becoming hyper-intelligent and deciding that humanity was the problem. It wouldn’t be surprising if family visits started to plummet though, because the wolves stand approximately 3 feet tall and would almost certainly give you a heart attack if the light caught them at midnight. The wolves’ voices travel 1km and can also make gunshot sounds and a booming hunter’s voice, covering all the warning sounds that wild bears associate with danger. Some of the robots are used to keep deer and wild boar away from crops as well.

Are you a citizen of bear country? Then robo-wolves could be coming to a town near you, and so could non-stop nightmares.

Hokkaido might be part of the heart and soul of Japan today, but it was only officially colonised in 1869. Its original residents were the humble Ainu people, whose traditional dresses and songs survive to the present day. So too does their deep connection with brown bears.

For 10,000 years, bears would be waiting wherever the Ainu people trod: by their fishing sites, enclaves where monkey pear grew, forests where deer lived. They considered brown bears to be the highest of mountain gods, giving them the name of “Kimun Kamui”. One ceremony was the iyomante, or bear-sending ritual, where a mother bear was lured out of her den during winter and killed with two blunt arrows. Her cub would then be raised among the people, hunting with the men and being nursed by the women. Once the cub reached adulthood, the men would spend two weeks carving intricate prayer sticks. Mugwort and bamboo rods would be gathered to burn as incense, and distant villagers would be invited to the upcoming festival.

With a meal of rice and wine, elders would give thanks to Fuchi, the Ainu god of fire and hearth, before two brave men were led into the giant bear’s cave. They would then give him the same treatment as his mother received years earlier, and fire two blunt arrows into his heart, before finishing him off with strangulation and beheading. The bear’s head would be placed on an altar, and the gods would be appeased until next year.

Blond bears aren’t uncommon worldwide, from the Syrian brown bear to the grizzlies of Denali national park. But none can compare to the multi-coloured wonders of the Japanese Ininkari bear.

Most of these bears are a standard brown, but there’s also a genetic grouping where the upper half of the body is pure white, with the lower half a mixture of blue and grey. Some Ininkari bears have blue eye patches as well.

Very few Japanese people ever see these bears, as they live in isolation on the remote Kuril islands archipelago, the remnants of the ice age land bridge. Specifically, they live on the islands of Etorofu and Kunashiri, with 130 and 260 bears apiece.  There’s no gradual blending of the fur – there’s always an amazingly clear dividing line between the colours of the torso and the lower body. Yet officially, they belong to the Ussuri brown bear subspecies like the rest of Hokkaido’s bears (although they could be a sub-subspecies).

The Ininkari bear has prospered due to having almost no natural predators, minimal hunting pressure due to isolation and reverence for their beautiful fur, and a plentiful supply of fish in the water. They were named in 1791 by none other than Chief Ininkari of the Ainu ethnicity, who painted a beautiful picture which was met with disbelief by western biologists.

The coastline of Hokkaido is swimming with salmon, and the forests are packed with deer. Yet for some reason, Japan’s brown bears have shifted to a vegetarian diet over the last 150 years. Dr Matsuybahsu and colleagues gathered 377 brown bear bone samples from museums and the present day, and concluded that land animals like deer and insects made up approximately 64% of the Japanese bear’s diet until 1920. After 1996, this plummeted to just 6%. Salmon consumption plummeted from 19% to 6%, whereas fruits like crimson glory vine rose from 1% of its diet in 1920 to 64% after 1996.

Add in Japanese staples like sweet coltsfoot and water dropwort, and the newer bears were getting a combined 84% of their diet from plants. What was going on? City development was initially blamed, as before 1920, Hokkaido was largely a rural place of wooden villages. 1996 was selected because it was when the rapid urbanisation of Hokkaido mostly ground to a halt. Throughout the 20th century, dams and waterworks may have prevented the salmon from swimming upstream to their old mountain spawning grounds, leaving the inland grizzlies stumped.

But there’s another equally strong theory: that the extinction of the Hokkaido wolf in the early 20th century left less deer carcasses for bears to steal and feast on. Maybe bears have a secret desire to be cool and are hopping on the new veggie trend. Either way, the bears have adapted well, as their numbers on Hokkaido haven’t declined.

That said, many Japanese bears are devouring as much salmon as ever, and one example is the Shiretoko peninsula in northeast Hokkaido, a spiky fang with a string of volcanoes running down its spine. Shiretoko is home to 200 bears, and here, something amazing has happened: man and bear are learning to live in harmony.

Shiretoko is a national park, a strictly out of bounds location except for hardy fishermen who rely on generations of father to son teachings. When the bears came-a-knocking in previous decades, they would hire hunters from rustic Hokkaido villages to kill them, or bang oil drums to make a deafening racket. Nowadays, the local bears sit on rocks and eat salmon mere metres away from the fishermen hauling their nets up with cranes. If they get too close, they stare into the bears’ eyes, and speak using “bear language” picked up by watching their gestures.

“It’s a part of our life. Even though bears appear, they just pass by around here” said a fisherman called Mr Oose. Mother bears have been seen walking their cubs through the fisherman’s bases, to get them accustomed to mankind – survival is in their blood, and they’re now passing the secrets to their offspring. The electric fences haven’t been used in years now. Like the Ininkari, the bears of Shiretoko sometimes have an unusual colouring, including a white collar around the neck on an otherwise brown body, like a ceremonial dressing.

Japan’s most notorious bear incident ever was a 1915 bloodbath, where a brown bear called “diagonal slash” killed 6 people in a rampage near a wooden village. It started in late November when goats began to vanish in the Sankebetsu region of northern Hokkaido. Mr Ikeda wasn’t exceptionally worried, but when Abe Mayu was cooking in the kitchen while watching a friend’s baby, the gigantic bear broke in and dragged her away.

50 men were gathered to defend the village with rifles, but after word of a fresh sighting reached them, they all stood up and dashed to the Ota homestead, leaving the Miouke household with 1 guard. That night, Mayu, wife of Miouke, was cooking when she heard a rumbling sound. Suddenly, the massive bear was rampaging around her house. When Mayu tripped and spilt her soup, it put out the fire, the only remaining source of light.

Mayu escaped the house’s walls, but not before 5 people were mauled to death, including her 3rd son Kinzō. Her husband Miouke was out of town searching for legendary bear hunter Yamamoto Heikichi, who refused to come out of retirement at first, but ultimately trudged into the village 2 days later. A large shadow was sighted by a snowy, icy river, which disappeared at first when they unloaded their bullets into it.

But the next morning, paw prints and blood strains were found. The bear couldn’t last much longer. The once-retired Heikichi followed the pawprints to an old Japanese oak tree, which the injured bear was leaning again. He aimed carefully, and fired a bullet into the bear’s heart, killing it instantly. The bear’s weight was estimated at 749 pounds.

In the years ahead, the Sankebetsu village became a ghost town, and the surrounding highways are still covered with bear symbols and emblems, which are oddly cute-looking.

In 2018, the BBC reported that 4 Ussuri brown bears had been rescued from grimy, rust-speckled cages in Japan, and shipped off to the UK’s Yorkshire Wildlife Reserve, where they had already gained 6 stone in weight. The bears were aged 17-27, and had been locked in conditions worse than death row since they were cubs. They had been fed nothing but rice, and shockingly, their jail was the Ainu Cultural Museum. Where was the supposed reverence of the Ainu people for bears?

Sadly, this is par for the course in Japanese zoos. Japan has a notoriously bear-fearing population, and many of the zoos were originally rehab centres for cubs orphaned by hunting parties. Gradually though, the owners noticed that families were willing to pay handsome fees for entry, and the centres slowly transitioned into cruel zoos where up to 12 bears are kept in a pit at once. A 2007 report found that Japanese zoo bears were depressed and lethargic, begged for food, and were forced to ride bikes and dress up in clothes.

In one pit, the bears had skin diseases which had destroyed their fur. Little has changed today, as a quick surf of tripadvisor reveals places like Showa Shinzan and Noboribetsu zoos where the horrified visitors leave 1 star reviews and vow never to return. Showa Shinzan has 140 bears, and the operators insist that they’re smiling, waving bears, but in reality, they’re begging for the nuts and apples which visitors are allowed to buy.

Generally, Hokkaido is a much more chaotic bear hub compared to Yellowstone or Canada. In 2017 alone, the Japan Bear and Forest Society said that 3779 bears were killed in Japan, including black and brown, with 108 attacks on humans and 2 deaths.

The chaos came to a head in summer 2018. A man’s goat vanished and a pet dog was killed and buried in July, and on August 9th, a bear ventured into the southern Hokkaido town of Shimamaki looking for food. The shining light of a spotlight failed to make it leave; only the loud bangs of firecrackers succeeded.

In 2010, a child pointed out a mother brown bear and cub in the forest by an elementary school. Soon, the big bear family was waltzing down the streets of Shari like they owned the place. Police tried in vain to scare the bears away, as fascinated locals watched on, but when all attempts failed, hunters were brought in to execute them. Just 1 day earlier, a bear had been struck by a train and killed not far away.

More recently, a bear was spotted running down a highway in eastern Hokkaido on March 2nd 2021, keeping an even pace and sticking to the left hand lane. A car followed it and filmed for 30 seconds, believing it was a dog at first, before the bear wisely observed the road rules and made a right hand turn, after checking that no cars were coming.

Rishi island is located in northwest Japan and seems to be ripped from a Saturday morning cartoon. It’s completely round, and in its centre lies the extinct volcano Rishiri Fuji. The island only exists because of layer after layer of solidified ash and magma. In 2018, no bears had been sighted in 112 years, but landmarks such as Neguma (sleeping bear) Rock proved that they’d once existed.

Just as the tourist season was about to kick off, gigantic pawprints were spotted on the seashore on May 30th, and the spacing of the claws clearly pointed to a brown bear. 12 camera traps were placed along forest roads, and on June 15th, the islanders captured a real image of the bear and its bright glowing eyes. It was official: bears were back on Rishi Island for the first time in living memory, which was all the more amazing given that the strait to mainland Hokkaido measures 20km at its narrowest point. The bear from 112 years ago was another migrant, who had wandered to the shore, shaken the water from his fur, and been shot dead soon after by hunters.

The 5000 strong population was enraptured for several weeks, but by July 12th, all signs of the bear had vanished. Pots of tempting honey failed to flush him out, and forest officials scoured a Mongolian oak forest packed with classic bear foodstuffs like acorns and salmon. Officials announced that there was a 99% chance that the bear had gone home – until next time.

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Barring a miracle, there are currently no wild grizzly bears roaming the state of Colorado. The last confirmed sighting was 1979, but just as the fur traps and wooden lodges of 19th century mountain men gave way to steel skyscrapers and GPS collars, the bear situation in Colorado was once very different. 500 years ago, the range of the grizzly bear in North America stretched continuously from the western tip of Alaska to the Sonora mountains of Mexico. Colorado, with its rocky canyons, 8 foot deep snowdrifts, and haunted mountaintop hotels, was true bear country. The bears spent decades terrorising European settlers and mountain men, and centuries terrorising native American tribes.

One legend, for example, tells of a stranger who purchased a rifle from Dr G.H. Graves in Canon City in 1872, and headed off into the Collegiate Peaks to make his fortune. This young man was never heard of again, until a few years later, a new posse of hunters ventured into the mountains and came across the intertwined skeletons of a human being and gigantic grizzly bear. Beneath the skeletons lay the rifle from Dr Graves’ shop, with 5 inches of gunpowder below the bullet ready to be fired. Naturally, Graves retrieved his gun for resale, and told the story with relish for years afterwards.

Unlike the Californian grizzly (ursus arctos californicus), the grizzly bears of Colorado belonged to the standard grizzly subspecies (ursus arctos horribilis). The Rocky mountains and San Juan mountains were their main habitat, and they were once so common that extinction was inconceivable. One mystery which still exists is their size. With no non-stop salmon feasts like in Alaska, the Colorado grizzly was probably more in line with Yellowstone’s bears, being forced to eat berries, roots, and hard to catch deer. Yet legends of colossal 1000 pounders were still common among fur trappers.

One story took place in 1870 by north Boulder Creek in the Colorado front range, near the homestead of prominent politician Emery DeLonde (rusty buildings whose ruins still stand today). Thomas Cameron was hunting grouse with some friends, and as he camped out at midday, his tiny little dog ran ahead and started scratching the dirt while barking loudly. Cameron assumed that he’d flushed out some prey, and dashed to the spot with rifle in hand, but was proven wrong when a huge grizzly bear appeared. He fired a musket ball into its shoulder, and was narrowly saved when his friend Mr Jones appeared and fired a shot into its brain.

The grizzly’s carcass weighed a staggering 900 pounds, whereas the heaviest male Yellowstone grizzly ever recorded was 750 pounds. It was “of immense size, a veritable rocky mountain grizzly”. That said, Californian grizzly hunters were often guilty of exaggerating the size of their kills.

Every bear region on Earth has its own legendary bears who loom large over the terrified locals long after they’ve actually died, and Colorado’s version was Old Mose. This was another supposedly gigantic bear, whose name came from his relaxed “Moseying” style of walking. The story kicked off in 1883, when James Radliff was hunting for elk in the Black Mountains. Soon he found himself being mauled by a 1000 to 1200 pound cinnamon-coloured grizzly, injuries which were so severe that he died.

Word of the killer bear spread around Park and Fremont county. Before long, newspapers on the east coast were paying attention, and the legend of Old Mose was officially born. He was believed to have supernatural powers, and was supposedly responsible for the murder of 800 livestock animals over his career, taking down 3 year old bulls with ease while most grizzlies struggled for calves. Old Mose pinched cattle like they were his rightful property. Fences and walls failed to stop him, and concerned cattlemen soon put a $100 pricetag on his head (which was worth far more back then).

As a famous Colorado “outlaw”, bounty hunters flocked from all over America to take Old Mose on. They commonly vanished without a trace, including one James Asher, whose gnawed bones were discovered in Old Mose’s established hunting grounds near Salida and Cañon City.

One Colorado citizen became more obsessed with taking out Old Mose than anyone – Wharton Pigg. He was the owner of Stirrup ranch, 35 miles outside Cañon City, smack bang in the heart of Old Mose’s territory. By now, it was the early 1900s. Old Mose had been a fixture of newspapers for 20 years and was rumoured to be 50 to 60 years old. Pigg was patient, and caught Old Mose in a cleverly laid trap. But when he arrived, all that was left were bloodstains and two bear toes with visible chew marks.

Some newspapers proposed capturing Old Mose and displaying him in the World Fair, but this was deemed too risky for such a violent bear. In 1904, bear hunter J.W. Anthony rode into Colorado with 15 hunting dogs. Teaming up with Wharton Pigg, the duo spotted Old Mose’s distinctive paw prints, now with only 8 toes. Eight miles into their trek, they found the legendary bear by a gulch. Pigg deployed tactics and circled around the bear with his dogs, while Anthony crept forward. Old Mose stirred, and charged Anthony, who fired 7-8 bullets, with the 7th landing in Old Mose’s brain and stopping him in his tracks just inches in front of Anthony.

His weight was estimated at 750 pounds, a huge bear, and the coroner concluded that while Old Mose’ IQ was no higher than a normal bear, the brain regions connected to taste and smell were unusually well developed, sending his cattle-pinching cunning to dizzying new heights. But one conclusion confused everyone – that Old Mose was estimated at 10-12 years old. He wasn’t 30, and certainly not 50. He couldn’t have been responsible for the death of James Radliff in the early 1880s. Old Mose may have been several different bears. Most unexpectedly, Old Mose was actually female.

The final death of “Old Mose” (whoever he was) caused a big splash of publicity, but this disguised the stark fact that Colorado’s grizzlies were now in freefall. By the 1940s, they were extinct in northern Colorado, and were solely restricted to the San Juan mountains in the south-west. According to the government, only 12 grizzlies remained.

Experienced trapper Lloyd Andersen, AKA the bear man, shot a 300 pound grizzly sow dead in 1950, but her 2 small cubs escaped. He felled another grizzly in the San Juan mountains in 1951, as did Emil Wail, who pursued a grizzly that had dragged a 12 foot spruce deadfall for 5 miles. In the 1870s, nobody would have batted an eyelid, but by now, grizzly sightings were rare enough that they made Colorado’s newspapers in a big way.

In 1954, a “tiny” dog-sized grizzly was killed by a sheepherder, and some protection came from the government at long last. The government established the Rio Grande-San Juan Grizzly Bear Management Area, but it was dissolved only 10 years later, in 1964. Rumours of shadowy bears were constantly trickling in. Andersen found a grizzly skull and followed a set of pawprints in 1957, while a game warden spotted a mother and 2 cubs in 1956.

Environmentalists were eternally optimistic, but before long, it was 1964 and no bears had been killed since the dog-like grizzly of 1954.

Lloyd Andersen was still on the case. Most of the 1960s sightings were down to him, and while none were officially confirmed, Andersen’s word was his bond. He reported in 1962 that 20 sheep had been found massacred in the San Juan mountains, and in 1964 he chased a grizzly on horseback for 12 miles. This hulking brown bear turned to snap at his dogs repeatedly, before Andersen cornered it by the rocks and killed it. Then in 1967, Andersen was camping in south-west Colorado (did this guy ever rest?) when he noticed a disturbance with his tethered horses. They were acting strangely, and in the distance, Andersen spotted a mother grizzly with two cubs, working their way up a treeless slope. For half an hour, they sniffed out rats’ nests and played with each other, before disappearing over the saddle.

This wasn’t a lone, aged survivor, it was a fully fledged grizzly family. “No doubt about it. I’ve seen grizzlies before. As a government trapper I trapped seven” Andersen said. That year, several other hunting parties saw a mother and two cubs in the area.

Nevertheless, in the towns of greater Colorado, grizzlies were slowly becoming a whisper, a myth, existing only in the imagination and stories of old grandparents told around the fire. David Petersen was one bear expert who wrote the book “Ghost Grizzlies” in 1998. He described how the Colorado grizzly was in the category of Bigfoot by the late 1960s, a romantic creature of legend. In the war-torn jungles of Vietnam, he would cast his mind to the Rocky Mountains and fantasise about its continued existence.

There was a glimmer of hope in the early 1970s, when biologists laid out the tempting carcasses of dead horses, and found them dragged away by several miles. In 1975 however, John Torres of the Colorado Wildlife Division made a solemn declaration: “Our results indicate that, for all practical purposes, the grizzly bear is now extirpated from Colorado“.

By 1979, only the most starry-eyed optimists believed that Colorado grizzlies still held out. Any serious environmentalist who claimed that they did would be laughed out of the meeting.

They were about to be proven wrong in a big way.

It was September 23rd, the last day of the bow hunting season, and 46 year old Ed Wiseman was hunting elk in the woods south of Pagosa, close to the New Mexico-Colorado border. He was a classic mountain man, barrel chested with a bushy beard. It was a high cliffed area near the headwaters of the Navoa river, where elk had limited paths for manoeuvre, and so at 5pm, Wiseman separated from his friend Mike Niederee in order to flush some game towards him. Because he’d hunted 100 black bears over his career and grizzlies were supposedly extinct, he wasn’t worried at all. But Wiseman was less calm when a few minutes later, he spotted a 400 pound bear charging him 30 metres away. He had disturbed a sleeping grizzly, and after his bestial yells failed to deter it, the bow was knocked out of his hands.

The feeling of flesh ripping soon dominated everything. Wiseman pulled his legs into a tuck position and shielded his legs, and went deliberately limp.

The bear started with his right leg, before biting his right shoulder and shaking him like a rag doll. Wiseman realised that playing dead wasn’t working, and all he could do was grab a loose arrow, and thank the maker that the head coincidentally happened to be pointing bear-wards. He rolled onto his back and stabbed, praying that the shaft wouldn’t snap. His memory went blank at this point, but gripping the primitive wooden shaft, he remembered following with a second stab into the bear’s shoulder and a third which travelled between the ribs and directly into its chest cavity.

Miraculously, the bear roared and retreated. Colorado’s last grizzly (?) managed to amble 20 to 25 yards away before collapsing. “At that point I knew the attack was over” Wiseman later said. His leg was broken, he had 70 to 85 puncture wounds, and he was in total wilderness. The reliable Niederee heard his shouts and strapped him to his appaloosa horse, but the fading Wiseman could go no further, and sent Niederee ahead to camp where fellow hunters were eating supper. Wiseman expected a helicopter to arrive by midnight, his airborne saviour, but no pilot would risk flying into rugged mountainous terrain in pitch darkness. Instead, Wiseman lay there shivering and mangled until morning. When he reached hospital, his nightmare was just beginning.

Colorado was stunned when it awoke to front page news of a man slaying a long extinct animal with a mere arrow, and the story was too fantastical for the FDA: they investigated Wiseman for 6 months, accusing him of trophy hunting. Only two successful polygraph exams cleared Wiseman’s name, and for years afterwards, he told his tale in detail to sceptical reporters, most of whom were ultimately convinced, including David Petersen.

Meanwhile, the government sprang to action. The Colorado Wildlife Division documented extensive trapping and bear monitoring in 1981 and 1982, with the goal of radio collaring any survivors. They scoured the San Juan mountains for possible cubs or siblings of the “last Colorado grizzly” but failed to find pawprints or fur, let alone living bears. They noted that Wiseman’s bear was 20 years old, with arthritis and abscessed teeth, and probably wouldn’t have survived another winter. The bear’s skull was sent to the Denver Museum of Natural History and the cold, hard stamp of extinct came down on the Colorado grizzly once more.

Doug Peacock, however, disagreed. This legendary outdoorsman later wrote the bestselling memoir The Grizzly Years, and in 1990 he began a 6 year odyssey to find signs of the Colorado grizzly’s survival, sometimes accompanied by Doug Petersen. He spotted signs such as distinct dig marks in 1993, and a photo of a blond-looking bear which could have been a blond-phase black bear, but most experts agreed was a grizzly. A hiker claimed to have been bluff-charged by a huge grizzly in 1995, but when experts rushed in, no signs were found. The Colorado grizzly was back to a being of legend.

As of 2022, 1979 remains the last officially logged and documented evidence for the Colorado grizzly’s survival. Peacock’s quest produced one very credible sighting in 1990 when he found 3 sets of pawprints: two that were clearly a black bear’s, and one with dramatically different claw and toe spacing. Not far away, Peacock interviewed a tall, thin rancher called Dennis Schultz, a well respected figure. He swore to have seen a mother grizzly with three cubs, all with distinct humps. Here’s the killer: Schultz’s ranch was only miles away from where Wiseman’s 1979 grizzly had lived. Experts flocked to the ranch and discovered probable grizzly pawprints in the snow, but because they had since been scuffled by elk tracks and their edges dulled by melting, they couldn’t be 100% sure.

Nevertheless, even bear-mad Doug Petersen concedes that they’re probably finished by now: “If there are any grizzly bears left in Colorado, I hope nobody finds them”. Like the Tasmanian tiger or Ivory billed woodpecker, “sightings” happen every year, including a hunting guide called Mark Jaffe who claimed to have seen one in 2012. Many are put down to unusually large black bears with a rare genetic colour pattern, but the last truly credible sighting happened only in 2006. In the San Isabel National Forest 19 miles east of Aspen, two experienced hunters claimed to have watched a mother grizzly with two cubs through their binoculars, for approximately a minute. Helicopters flew over in search, to no avail, but Tyler Baskfield of the Division of Wildlife declared that the hunters were credible witnesses, with ample bear experience.

The best hope is probably 2 or 3 middle aged grizzlies whose gene pool is so limited that reproduction would be impossible. But the difference to the Californian grizzly bear is that Colorado’s version wasn’t a separate subspecies. There’s no extinction, and therefore, true repopulation is possible. In 2019, the Centre For Biological Diversity began a campaign for exactly that.

Then again, the San Juan mountains are a big place – maybe we won’t need a reintroduction. Stay tuned…

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