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.

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.

The post 10 Bear Cam Tales From Brooks Falls, Alaska 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.

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.

The post The Brown Bears of Japan: 10 Facts appeared first on Bear Informer.

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…

The post 10 Facts About The Colorado Grizzly appeared first on Bear Informer.

Home to an incredibly rare species of bear – the ice bear! In fact, the heavily advertised ice bears are simply grizzlies which live so far north that their fur is tipped with whiteness.

Bear Cave Mountain is located in Ni’iinlii Njik Territorial Park, a 2500 square mile ecological reserve in Canada’s northern Yukon province. The name comes from its massive popularity among hibernating bears – year in, year out, there’s at least 25 in winter sleep mode at once. This is partly due to the nearby Fishing Branch River, one of Canada’s most famous salmon fishing spots. This river is the Yukon equivalent of Brooks Falls in Alaska, minus the webcam and millions of internet users watching from their bedrooms. There’s so much salmon here that 30-50 bears can converge at once, with Bear Cave Mountain looming majestically in the background.

What makes Fishing Branch particularly perfect is its underground thermal springs, which keep the river nice and warm, and improve the conditions for salmon spawning. It’s a prime egg laying site, and the grizzly bears know it. The sleeping ones are effectively reserving their place for summer.

In winter, Bear Cave Mountain is a barren wasteland, but in May, when the bears finally exit hibernation, it becomes a luscious green mountain with dandelions springing up everywhere. Tourist trips are now operational, but this bear hub is so remote that visitors are forced to fly to the campsite by helicopter.

Another popular tourist spot. Knight Inlet is a 100km long fjord in British Columbia, which exits into the ocean near Vancouver Island. The main bear hotspot here is a luxurious body of water called Glendale Cove, which feeds the Knight’s Inlet and is surrounded on all sides by towering green mountains. The cove was formerly the site of a canning factory, and a mysterious, extinct village of natives, but these days, it’s an isolated wilderness where 50 hungry bears can converge on the waters all at once.

The reason is a familiar one: up to 300,000 pink salmon which arrive in its waters in June. Unlike other rivers, the salmon here stop at the lake, waiting for the early summer snowmelt. Their goal is to ride the rising waters and swim upstream to their mountainous spawning grounds, but that’s without the grizzly bears having their say.

In turn, this isolated cove is an irresistible spot for tourists, with the main attraction being the comfortable Knight Inlet Lodge. The lodge’s Instagram account consists almost entirely of grizzly bear pictures, and let’s face it, that’s all they need to drum up business! The tourists can watch the bears from boats on the cove, or they can venture out to the thick, twisting former logging roads to get more up close and personal. There are no roads to Knight Inlet – a float plane is the only method of transport.

If you drive the full length, your chances of seeing a grizzly on this 800km highway are approximately 99.9%. The Dempster highway is the only main road in Canada to cross the Arctic circle, beginning 25 miles east of Dawson (population 1250) and ending at the Inuit settlement of Inuvik (3243). The whole road is like a Canadian wild west equivalent, an extreme wilderness with snowcapped mountains and forests stretching far off into the distance. Moose can be seen playing in nearby waters, and giant herds of peaceful caribou often block the roads. The only staging posts are tiny, forgotten towns like Tsiigehtchic and Fort McPherson, each scraping together no more 1000 citizens.

If the Earth really was flat, then this highway would surely be the edge. It’s a poorly paved road, very difficult to travel – particularly when a paw the size of a dustbin lid crashes down on your windscreen. The Dempster highway is famous for its grizzly bears, so famous that wildlife enthusiasts commonly drive down the road just for the thrill of it. Sometimes you’ll see the bears climbing distant mountains, while other times they’ll by standing by the roadside as though saying hello.

Back in 2017, an incident happened on this highway when a grizzly approached a motorcyclist “with intent”, forcing him to reverse his bike by a whole kilometre. A New Zealand cyclist had been charged just earlier, and both incidents happened between 230km and 270km down the highway. Authorities concluded that it was the same bear.

Stewart, Canada is a classic kind of town where humans believe they’re running the show, but it’s actually grizzlies who are letting them live in peace. Stewart is only one mile away from Alaska, and effectively operates as a single community with Hyder just over the border. In a weird anomaly, Hyder has the only useable route to the Canadian town of Premier, meaning that its residents have to drive through another country to get home.

Stewart is a former mining town, and the buildings have a charming resemblance to the flimsy wild west sets of old, but the only lone ranger walking into town here is an 800 pound grizzly bear. On the Alaskan side, there’s a river called Fish Creek which is swarming with salmon, and this river attracts bears from far and wide, who inevitably wander past Stewart on their punishing journey from the mountains. Only Hyder in Alaska has a proper bear viewing platform, but to residents of Stewart, grizzly sightings are a normal occurrence.

Like the Demspter highway, wildlife maniacs commonly drive down the 4 hour wilderness highway to Stewart (the Yellowhead Highway) solely to get a look at them. The nearby forested roads saw one of the greatest bear encounters of 2019, when Cari McGillivray filmed two grizzlies wrestling for around one minute. They started in the grass and crossed the whole road and back on their hind legs before one of them gave up, with even a wolf stopping to watch.

At 700 grizzly bears, Alberta is less of a grizzly hotspot than British Columbia (15,000) or Yukon (7000), but within Alberta, Bow Valley is undoubtedly the best spot to see them. The valley is located just west of Calgary and includes the luxurious ski resort of Banff, which boasts around 65 grizzlies itself. They’re attracted by the lush summer foliage of the mountain slopes such as dandelions, and the bare ski slopes are particularly popular. One of the winter cable cars is even converted into a bear viewing lift in the summer.

The Bow Valley has enough bears that they’ve been assigned names, such as 144 Split Lib, and 122 The Boss. The latter is notorious for scaring off rival males and once being hit by a train and surviving.

There’s some epic family history here – horrified rangers discovered in May 2020 that Split Lip had killed and eaten the cub of a popular mama bear called 142. It was nature, they argued, and there was nothing they could do. 142’s mother was the matriarchal bear 72, who lived to 22 years old before plummeting off a cliff and dying during icy conditions. But 142’s brother still roams the park – he’s bear number 143, and a more cautious character. Bear 142 has a mischievous personality herself, punching holes in the tent of a Bow Valley backpacker one day after sniffing out some tasty oats, before being scared off by campers. The most heart-stopping moment came in 2017, when Split Lip tried to cross the pedestrian bridge at Banff’s entrance.

Bute Inlet isn’t far from Knight Inlet, only 32 miles further southeast, but it’s distant enough to become an entirely new region, with a distinct culture offered by the First Nation Homalco people, who lived there for thousands of years and still control the valley’s bear tourism.

There’s no roads to this remote bear spot: all tourist journeys start by boat from the small town of Campbell River. During bad weather, the waters can become a violent hellscape of boat-sinking currents and inescapable whirlpools, which make even reaching the sanctuary an epic task. On calmer days, you can witness orcas and humpback whales poking their heads up.

Once you disembark on the opposite shore, a minibus run by the Homalca tribespeople will pick you up and drive deeper into the inlet. Then you’ll be in grizzly country proper, as marked by a colourful wooden sign saying “Caution! Bear in Area!”. The Orford river within is packed with spawning salmon, and like any other salmon river, the bears here often congregate all at once, for better or worse. The Bute Inlet has special bear viewing platforms, and an estimated 40 grizzly bears live there overall. The salmon species here are Chum and Coho, not matching the “all 5 species” gimmick of Tweedsmuir, but more than enough for ravenous grizzlies packing on the pounds for hibernation. Like Khutzeymateen, Bute Inlet falls into the category of green, luscious mountains rather than the sub-arctic steppe of Kluane.

Supposedly, this national park in southwest Yukon has the most genetically diverse grizzly bears anywhere in the world. 250 grizzly bears roam this mountainous landscape, alongside several animal friends: moose, elk, coyotes, and Arctic ground squirrels.

This park has the highest peak in Canada, the 5959 metre Mount Logan. It’s a mountainous place, but rather than tightly forested Alpine valleys, Kluane has the bleak, epic vistas and wide U-shaped valleys of the subarctic. It’s the kind of place where distant mountains are constantly visible for miles around. The Alaska highway runs through the eastern edge of the park, and the best way to witness bears is stopping next to the gigantic Kluane Lake, accessible only by a 5 day drive, or more simply, a helicopter flight – preferably one which hasn’t crashlanded into a grizzly bear’s den. The Sheep’s Creek Trail is also famous for grizzlies, as is the Congdon Creek Campground, a popular overnight spot for exhausted drivers. Your average Kluane Park trail is guarded by rigid metallic fences, and yellow signs emblazed with “warning – bear frequenting area”.

The only decent salmon source here is the Kokanee salmon, a unique landlocked population of several thousand fish swimming in the isolated Kathleen lake. Consequently, the bears here are quite small, only two thirds the size of coastal grizzlies.

Since its opening in 1972, and with 300,000 visitors over the years, only one person has been killed by a Kluane Park bear, a hiker called Christine Courtney in 1996.

For years, there was a cast iron rule about Vancouver Island: that black bears were plentiful, but grizzly bears could never be found. It’s believed that brown bears never existed on Vancouver Island (located in Canada’s far west) even before the arrival of mankind.

As of 2016, things may be changing, as wildlife officials spotted a pair of large grizzlies swimming in the island’s northern portion near Port McNeil. They were believed to be passing through, but British Columbia has 115,000 grizzlies, and grizzlies are easily capable of swimming 20 miles in one session. Are brown bears getting more ambitious? The bear question resurfaced in July 2019, when a grizzly was spotted chewing happily on the long grass by a logging road. At one point, 9 cars stopped to get a good look, and the road was completely clogged.

In May 2020, the mayor of Sayward in the island’s north reported 7 sightings. The forest commission then declared that Vancouver island had 2 grizzly bears at most, but the cold, hard fact is that Vancouver Island lies only 1-2 miles from the mainland. Some theorise that global warming is killing the salmon, forcing the bears to search for berries further afield. Apparently, brown bears have been spotted standing right next to the island’s black bears. What could they be planning?

For now, the official position is that grizzly bears don’t live on Vancouver Island, but swim over every summer in their ravenous search for food. Pray that they’re correct, otherwise Vancouver Island may soon be named Bear Island.

In native Tsimshian speak, Khutzeymateen translates to “place of bear and salmon” and that’s exactly what it is. In August 1994, Khutzeymateen was the first Canadian grizzly sanctuary to be established and as of 2020, it’s home to 50 to 60 grizzly bears. It’s located 28 miles northeast of Prince Rupert in Canada’s bear-tastic BC region, and is a bonafide animal paradise: the grizzly’s neighbours include black bears, wolves, wolverine, porcupines, mountain goats, harbour seals, beavers, otters, humpback whales, killer whales, and 100 species of birds.

Visitors are discouraged to Khuzteymateen. It’s the bear’s home, not the people’s, but limited amounts of bear fanatics can board a boat on the nearby Cow Bell, controlled by the First Nations natives. The boat then sails down the massive Chatham Sound, which only has a slight shoreline on either side before the steep, towering mountains rise up, mountains which are far lusher and greener than the subarctic peaks of Kluane National Park. The guide deliberately stays quiet; it’s up to the tourists to spot the bears, equipped with their own binoculars. That said, sightings are nearly guaranteed in the peak season of July, whether it’s a mother with cubs or a lone male.

There are no permanent settlements, roads or camps inside Khutzeymateen. Its lush forests are why it was originally designated as sanctuary, as rates of logging accelerated rapidly in the 1970s, after a 50s and 60s golden age when only two small areas of forests were slashed down.

BC doesn’t stand for bear country, but it might as well, as British Columbia is the most heavily populated grizzly region in Canada. Tweedsmuir Provincial Park stands out within BC as a true bear paradise, with grizzlies and black bears alike. It’s the largest protected park in BC, located on the northern fringes of the great bear rainforest.

The bears in Tweedsmuir are mountain grizzlies, leaving their hibernation caves in early May. Being further inland, the salmon’s ultimate destination as it swims upstream, the bear fishing season is later here compared to Brooks Falls in Alaska, from mid-August to mid-October. Instead, the grizzlies spend early summer foraging for vegetation in distant low-lying valleys. When they do arrive, they arrive in style, particularly congregating on the Bella Coola river, a bear buffet that contains all 5 species of North American salmon.

The chalet-style Tweedsmuir Park Lodge, the main tourist hub, even boasts of grizzly bears running across its grounds. The Belarko bear viewing platform is one attraction, opening between 7am and 7pm in September. This is another realm of fresh mountain air and soaring glaciers in the distance.

Naturally, Tweedsmuir Park has strict bear-dodging instructions. As if it needed to be said: “all Park visitors are reminded that bears have the right-of-way“.

The post 10 Canadian Brown Bear Hotspots 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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Located in Yellowstone’s mid-east, Fishing Bridge is one of the park’s most popular bear viewing sites. The bridge sits on the north-east shore of Yellowstone lake, shores which happen to be prime habitat for the bear’s delicious staple of cutthroat trout. During spring, it’s possible to witness dozens of grizzlies in action here at once, as April and May are the trout’s peak spawning times. With the bears comes the tourists, although to be fair, this is often against their will, as the bridge is notorious for bison jams and bear jams!

There’s enough grizzlies (and black bears) at Fishing Bridge that tents are now outlawed from the nearby RV Park, with only hard-sided campers being permitted. The bears are in control here, not the people. On March 9th 2019, Fishing Bridge was where the first newly awakened grizzly of the Yellowstone season was spotted.

The views are stellar at Fishing Bridge, with a pristine and sparkling lake stretching far off into the distance, bordered by luscious fir trees. The bridge lies just at the end of the main highway from Yellowstone’s east entrance, and there’s also a wooden tourist office, which is so rustic that it feels like a trained moose should be serving you. Originally, the bridge was a terrifying wooden thing that swayed in the wind, and was extremely popular with fishermen (fishing was banned here in 1972), but these days, it’s a hulking construction of steel that allows traffic to cross.

Yellowstone Park is home to an endless spaghetti maze of twisting, winding trails, but Mount Washburn is undoubtedly one of the highest and most bone chilling. It’s a 3000 metre high, 6 hour long hike with a constant blowing wind, and one of the last places in Yellowstone park where the snow melts each summer.

Making matters worse, it’s also a prime hotspot for grizzly bears. The grizzlies are drawn here for one simple reason: the endless supply of whitebark pine trees, a relic of the last ice age which only grows far above the usual treeline of Yellowstone. Every year, squirrels pick and bury the tree’s nuts in their thousands, before grizzlies arrive on the scene and use their supersonic sense of smell to greedily dig up the stashes. These nuts have a massive protein and fat content, and if it’s a productive season, then grizzlies prefer them even to berries.

This isn’t a route to be taken lightly: dogs are banned from Mount Washburn, and so is leaving the trail. Unlike Fishing Bridge, the grizzly bears peak here during fall, mainly because that’s also the peak of whitebark pine nuts. It would be oh-so-easy to mix up the dates in your head and stumble into the arms of a seemingly friendly grizzly. Yellowstone’s website states simply that “Hiking this trail is not recommended in September and October“. Paw prints are abundant on this high altitude route, as are trees which have ominously been stripped of their bark by grizzly bears with itchy backs.

It’s said that Yellowstone park is the world’s most inevitable volcanic eruption, a 22 mile hotbed of pulsating tectonic activity whose eruption could fundamentally alter life on Earth as we know it. The problem is that nobody knows the exact date for this apocalypse, but one sneak preview you can see right now is Old Faithful, a geyser located in Central Yellowstone which sends a red hot plume of boiling water to the sky approximately every 80 minutes.

Tourists adore Old Faithful, and watch its eruptions with a keen eye from the wooden boardwalks, but it’s also popular among grizzly bears. Back in 2009, a grizzly bear was captured on video chasing a herd of bison right past Old Faithful itself.

In a photographer’s dream shot, the bear was framed to perfection with spouts of geyser water shooting up in the background, before continuing on past the wooden visitor’s centre. Had this occurred in high summer, the complex would have been packed with visitors, but it was merely April instead, with piles of melting snow lying all over the place.

August 2018 saw another incident, when a 10 year old boy was knocked to the ground by a spooked mother grizzly (whose life was spared) on the Divide trail just to the southeast. In June 2020, a 37 year old woman was knocked over and scratched by a bear on the nearby Fairy Falls trail, a winding path with no visibility. Old Faithful is a busy place with plenty of rangers, but the bears will always have the final word.

One of the true wildlife havens of Yellowstone Park, a place where you can witness brown bears, black bears, eagles, bison, elk and grey wolves prowling the plains in complete harmony. The Lamar valley begins at the northeast entrance of Yellowstone and is 29 miles long, with a well-paved road passing directly through the centre.

This is the only Yellowstone road to be open all year long, and drivers are encouraged to scan the rugged mountain slopes avidly for grizzly bears patrolling around. For Yellowstone’s authorities, this is the perfect safer option for less experienced bear watchers such as families with kids, and the slopes of Mount Norris and Specimen Ridge tend to be particularly packed with these brown or occasionally blond dots. There’s also multiple subroads leading to car parks where families can wait for friendly (or hungry) bears to come and say hello.

The Lamar Valley is a wide, meadowed valley with a raging river running through the middle, and wide meadows means large herds of bison. If you’ve always been obsessed with interspecies warfare (who hasn’t?), then the Lamar Valley is an unbeatable spot for seeing a grizzly trying to take down some prey, or wolves and grizzlies trying to displace each other from an irresistible bloody carcass. Ideally, this would all be happening to a soundtrack of the Lion King funnelled through a Yellowstone Park remix machine, but life isn’t perfect.

One of the eerier, creepier bear hotspots of Yellowstone park. Heart Lake lies to the southwest of the more famous Yellowstone lake, and is much smaller, but also wilder and more secretive. This is a humid place of flies and mosquitoes where you could easily walk into the deceptive shallow waters and emerge with 20-25 leeches sucking on your legs.

Every year, Heart Lake is closed to public access from April 1st to June 1st, and the reason? You’ve got it – legions of hyper alert grizzly bears patrolling its shorelines. Heart Lake is a primetime fishing spot, a world renowned spot for mountain whitefish, cutthroat trout, and lake trout. Despite the restricted access due to bears, anglers with no fear are always eager to get their fishing rods into this lake, particularly given that lake trout was introduced illegally in the 1800s and there are no restrictions on catches.

The problem, or maybe the fun part, is that grizzly bears have the same idea. One incident happened back in 2017, when a 5 year old male bear was shot dead near Heart Lake after a 2 year rampage. In 2016, the bear had rummaged through the backpacks of unsuspecting campers and ransacked their tent, and the final straw came on August 27th 2017 when the bear stole and devoured a tourist group’s entire food stash. A backcountry pass is mandatory for visiting this bear hotspot, and bear spray is strongly recommended.

For once, it’s not just a name – stand on this rocky viewing platform and if the time is right, you could see huge numbers of grizzly bears patrolling the plains before you. This popular tourist spot has a 20-25 space car park (which is in serious need of refurbishment), and is located in the Hayden valley of Yellowstone’s mid-east, a valley which runs just northwards of Yellowstone lake and Fishing Bridge.

The Hayden Valley is bisected by the Yellowstone river, with lush, flat meadows on either side where grizzlies can hunt for bison and which act as flood plains. The viewing point is surrounded by fir trees, but these have a perfect parting to allow a view of Hayden valley for approximately 10 miles into the distance, ending at the distant mountains. Armed with binoculars and patience, your chances of seeing a grizzly during spring and autumn are close to 100%, while bird lovers can watch geese, pelicans and swans gliding serenely down the Yellowstone river.

One bear incident happened in summer 2017, when a bull elk carcass washed up on the river shore just 100 yards from the nearby road. It had either been hunted, run over, or died of natural causes, and before long, several large bears were duelling over the carcass in plain sight of transfixed tourists.

In Yellowstone park, the west entrance is typically the busiest among tourists, but it’s the east entrance which is a notorious hotbed of grizzly bears. The entrance itself is grizzly capital USA, and so is the long winding entrance highway that stretches for 27 miles towards Lake Yellowstone and Fishing Bridge. This is a classic highway for bear jams where all traffic grinds to a halt, where the eyes of a keen bear tourist should be glued to car windows at all times. The first section of the highway is flanked by the Swan Lake meadow flats, which are perfect for spring bears, while the middle section climbs the 2958 metre high Sylvan Pass, which is perfect for summer bears.

One famous resident is Raspberry the bear, born in 2008. Like sow 399 of Grand Teton, Raspberry has taken to raising her cubs by the roads to protect them from aggressive back country males, and consequently, she is unusually habituated to humans. In 2016, she gained new fans for her adorable bear cub Snow, who still roams the east entrance highway as an adult. Raspberry has also stuck to her traditional turf, and in 2020, she gave birth to a new cub called Jam.

Unfortunately, rangers are increasingly worried about this Yellowstone bear hotspot, as the Sylvan pass section is so winding and treacherous that it would only take one overeager driver to hurtle round a bend too fast and take out Raspberry or one of her friends forever.

This bear hotspot has some of the tightest visitor rules in Yellowstone Park, for the sake of people’s safety. Night time trekking is permanently banned, and from April 1st to July 3rd, Pelican valley is closed to human beings entirely. Pet dogs are permanently banned.

The reason is simple – Pelican Valley is considered by wildlife biologists to be the most suitable piece of raw grizzly habitat in the entire USA. It’s located in the park’s east, directly northeast of Yellowstone Lake, and if you parachuted in, you’d probably be unable to tell whether it was the 2020s or the 1200s. It’s a windswept, moderately flat valley, running along the (unsurprisingly) bird-filled Pelican creek, with wooden bridges galore. Because it’s 1 mile wide and relatively treeless, your odds of seeing a grizzly bear walking the grassy slopes through your binoculars are extremely high.

One special feature of Pelican valley is Turbid lake, a misty blue lake surrounded by yellow pools of sulphur coming up straight from the Earth’s mantle. The lake’s shores are often littered with elk carcasses, and bones surrounded by giant grizzly paw prints, making it an awe-inspiring, yet slightly creepy place, like Yellowstone’s own elephant graveyard.

Despite the iron regulations, the death toll in Pelican valley is a surprising zero, but there’s a first time for everything.

The so-called Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, a tourist spot renowned for its towering cliffs. This bear hotspot is named after the 132 foot Tower Creek Waterfall, a moderately wide, yet torrential plume of water which plunges straight into the rocky canyon below, a drop which you would have approximately a 1% chance of surviving. Before the fall, the river winds through a series of jagged volcanic spires. The earliest European explorers were amazed by Tower Falls, as were later gold prospectors, and a vivid painting by Thomas Moran in 1872 was partly behind the original decision to create Yellowstone park.

The nearby Roosevelt Lodge (created by President Teddy Roosevelt), café and campground complete the roster of attractions, but despite being comparatively more civilised compared to say, Pelican Valley, grizzlies are a constant presence here. Tower-Roosevelt is situated on the western fringes of the grizzly-packed Lamar Valley and they have no qualms about straying over for visits.

Tower Roosevelt isn’t an official Bear Management Area itself, but it’s surrounded by grizzly armies on all sides, with Mount Washburn BMA to the south and Blacktail BMA to the west. The popular Tower Falls overlook lies just 150 yards from the car park, and the winding path is an excellent bear viewing point, where the wide-open vistas become easily visible for a brief moment before the path curves back towards the rocky canyon. On March 15th 2017, the first newly awakened grizzly of the Yellowstone season was spotted just west of Tower-Roosevelt.

A lusher, less mountainous bear hub, which wouldn’t be out of place in sleepy southern England or the old tales of Huckleberry Finn. This 13.9 mile trail lies in the northwesternmost reaches of Yellowstone park, just over the border in southeast Montana. The attraction for grizzlies here is simple – fish, fish, and more fish. Despite the name, Gneiss creek trail leads past numerous bodies of water such as Duck Creek, Campanula Creek, Gneiss creek itself, and Richard’s creek, all swimming with dense schools of trout.

The large brown trout species, for example, can grow to a tasty 4 feet, and is found abundantly in Duck Creek, while Gneiss creek specialises in rainbow trout. All this makes the Gneiss creek trail a fisherman’s paradise, but also a grizzly bear paradise. It’s perfectly normal for overenthusiastic tourists to hike towards Gneiss Creek, only to be stopped dead in their tracks by a “Trail Closed” sign planted just hours earlier due to a strong-smelling moose carcass.

The first 8 miles pass through the heart of the Gneiss Creek Bear Management Area (see this handy map), which is completely closed to tourists from March 10th to June 30th. From July 10th to November 10th, only on-trail access is permitted – unless you fancy getting a little too intimate with the local grizzlies. In winter, the area is also home to the 14 mile long Gneiss ski trail – watch out for bears awakening from hibernation. This is a windy bear hotspot, where the constantly battered trees sometimes grow sideways.

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Denali National Park was first established back in 1917, and is a sprawling area of rugged semi-wilderness located 240 miles north of Anchorage. It’s home to the tallest mountain in North America, which stands at 6190 metres and is known as Mount McKinley to Westerners and as Denali to Native Americans.

However, Denali is also home to something else: 300-350 grizzly bears, spread across 4.7 million acres of land. These grizzlies roam the park alongside moose, caribou, arctic ground squirrels and dall sheep, and while they probably debate it amongst themselves, the bears are undeniably top of the food chain.

These are inland bears, with very little fish to eat, and consequently, Denali’s bears are far smaller than those of Katmai National Park (where “grizzly man” Timothy Treadwell used to hang out). 600 pounds is considered to be a large male, compared to 1200 pounds on the salmon paradise of Kodiak island.

Nor does the population reach the 700 grizzlies that Yellowstone boasts, but what Denali does have is stability: they never plummeted to the level of 150 bears like Yellowstone did in the 1970s when garbage problems were at their peak.

The bears here have a distinct yearly pattern. In spring, they stick to the valley floors and low hills, whereas in summer, they ascend to the grassier high and middle slopes. Paw prints have even been found in the snowfields of Mount Denali itself. In late summer and autumn, they descend to the valleys again, making August or September the perfect time to spot a Denali bear.

Blond grizzlies aren’t particularly unusual around the world. They’ve been spotted in Russia and Yellowstone Park alike, but Denali has a disproportionately high amount of them. Why? Nobody knows. All bears have brown, near black, and blond colour phases, activated by genetics, but there’s no unique evolutionary pressure for Denali to create blond bears. There’s plenty of snow fields where camouflaging could be beneficial, but not above and beyond other Alaska locations. It was probably a happy accident where a group of blonder than average bears happened to be the first colonisers, creating a blond gene pool.

These blond bears have even been given the nickname of Toklat bears, after Denali’s Toklat river. Some of the bears are blond all over, but others have amazing blond rings around their chests, or are blond with brown-coloured legs.

Adolph Murie spent 25 summers studying the grizzlies of Denali, and blond bears popped up repeatedly in his journals. On June 25th 1964, a photographer told him that a blond grizzly had “exploded” out of the bushes towards a spiky porcupine, and sure enough, when Murie arrived, the blond bear was rubbing at its paw anxiously. On June 6th 1965, Murie observed a blond mother and blond cub run riot on a heavily ridged mountainside, spooking 5 herds of caribou, until they finally located a bloody carcass and spent 25 minutes feeding. They probably weren’t blond after that.

The bears of Denali are also far easier to spot compared to Banff or Katmai, because Denali is a relatively unforested national park. A large swathe consists of open tundra lowland, covered with shrubs and berry bushes. The rest is steep mountainsides, and because fully paved roads travel through the heart of the park, it’s easy to park your car and observe the uninterrupted landscape for miles around. You can scan the horizon for brown or blond dots amid the snow patches, or keep your eyes perfectly still until they register a slight movement.

Because black bears prefer forests, it’s actually easier to spot the larger grizzly in Denali National Park. The internet is packed with stories of bears devouring shrubs right by the road, creating an all-consuming temptation for drivers to stop and hug them

Bear jams are equally common. In 2015, a mother and her 2 near-adult sized cubs were awarded National Geographic’s photo of the day when they blocked the Park road, a private road open for 5 days each summer. This video shows 3 cars stuck behind a relaxed looking grizzly bear on a tricky downhill mountain road. At one point, it seems like the bear has learnt the art of politeness and is sticking to the side of the road, but the next second, he darts back across. Finally, the grizzly climbs a muddy bank between a curve, giving the cars a brief chance to escape, until they succumb to the urge to take pictures instead.

As the Denali bear first emerges from hibernation in April, there are no berries to munch on and certainly no schools of salmon to devour. Their main choice is the long, hard school of digging for the thick fleshy roots of peavine plants (Hedysarum alpinum americanum), which look like a cluster of colourful lilac flowers. For mysterious reasons, this is the only root that Denali bears dig for seriously, except for occasional rock fireweed and coltsfoot. It’s said to have the flavour of garden peas, and the peak digging season in Denali is the month of May.

To acquire the delicious peavine, the bear uses its massive muscular hump to tear into the soil, before using its entire body to pull the exposed roots free. The cubs, meanwhile, nose through the mother’s diggings to find the roots which she’s missed. Peavine is particularly common by the rivers of Denali such as the Toklat, and in the densest spots, bears can dig so relentlessly that the soils resemble a ploughed field afterwards. Some years, a patch will be completely and utterly destroyed, and the bear won’t return for 2 years, before the ecosystem recovers as if by magic.

In early June, this root-munching party suddenly stops, and the Denali bears move to new pastures: high altitude mountain slopes where they can graze on grass and sedges like an alpine cow. Half of these grasses are barely digested – the bears are merely buying time.

Late summer or autumn is when the party really gets started, as the bears of Denali switch focus to berries, and in particular, the common blueberry. Hikers are often shocked at the millions of blueberry plants which cover almost every inch of Denali’s lowlands. The bears have no patience whatsoever and usually start devouring the blueberries long before they ripen. Bears can spend hours in a single patch, using their prehensile lips to grip the branches and rip the berries off, making up for their lack of fingers.

Soapberries are another Denali bear favourite, a tiny red berry which grow in dozens on a single bush. During the height of its mad hyperphagic feeding season, a Denali bear can eat 200,000 soapberries (also called buffalo berries) per day. Humans hate them (hence soap-berries), but bears adore them because of their abundant amino acids. The rule of thumb is that if a distant Denali bear is bopping its head up and down, it’s snacking on blueberries, but if it’s moving its paws from side to side, then it’s probably snacking on soapberries.

Cranberries are also common in Denali, but they tend to go ignored, except in spring and early summer when other berries are scarce. Completing the “big three” is the hard, black crowberry, which are common from the lowlands to all but the highest slopes. These glossy berries measure 1/3 inch across, bigger apiece than soapberries, and have a bland taste to humans, but not to bears.

Sometimes it feels like there must be one bear hotspot on Earth where they behave just like your favourite teddy bear, but Denali isn’t that magical place. They’re the same as any bears – peaceful if you have the secret bear wisdom, but undoubtedly dangerous if you don’t.

August 4th 1961, for example, saw a totally unprovoked attack. Ecologist Napier Shelton was wandering the slopes of Igloo Mountain examining the forests, when he heard an ominous growling. Turning around, he saw a large grizzly charging out of the willow trees only 10 feet away. He was lucky that the 25 foot tree he was examining had wide, horizontal limbs extending almost to the ground, and up the tree he went.

Unfortunately, the bear managed to grab his ankle, sinking its paws deeply into his calf before slipping down again, and dragging Shelton partly with it. The bear recovered and climbed high once again, this time biting Shelton’s thigh. With his other free leg, still clutching the tree, Shelton kicked and kicked. The bear let go, and circled the tree two or three times, before deciding to leave.

Shelton stayed in the tree for half an hour before daring to climb down. He lived, but suffered deep claw wounds, and the doctor claimed to have found traces of blueberry juice in them! Lesson one – never underestimate a Denali grizzly.

Every national park in America is allowed to make their own rules, and one of the biggest differences in Denali is that straying within 300 yards of a grizzly bear is forbidden. That’s much larger than Katmai National Park’s 25 yards, where the bears are far more habituated to people (but fortunately not the taste of them).

A big difference to Yellowstone is that bear resistant food containers are mandatory in Denali. These are unbreakable canisters made from futuristic forms of plastic, which require extremely precise motor skills to open – this prevents the bears from getting addicted to human foods and becoming “nuisance bears” who will inevitably get shot. Unlike parts of Canada, there’s no strict requirement to bring bear spray to Denali, although the NPS highly advises it.

As of February 2010, it’s now legal to bring guns into all sections of Denali, although firing them remains illegal. Beforehand, two thirds of the park were a gun free zone, and in May 2010, there was controversy when a grizzly bear charged from the thickets and was shot dead by an unsuspecting hiker wielding a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

Naturally, route restrictions must always be obeyed, and like in Yellowstone, it’s common to saunter along to your favourite route from last summer and find a stark red and black sign reading “trail closed! bear in the area“. The sign continues with “We share this landscape with bears. Human activities will resume when the bear moves on”.

From 1922 to 1970, esteemed naturalist Adolph Murie spent 25 summers in Denali National Park observing bears, sometimes doing nothing other than watching them eat berries for hours. Murie had already pressured Yellowstone Park into halting its wolf killing program in the 1930s, and when he died in 1974, his son finished and published his manuscript, simply titled “The Grizzlies Of Mount McKinley”. It contains hundreds of obscure bear tales, and in one, a small bear unknowingly wandered towards 12 wolves on September 4th 1964, who quickly took notice and surrounded him. The bear turned to confront the alpha wolf, but was forced to spin around repeatedly as others closed in on its rear. This stand off lasted for 5 minutes, until suddenly, all 12 wolves decided to give up.

In late July 1963, Murie observed 2 bears feeding peacefully on a mountainside. They were 200 yards from a fox den, and soon, a small fox family of 3 emerged and watched the bears cautiously. The bears stayed in place all day, minding their own business, and by the afternoon, the slope was a fairytale scene of 2-3 alert foxes and 12 extremely paranoid looking arctic squirrels.

Murie rarely saw wolverines interact with bears, but one story from August 7th 1961 was particularly telling. A wolverine was wandering towards a river bar, looking very relaxed, having no idea that a 500 pound grizzly bear was ahead. When a bear came into view, the wolverine stopped dead in its tracks, span around 180 degrees, and ran like the wind, without stopping for 100 yards. The bear hadn’t even noticed.

If a Denali bear experienced the taste of salmon, then he’d pack his bags and be off to Brooks Falls – no doubt about it. But compared to Katmai National Park, salmon is in very short supply in Denali. Except for sections of the Toklat river, the annual migration routes simply don’t pass through the park. Other sources of animal flesh are equally hard to come by, meaning that Denali bears are comparatively vegetarian. For example, Denali has approximately 1760 caribou, but within days of birth, they’re already speedy enough to dodge a hungry bear. The average bear snags just a couple of calves per year, and it’s a similar story for the 1800 moose in Denali. Moose mothers have even been seen goring black bears before.

Denali is packed with Dall Sheep – they’re the reason why Denali National Park was first created in 1929. They look like a soft target, but dell sheep are famous for their razor sharp “bear senses”, positioning themselves on crumbling mountainsides with supreme tactical accuracy. They can also outrun a charging bear surprisingly easily.

The only safe and reliable option for a meat-hungry Denali bear is the arctic ground squirrel, small furry mammals which cover almost every square foot of the park. It doesn’t matter how many squirrels they eat – they constantly regenerate. The bears’ strategy is to sniff them out with their supersonic sense of smell, and rip apart the soil to expose their underground dens. Sometimes they’ll just wait with their head at the entrance.

Denali National Park is “bear country” proper. The moment you step across the border, a sound effect will ring out and your place in the food chain will tumble around 10 points. Yet in the park’s 104 year history, there has only been a single death from grizzly bear activity. Like anywhere, the bears are no bloodthirsty monsters, just twitchy and unpredictable animals who fear you more than you fear them.

The park was established on February 26th 1917, and the first fatal attack took place 95 years later on August 25th 2012. Richard White, 49, was an amateur photographer wandering the banks of the Toklat River, a well known bear hub. He spotted a male grizzly feeding on willow trees innocently, and spent the next 40 minutes taking photos.

Unfortunately, he strayed to within 50 yards, much closer than the quarter of a mile recommended by Denali rangers. Later that day, fellow hikers stumbled upon his backpack, followed by scraps of torn clothing and blood. Rangers activated their helicopter, and while flying over the shores of the Toklat river, they spotted a large grizzly 150 yards below. It was sitting on human remains, guarding a “food cache” stored for later. Because the bear now had a keen taste for human flesh, a male trooper was forced to shoot it.

Images recovered from White’s camera proved the timeline of events. This was a true “fatal last photo” scenario, but luckily, the odds are still a million to 1 that you’ll survive your first summer hike in Denali (the second is debatable).

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