For many years, a theory has been popular that if humans went extinct overnight, it would be bears who gradually became smarter and inherited the Earth. Others vote for rats or chimpanzees, but a bigger mystery is how intelligent bears are right now. They’ve been observed to use tools by scratching themselves with a riverbed rock, and in 2014, undergraduate Alex Waroff of the University of Washington decided to conduct a better experiment. 3 male bears and 5 female bears were tempted with a glazed donut, and one by one, the bears climbed up, tempted by irresistible bear hunger. The donut had been established as food, and now the fun part came, as the tree stump was moved into a far corner.

It didn’t take long for the star bear to emerge: a 9 year old female called Kio born in 2005. She moved the tree stump and flipped it over almost instantly, grabbing her donut prize. Better, she later decided that a green plastic box was easier to move instead.

According to the researchers, this was the very definition of tool use: “She manipulates an inanimate object in several steps to help her achieve a goal“. The other grizzlies were significantly slower, but 6/8 got there in the end. The researchers were keen to stress that they weren’t on a mission to get bears addicted to donuts (which were donated by a local grocery store).

In October 2014, Ukrainian conservationist Sergey Gashchak received a fuzzy grey image of a brown bear from a network of camera traps he’d placed, with its eyes glowing in the dark. It didn’t matter that the quality was sub-144p, what mattered was the location – the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. For the first time since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, brown bears were back in the area. In fact, it was the first time for a century. They joined an ever growing army of wolves, horses, foxes and radioactive deer.

Since its 350,000 residents were evacuated in 1986, the CEZ has become one of Europe’s top wildlife reserves, purely by accident. Working in cooperation with British scientist Dr Mike Wood, Gashchak had set up 42 constantly rotating camera traps, with 14 each in high, medium, and low radioactivity areas.

Gashchak had already spotted brown bear footprints in early 2013, but definitive picture proof had eluded his grasp. Now, he had it. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone encompasses 1600 square miles of swamp land, traditional forests and meadows. It’s perfect for dozens of bears, let alone one bear. The question is whether the bear’s offspring, if it has any, will have mutations or deformed limbs. It’s happened to wolves, but some conservationists believe that Chernobyl has been a net positive for wildlife. For example, the rare Przewalski’s horse has made it their safe haven, sheltering in abandoned buildings.

The other possibility is that the radioactivity makes the internet’s worst nightmare a reality – bearsharktopus.

Conservationists worldwide erupted in outcry in March 2014 when a popular Swiss zoo called Dählhölzli Zoo had one of its cubs euthanised. Cub 4 was in an enclosure with its mother and father, Masha and Misha, who were a gift from the Russian president Dmitri Medvedev in 2009. 1 week earlier, the father bear had astonished watching visitors as it mauled its second offspring Cub 3 to death, to win back the affection of the torn mother.

After 2 days of peace, the father bear had started bullying the cub. It was only a matter of time before another murderous rampage, and so the Swiss zoo euthanised the cub in order to spare it “further distress and pain”. Swiss Animal Protection (SAP) asked angrily why the male wasn’t separated, as in the wild, a male bear will leave its mate immediately after courting. Anyone with cursory bear knowledge could have expected the gruesome outcome, they argued. The zoo responded that Misha and Masha have an unusually close bond, but why couldn’t the cub have been separated, SAP then asked. After all, Misha and Masha were human-reared, proving that the cub didn’t strictly need its mother.

Even worse, the zoo planned to stuff the cub and parade it around in front of schoolchildren as a reminder that “nature is brootal”. The bear was deep frozen, and the skin removed, to be placed over a plastic mould designed perfectly to resemble the dead cub.

Bears might be 800 pound beasts who are infinitely stronger, faster and more huggable than humans, but they suffer from many of the same health problems. Mango, for example, was a blond-coloured Syrian brown bear living in the Ramat Gan Safari Park of Israel. He was 19 years old, and in May 2014, zookeepers noticed that he was walking with a strange gait.

One week later, his right forepaws were completely paralysed, and a high powered X-ray showed a ruptured disc between vertebras 2 and 3. The zookeepers were surprised, as most of the older bears at Ramat Gan had no mobility problems. The bear was transferred to Safari hospital, where it took 10 people to lift the heavily sedated Mango onto the operating table. Even tranquilising him was a challenge.

The operation lasted 10 hours, and first step was shaving all the fur off Mango’s back. With an IV drip through his snout, they propped his head up on a pillow wrapped in a trash bag, and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his right paw. His skin was cut open, and his spinal cord exposed for five hours. Finally, the doctors switched the X-ray back on, and rejoiced – the operation had been a completely success.

The vets said that “Mango will undergo a length process of rehabilitation“, but were optimistic that he would walk again. They declared it to be a world first operation, although that said, nobody knows what’s happening in the cold depths of Russia.

While Bulgaria was under Soviet rule, its ruling commissars were fond of hunting brown bears in the Kormissosh forests of the Rhodopes mountains. Consequently, Bulgaria invented the bear breeding farm, bare concrete pits with no roofs where up to 75 bears were imprisoned at once, with no ability to roam. The temperatures would reach 35C, and the bears showed clear signs of mental trauma.

In 2007, Bulgaria joined the EU, and bear breeding was mercifully outlawed. But where would the existing bears go? In November 2014, a zoo in Kent made space for two of them, and the bear travelled 1600 miles overland. A normal bear approaching hibernation would score 5/5 on the body condition scale, but on arrival, these bears only scored a 1.5. Jagged bones stuck out, there was no discernible fat or muscle, and they were clearly mentally traumatised. Not for long though!

At first, the bear pair were kept in spacious quarters, where they could see, smell and almost touch each other constantly. Their diet was changed to fruit and vegetables, rolled oats and mealworms, with the occasional honey and marmalade. Eventually, the bears were released into a wide, spacious enclosure, and almost immediately, the “stereotypical behaviour” of imprisoned bears disappeared. They were exploring like normal bears should, and their curiosity was returning. The two bears developed a close relationship, which social media users called a “bear bromance”. The one hitch was that the bears didn’t hibernate, but it was still early days.

Disturbing signs that bears were growing more intelligent arrived in 2017, when a bear stole a IZH shotgun from a hunter’s cabin. He barely damaged anything else – it was like he knew exactly what he wanted. However, even starker evidence of super intelligent bears arrived in 2013, when 3 hunting buddies were exploring a forest in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug in Russia. When a brown bear burst from the undergrowth, one hunter reacted quickly and shot it in the leg. The agonised bear fled the scene, and the hunters retired to their wooden cabin for the night, probably joking about the incident.

Nothing could prepare them for the final scene the next morning. The shooter’s Ford Toyota was found destroyed from head to toe. The windshield was smashed in, the wing mirror was obliterated and the bumper was punched inwards. The lights were broken and the once comfortable seats were ripped apart. It was a revenge attack, pure and simple, and the final evidence was that his best friends’ cars were left untouched.

“That must have been a busy night for the bear, he worked hard” said one hunter, “did you leave anything sweet inside?”. “No, I didn’t”, replied the stunned shooter.  They concluded that the bear pinpointed the shooter’s car with its hypersensitive sense of smell. The bear was probably limping for a few weeks, but it had the last laugh.

Romania has the most bears of any non-Russian European country, numbering 8000 as of 2020. But in 2014, a rising wave of anger swept the country over constant damage to farms and property, personified by a Transylvanian politician called Csaba Borboly. He claimed that bears were wreaking havoc on the countryside, and were a natural disaster equal to floods or forest fires.

In late September, the Romanian government had increased the yearly hunting quota for bears to 550 from 460 in 2013, compared to 0 in Montana, but Borboly wanted it higher. Egging him on was the hunting lobby and an increasingly anti-bear media, for whom bears had become a regular punchbag. In fact, hunting wasn’t enough: Borboly wanted “state institutions such as the police, the paramilitary and even the army”.

But conservationist Csaba Domokos argued that bears were in more danger than people thought. The counting system relied solely on paw prints, and because bears have huge territory, he argued, individual ones were sometimes counted multiple times, increasing the number by thousands artificially.

A wave of poaching swept the country – Domoskos claimed to have saved 5 bears from steel traps in one 25 mile stretch, and believed that many more victims were lying unseen. Hunting enthusiasts claimed that Romania had 10,000 bears, while the more pessimistic conservationists argued 3000. Domoskos mourned the loss of one large male bear who was extremely adventurous and had activated 3700 location points in 6 months. “It does feel like a personal loss to me“, he said.

Chobani is an American yogurt company who have long used real life bear actors like Bart II in their adverts. In 2014, they successfully took the concept to the next level by getting a guy in a 12 foot mechanical bear suit to roam the streets of New York terrifying people. The suit was a high-tech contraption of wires, metal and special buttons to operate its jaws, with a very small-looking human entombed inside it. Descending onto the street, the bear burst around corners and caused women with handbags to jump back in fright. Coffee-carrying businessmen reacted with genuine fear, while the occasional passerby was so harried and busy that they didn’t notice – that’s New York for you. Either that, or it was a case of “seen it all, done it all”.

The bear’s antics included attacking a hot dog stand, and scaring a passing dog which its owner was forced to pick up. The only people who didn’t seem frightened were a toddler who stared in amusement, and two construction workers who wanted their picture taken.

Occasionally, the bear gets more relaxed and sits on a bench, most likely to avoid being shot. The advert ends with a mysterious hand placing a Chobani yogurt pot in front of robo-bear, which he prepares to devour. In 50 years, there’ll probably be old grandmas insisting that they saw a bear in New York City once.

This is the dark story of 2014, so stop reading now if you’re an animal lover. Established in 1986, Jinyangho zoo in South Korea is a notoriously cruel place, where the animals are kept in tiny cages with haunted expressions on their faces. The equipment hasn’t been replaced in decades; the ape cage is so old that touching it leaves a trail of red rust on your hand. Just see the reviews on tripadvisor.co.uk.

On November 29th 2014, a 10 year old brown bear weighing 440 pounds approached the cage of a lioness. There was a padlock, but it was so rusted that the bear swatted it aside with its paw. Once inside, the bear launched a savage attack on the resident lioness, resulting in her being put down the next day. It wasn’t explained how the bear had escaped its own cage. Unbelievably, the zoo reported it to the local government as death by “natural causes”.

The zoo claimed that the lion had no external injuries, that she was 20 years old and it was probably due to old age. But eyewitnesses said that the lioness and  floor were covered with blood. The bear itself wasn’t to blame, as its aggression would have been inflated by the traumatic conditions.

Apparently, South Korea’s welfare requirements for zoos are unusually loose for a developed country. Jinyangho zoo has 260 animals in total with 52 species spread across 20 cages.

Do you love animals? Then don’t visit Jinyangho zoo!

Over in Russia, the land where anything can and will happen if bears are involved, St Petersburg zoo entered a state of mourning in August 2014 when Varvara the bear died aged 35. She was speculated, though not proven, to be the oldest brown bear in the world, after previous record holder Tikhon had died not long before at age 36. Although she had spent more time resting than usual, she had enjoyed a flashy birthday party in June, and still loved to gobble down rabbit, salmon and fruit. Varvara was said to be the star attraction among the zoo’s visitors. The average life expectancy for a wild bear is 15 to 20, about 15% reach age 24, and wild bears over 30 are almost unheard of.

In a statement on the Russian social network Vkontakt, the zoo thanked Varvara’s loyal fanbase for their support. According to a spokesman from the zoo: “Animals live longer in zoos where they are exposed to no dangers, enjoy diverse good options and good healthcare”.

That said, Varvara wasn’t the oldest brown bear ever. The record is 48 years in captivity, and more recently, sow 101 died in June 2020 at the age of 38. She had lived in Yellowstone Park from 1982 to 2002, but developed such a taste for garbage that rangers couldn’t keep her away from human settlements. She was moved to the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Centre permanently, but her compensation was living to a ripe old age.

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As 2020 ended, the question of whether bears love to play in fresh snow as much as people was finally answered. Jenny was (and still is) an orphaned Syrian brown bear cub residing in the Orphaned Wildlife Centre in New York. She’s a lifer bear who will never be released back into the wild, but judging by this video, she’s happy that way.

In December, when a foot of fresh snow fell on New York City, Jenny looked as though she’d drunk a newly invented brand of hypercaffeinated coffee. Like a human, she ran around the yard, forging tunnels through the deep virgin snow. There was no obvious motivation other than pure fun. She was in such an energetic mood that she approached her first pen-mate, a black bear, who was much more chilled out.

When Jenny approached her fellow Syrian brown bear, the two started wrestling for approximately one minute, biting at each other playfully. Then she realised there was more virgin snow to play in, and charged deep into it, before finding a long, dark tunnel that the bear trainers had installed. Jenny vanished for a second, before reappearing on the other side. Then she found a tree and hugged it like a hippy, before doing what else, but making more tunnels through the freshly fallen snow. This snowy January day seemed to be Jenny’s Christmas morning equivalent. No, they’re not allowing humans to move in.

Loki was a Eurasian brown bear cub born in Leicester zoo in England, and over his first year of life, he enjoyed himself to the maximum. The biggest treats came on his first birthday on December 14th 2012, when Loki received a pile of elephant dung to roll in. His next treat was more understandable, a delicious helping of fruit cake, although that said, its main decoration was dog biscuits, arranged in the shape of a number one.

Loki had the most fun with a large orange ball. He spent the whole day rolling around with it on the frozen earth, raising the ball above his head, and balancing it on the ground like a pro. Assisting Loki in opening the presents was his 8 year old mother Nellie, who was apparently severely jealous and kept stealing things. Everything was put inside old cardboard boxes, including an old tyre which Loki playfully stuck his head through.

Halloween was another time of fun and festivity, as Nellie and Loki were gifted a special jack-o-lantern. As Loki smashed it open, he received an incredible surprise when a flood of yellow scrambled egg leaked out. He was also tempted by a pedalo with strawberry jam hidden in the middle. “He is so playful and an absolute joy to watch in his enclosure” said one employee of Leicester zoo.

As of 2022, Loki still lives, in his new home – the Scottish Deer Centre. 

Wildpark Schwarze Berge is a wildlife park in Hamburg, Germany which boasts thousands of well-treated animals. There’s bison, elk and wild boars galore, and in 2017, two bears were filmed having a jolly wrestle in a pool, with “Füttern verboten” (no feeding) signs close by.

For 6 minutes, the bears snapped and bit at each other, pushing each other back and forth while only their heads were visible. It was clearly a friendly battle, except for one tense moment 3 minutes in when a bite landed too closely and the first bear pushed the other forward for 3 seconds with a ferocious display of speed. The aggression faded as quickly as it appeared, and for the last 3 minutes, the bears were best friends again.

Just before 6 minutes into the video, the second bear randomly glides back on its hind legs as though moonwalking, while the other bear watches on in bemusement as though thinking “what are you doing, man?”. The video then ends with both bears looking at the camera in unison, realising that nosy humans are watching them.

Meanwhile, the rocks in the background are some of the weirdest ever. They’re covered in complex patterns which resemble dozens of ever changing animals or human faces, like an infinitely concentrated fossil bed, but there’s no evidence that they’re anything but normal rocks. Most likely this was deliberately placed to make the bear sanctuary feel wilder and hijack the bears’ wild brains. 

One classic debate about brown bears is whether they have terrible eyesight or not. Advocates say it’s compensated for by a laser accurate sense of smell, but the truth is that bears have excellent vision, including a membrane called the tapetum lucidum which enhances their night vision. In fact, photographers have taken numerous photos of brown bears sitting on rocks and watching the sunset, with no apparent motivation other than pleasure. Sometimes, they’ll stare at mountains or sweeping vistas for hours, and biologists believe that they derive the same pleasure from amazing views as we do.

This classic 2014 video is one example. A cameraman is sitting in a chair in the Alaskan wilderness near the McNeil River, trying to stay calm as a massive brown bear approaches. It’s clear, however, that this bear is relatively friendly, and about 1 metre away from a tasty human being, it sits down peacefully. It then does nothing other than cast its gaze over a wide running river for 1 minute, with a look of happiness on its face, before standing up and wandering away.

It’s possible that the big brown bear was strategizing for a future fishing session, working out the best rocks to sit on, but unlike dogs, bears are well known to have full colour vision. When scientists trained bears to associate foods with varying shades of blue, such as blue-green or blue-yellow, they always chose the correct colour when food containers were placed in front of them.

We’re always waiting for the latest milestones in bear advancement, whether it’s the first bear to use tools, the first to deliberately seek out alcohol, or the first to say “I love you” to its owner like that dog did a few years ago. In November 2014, the first bear to discover the game of Buckaroo was found, or the first to be seen anyway.

In Katmai National park, photographer Lisa Sidorsky captured a small brown bear cub hopping on its mother’s back while she fished for salmon. The water was extremely shallow, and the cub was at no risk of being washed away – there was no motivation other than pure fun. The mother playfully shook her offspring off, but the cub refused to be deterred, and hopped back on the bear express all over again, while the mother gradually became annoyed as her salmon meal slipped away. Nevertheless, the bear found getting tossed off its mother almost as fun as the ride.

The cub climbed back onto her back like a person clinging to a horse, although its grip was much less secure. The bear was now hanging on for dear life. At top speed, a bear can reach 35mph, but fortunately, there were plenty of brown, furry handholds for the cub to use.

Bears aren’t limited to playing with each other, or with trees. If you play your cards right in life, then you too could be playing with a 1000 pound grizzly bear before long. True, it might take 5 years of training and trust-building, but for Jim Kowalczik, playing with grizzlies is a daily reality. Kowalczik is a trainer at the Orphaned Wildlife Centre in New York, the same bear haven where Jenny played in the snow. Jimbo was a 1400 pound Kodiak bear, and thanks to the trusting relationship between the pair, the internet is now flooded with so many videos of man and bear playing that it’s a wonder the youtube satellite hasn’t crashed.

The most popular has 39 million views and shows Jim lying on the ground calmly, while Jimbo hugs him and eventually drools on him lovingly. He probably thought he was giving his trainer a clean. Other videos show Jim playfully dropping snowballs onto Jimbo’s face and grabbing him around the jaws, mimicking a bear’s fighting style in the wild, while Jimbo envelops him in a massive bear hug. One small problem when rough housing with bears is their 5 inch bear claws, but Jimbo was a considerate Kodiak bear. In this 2017 video, Jimbo makes a hasty grab for his master, pinching his skin. Jim lets out a yelp, and Jimbo withdraws his claws instantly, understanding his mistake.

These videos are having a serious effect on society: an epidemic of people wanting their own bears to play with.

In March 2012, definitive evidence arrived that bears love sledging, even if the bears were so heavy that no sledge was required. Photographer Duncan Usher visited a wildlife park in Bavaria one sunny spring day, and watched in amazement for 20 minutes while two fully grown bears slid down a snowy slope on their backs. The two bears were bear grunting with pleasure, and when they hit the ground, they did somersaults, before climbing back up and sliding down all over again.

One was an adult male with lighter hair, while the other was an adult female with darker hair. Visitors gathered around in amazement, and Duncan was laughing so hard that he could barely take photos. At one point, the male bear grabbed his back paws with his front paws to increase his speed. The duo then finished off by rolling around in the snow and play fighting.

It was theorised that the early spring sun had stimulated a hibernation awakening instinct, telling the bears that it was finally time for some fun. Once playtime was over, the bears walked off in opposite directions as though nothing had happened. According to the photographer: “in 25 years of animal photography I have never experienced brown bears playing so enthusiastically“.

The island of Sakhalin lies directly north of Japan and is the largest in all of Russia. The island is a haven of untouched wildlife, and as drone operator Sergey Lyubachenko proved, this once included two incredibly playful brown bears. These were subadults approximately 1 year old, and all signs suggested that they’d left their mother or been abandoned, but were sticking with each other’s company to stay safe. And they were certainly enjoying it, as in an epic vista thought to be the realm of only CGI wizardry, the two bears were filmed paddling and play-wrestling each other. The setting was a clear, sparkling lake, with a setting sun in the distance that cast everything in an orange glow.

Beforehand, the bears had walked towards the lake and sniffed around for washed up fish, before snacking on a fresh fish they’d kept in storage. This water paddle fight was clearly their post-dinner celebration. The 1 minute video was uploaded on July 30th 2020, although it was filmed earlier, as Lyubacnehko had previously considered the quality to be poor. He needn’t have worried. There’s clearly no aggression in the young bears as they playfight in the water.

That said, it didn’t end so well for the drone. At one point, one bear left the lake and started pawing through the sandy shore like he was making a blanket, but when Lyubachenko flew his drone forward to investigate, a lightning fast paw swiped it down.

If you’re a fan of bears and hugging people is your perfect idea of fun, then this video is right up your valley. Released by Lake Clark National Park in Alaska, it shows two brown bear subadults lying on a beach and cuddling each other. That’s all the video shows, but the bears clearly love it.

One starts by staring into the distance and apparently thinking hard, while the second bear cuddles her from behind. Then the front bear lies down and buries her head in her paws, while the other bear cuddles her even harder. One guess is that the front bear was wondering why their mother hadn’t returned to them, before bursting into tears, and being comforted by her caring sibling. Or maybe, we humans have no clue what goes on in the bear world.

Regardless, Lake Clark has around 217 brown bears in an area of just 54 miles. Its shores are swimming with salmon, and consequently, the bears are more tolerant of each other compared to inland grizzly country where food is scarce. There’s less competition, and while the Lake Clark grizzlies will commonly snap and bite, there’s an established social hierarchy whereby proper communication can prevent fatal brawls. Maybe these caring grizzlies were an example. Maybe this social communication is spurring them to evolve into a new form of caring bear. 

Our final playful bears were sighted in Katmai National Park in Alaska, the former stomping ground of world famous grizzly man Timothy Treadwell. These bears were much friendlier than the ones that ate Treadwell in 2003, as the video shows two sub-adult bears wrestling for 5 minutes by a wooden fishing platform stretching out onto a lake. One bear is dark brown, while the other is lighter. It’s obvious that the bears aren’t trying to assassinate each other – if they were, it would have to be the most half-hearted attempt in history. The bears pull all the tricks from the bag in their make believe duel, including standing on hind legs, snapping at each other’s necks, bear hugging each other to the ground, and jumping on each other’s backs.

Halfway through, the lighter grizzly seems to decide that playtime is over, until the overeager dark bear pesters him into half-heartedly re-entering the fray. At times, the fighting suddenly accelerates, cranking up a gear, but the playing session never transforms into a fully fledged grizzly duel.

The fight apparently took place in a human-bear paradise, as 1 minute in, a float plane is visible in the background landing on a lake, surrounded by the bobbing heads of 3 adult grizzlies. 2 minutes later, two of those grizzlies are now on land, on a mini-peninsula in the background near a parked fishing boat.

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What do you do when you’re loaded with millions of pounds and have plenty of time on your hands? Concoct a grand plan to bring bears back to British soil, of course. Paul Lister is the laird of Alladale estate, 60 miles north-west of the Scottish city of Inverness. He’s the heir for the successful MFI company, which sells flatpacks, and in October 2013, he announced his intention to create a 20,000 hectare wilderness area in the Highlands. His goal was to introduce 2 packs of 10 wolves and a dozen bears within 3 years. It would “change the landscape for the benefit of nature”, he announced.

Politicians and Ramblers Scotland reacted angrily. They argued that innocent hillwalkers would have to watch their step, and that bears and wolves were wiped out for a good reason in the first place. But Lister announced plans for a feasibility study in 2014.

At the time, Scottish Wildlife Trust was busy reintroducing beavers to Scotland in Argyll, and Lister hoped to ride the rewilding momentum. “If you don’t have an ideal to die for you have nothing to live for,” he said.

His model was the game reserves of South Africa, and he hoped that the reserve would attract 20,000 visitors a year with accommodation for 80 visitors to sleep overnight in. As of 2021, there are no bears roaming the Scottish countryside yet. Given the success of Papillon in escaping from bear sanctuaries in Italy, that might be for the best.

Many animals have been observed getting high on drugs in the animal kingdom, from dolphins seeking out puffer fish, to sheep running wild after gobbling up magic mushrooms in a field in Scotland. With bears, the substance of choice is apparently aviation fuel.

Over in the Kronotsky nature reserve of Russia’s far east, Igor Shpilenok photographed several bears sniffing loose cans that had been lying around, taking deep breaths for minutes at a time. They carved out shallow holes in the snow, and laid back in a state of Nirvana before passing out. The bears were getting so addicted that some of them stalked helicopters and waited for takeoff, hoping to lick up the fuel traces that fell onto the hard soil. The cans contained kerosine and gasoline and according to Shpilenok, this went on for 7 months.

The reserve is Unesco World Heritage site, but the fuel cans weren’t pollution – they were necessary to keep the ranger huts up and running. Occasionally though, the workers wouldn’t take them in fast enough. Other bears spent minutes sniffing at and manhandling the empty discarded cans. A female bear called Suzemka was one of the most heavily addicted, turning up regularly.

The Kronotsky Nature Reserve is home to the Kamchatkan brown bear, the largest subspecies after Kodiak bears. Like Kodiak Island, the Kamchatka peninsula is particularly rich in salmon, the bear’s favourite food.

This bear incident is bone-chilling for all lovers of soup out there. It took place in the village of Ust-Ilimsk, in the Russian region of Irkutsk, to the north of China and 5 time zones east of Moscow. A Siberian couple were sleeping in a makeshift bedroom in their sauna hut, while repairs were carried out to the main house. Earlier, they had cooked some borscht, a traditional Siberian soup which mixed beetroot with meat, and left it to cool in a pan on their verandah cooker.

At midnight, they were startled awake by loud noises. Peering through the window, they noticed a bear on the verandah gobbling down their soup, their pride and joy. They phoned the manager of their residence, who himself phoned the police, who turned up quickly and fired loud shots into the air. But it was too late – the soup was all gone. With its work done, the bear fled into the woods. Except for the soup, nobody was hurt, including the bear, but the couple noticed a smashed window which bore all the signs of bear paw handiwork.

The bear was a messy eater as well, with bright red soup spilled all over the rings of their verandah cooker. In response, the police implored local citizens to store their homemade food safely. On an ominous note for the neighbourhood, many Olympic athletes have been swearing lately that beetroot gives them superstrength.

Yusuf Alchagirov thought it would be a normal day farming raspberries. The 80 year old Russian was tending to his farm in the small region of Kabardino-Balkaria in Russia’s south, when he noticed a brown mass of fur shift from its hiding place behind a tree. The bear’s head was “a great watermelon”, and at first, Alchagirov ran way, but the bear caught up at blinding speed.

Relying on pure instinct, Alchagirov tossed his jacket over the bear’s face to act as a muzzle and drew a knife, but the bear’s aggression was too much to handle. Summoning all his Siberian strength, Alchagirov clasped down on the bear’s jaws. Soon, he was pinned to the floor, and Alchagirov remembered his teachings and delivered a hard punch to the bear’s nose. ‘The bear’s nose is very sensitive”, he later explained.

At this point, a glimmer of hope must have entered his mind, and he pressed home the advantage with a headbutt. But seconds later, Yusuf Alchagirov was flying off a cliff. The bear had grown tired of the fight and tossed him away like a rag doll.

Advantage bear, but whether he won the fight depends on your definition of a win. Because three days later, Alchagirov was sitting in a hospital bed with a smile on his face. He had four broken ribs, deep teeth marks, and bruises, but he was alive and well. “It would have killed me if I’d chickened out,” the farmer said. Friends had found him at the bottom of the cliff seven hours later, after he failed to return from the farm. No update on the bear was given.

This headline was a mixture of black bear and grizzly antics. It concerned a rising fear in America that bearmageddon was imminent, after 6 terrifying bear attacks occurred in quick succession in August 2013. The first happened in north Michigan when 12 year old Abby Wetherell was jogging on a local trail, before a black bear chased after her for no good reason. She tried to play dead, but the demented bear slashed her on the thigh, and only fled when her father and neighbour arrived.

On the same day, August 15th, two Yellowstone hikers felt a sinking feeling as two small grizzly cubs came strolling towards them. Sure enough, a mother grizzly burst out of the bushes and slashed one man on the backside. His two companions whipped out their bear spray cans and saved his bacon, but the next Saturday, two habitat researchers were assaulted after accidentally waking up a sleeping grizzly in Idaho. On August 17th, a hunter survived for 36 hours in the Alaskan wilderness with severe blood loss, after a savage grizzly mauling. 

All 6 victims survived, but bear panic swelled to insane proportions, with fears that they’d been playing dumb for a thousand long years and were now revealing their true colours. But there was no “story”, said the authorities: bear attacks always tend to rise during fall. The angry mother grizzly wasn’t executed, as she was deemed to have been defending her cubs. Ultimately, Washington DC was still controlled by humans as of 2014. 

The Marsican brown bear might be the most endangered subspecies in the world. It’s an Italian bear, but unlike the majority, who reside in the Trentino region of Italy’s alpine north, Marsican bears live in the Abruzzo National Park of Italy’s centre. There’s only 40 left in the wild, which is why in 2013, genetic scientist Pasqualino Loi announced a grand plan to save the species through cloning. He proposed similar methods to the famous Dolly the Sheep from 1994: a somatic cell nucleus implanted into an enucleated ovary, in a similar surrogate mother. Pasqualino Loi’s ingenious idea was to use a large species of dog like a Saint Bernard or Schnauer. This dog would give birth to a whole litter of Marsican bears, preferably six to eight.

Opponents called the plan madness, arguing that low genetic diversity was a problem for Marsican brown bears going forward and that cloning would just create thousands of identical ones. Loi argued that this was better than no bears at all.

Loi was previously involved with the cloning of a wild Mouflon sheep in 2001, which died within six months of birth. He had been campaigning for a decade to collect DNA samples from endangered wild animals, to make cloning projects possible once technology had advanced far enough.

Loi promised to apply to the Italian Minister of Environment for permission, but as of 2021, there are no Saint Bernards pregnant with grizzly bears yet.

In years gone by, the supposed hairs of yeti have been confirmed in a lab to come from Tibetan blue bears and Himalayan goats alike. However, nobody has proven that yetis don’t exist, and in 2013, a British scientist working for Oxford University dropped a bombshell. Bryan Sykes had issued a global call for yeti or sasquatch hairs in 2012, and now, he revealed his findings: an extraordinary genetic similarity between two “yeti” hairs and the jaws of an ancient polar bear which dated back to 100,000 years ago.

This jawbone came from the earliest stages of polar bear evolution, when they diverged from brown bears, a period of volatility where the subspecies were being mixed around like a salt shaker. His analysis centred on two hairs, with the first coming from Ladakh in northern India, from the mummified remains of a creature shot by a hunter in the early 1970s. The second was from 800 miles further east in Bhutan, a single hair found by yeti enthusiasts in a forest in the early 00s.

Other scientists called for more detailed genetic analysis, but other scientists were optimistic, speculating that an ancient polar-brown bear hybrid could survive, unnoticed, in the Himalayan mountains today. It could be similar to 100,000 years ago, or it could have evolved into a towering, shaggy, yeti-like form.  “The next thing is go there and find one,” Sykes told the media.

Alberta, Canada has only a fraction of the grizzly bears of British Columbia or Yukon, but as of 2020, they still number a healthy 200. The Banff area has famous bear characters such as The Boss and Split Lip, complete with mugs and T-shirts for sale in gift shops. Tourists go hiking near Banff jut to witness these celebrity bears, but in May 2013, it was revealed that grizzly numbers were steadily rising in the far southwest of Alberta as well. They had been gone from the area for 70 years, but it was previously a grizzly hotspot, and over the last decade, sightings in the prairies had grown more and more frequent.

Approximately 122 grizzlies now lived to the south of highway 3 near Pincher Creek, a kind of symbolic staging point for grizzlies. Locals had been insisting for years that a grizzly mob was taking over. Conservationists believed that the bears were heading north across the US border from Montana, perhaps fleeing the scene of a crime, but most likely migrating naturally. The town of Cardston had become a particular bear haven. 122 wasn’t a hard estimate, but the minimum number, based on DNA samples from hairs in the undergrowth.

That said, the rangers struck a note of caution. They pointed out that Alberta was still a risky bear habitat of heavy industry and jam-packed highways, dubbing it a “mortality sink” for grizzly bears.

As the first bear on Swiss soil for 70 years, M13 was probably the most famous bear in Europe from 2011 onwards, but February 2013 saw the chilling news that M13 had been shot dead. He was a member of Italy’s 80-strong Trentino population who had strayed across the border, and announced his arrival when several sheep were found dead near the mountain region of Graubünden.

In October 2011, he was fitted with a radio collar, only to lose it in a collision with a train in Spring 2012, before being refitted in June 2012. He stuck to the Graubünden area, and the real problems started when M13 broke into a holiday home at the end of 2012 and robbed the food inside. He followed villagers in broad daylight, and seemed to have an unusually low fear of humans. Raiding villages had become ingrained in his behaviour, and even rubber bullets wouldn’t work.

M13 was awarded the official tag of “problem bear”. Biologists hoped that his spirit would dampen in hibernation, but it wasn’t to be. Mid-February 2013 saw M13 following two hikers into the village of Val Poschiavo, and then walking down the street as though he owned the place. A driver almost ran M13 over, at which point he bared his teeth and growled. After he was shot, the reaction was 90% hostile, and the WWF issued a statement saying it was “deeply disappointed”. It was rumoured that M13’s final crime was stealing potatoes.

Syrian brown bears are one of the rarer subspecies in the world, found mostly in Iran, Turkey and Iraq, with the occasional pawprint sighted in the winter snows of Syrian mountains. However, there’s plenty living in captivity, and one example is the Hollywild animal sanctuary of South Carolina.

From her massive weight gain, and the extra effort she’d spent digging a den that year, animal curator Jennifer DeCarranza was convinced that Giza the sow was pregnant. In early January, she spent every day kneeling by her den and listening intently. Her heart finally soared on January 16th when she heard the tell-tale noise of a bear cub asking for food. 

On March 27th, the park announced the results of a competition to name her: Nygeff. Nearly 100 people submitted names, and so many voted for “Syri” that this was made her nickname. The park prepared for its first day of public viewing that weekend, with the aim that viewers could watch Nygeff at every stage of her development. Gerald Abraham, the man who invented the name, was given a free pass into the park. Nygeff also had a father called Ramses, and with Giza, he had also produced three offspring in early 2012, named Amalia, Malika, and Samra. Previously, Ramses and Giza were members of a travelling bear show.

The post Top 10 Brown Bear Headlines Of 2013 appeared first on Bear Informer.

Most internet hoaxes last only a day or two, but some achieve the glorious status of zombie hoax, where no amount of facts can stop them from reviving every 2 years and shuffling around the internet looking for new victims to fool. The contender in the bear universe comes from 2001, when according to a legend, forest worker Ted Winnen was hunting in the remote Alaskan wilderness, when a massive grizzly bear suddenly charged from nowhere. With a feather light touch, Winner unloaded his 7mm Magnum semi automatic rifle into the bear’s skull, which came to a stop only inches away.

Winnen quickly realised that this bear was a record breaker. It weighed 1600 pounds, stood 14 feet from the head, and was tall enough to see inside a first floor gutter. Inside the bear’s den, Winnen discovered the half-eaten remains of a hiker, and its stomach contents proved that the bloodthirsty monster had eaten 2 innocent hikers over the last 72 hours and was doubtlessly planning more soon. A smiling picture of Winnen with his blood-stained kill proved that it was all true.

The Fish and Game Department was bombarded with inquisitive phones calls, but Winnen was actually a US airman, not a forest worker. The gun was a .338 Winchester Magnum, and the bear weighed only 1100 pounds, which was massive, but far from a record. Its height was 10 feet 6 inches.

Let’s face it – if bears are able to see into first floor gutters now, then humanity might as well give up.

A man is standing with his bicycle in a forest, adjusting the go-pro strapped to his helmet. He slams his pedal to the floor and is now cycling at top speed, but seconds later, a gigantic brown bear is on his trail, galloping out of the forest. The man accelerates, and hangs on for dear life. He risks a look around, only to see the bear directly behind him. The bear is keeping pace with ease, and is undoubtedly hunting him. The path transitions into thicker undergrowth, and the man pedals with all his might, but there’s just no quit in this bear.

Suddenly, at high speeds, the man sees a tree branch blocking his path. Disaster! He hops off his bike and dashes behind a fir tree. Breathing heavily, he risks a quick peek out, and sees the bear standing in the clearing. It looks around determinedly, before making a decision and galloping off into the thick undergrowth. The man survives.

If real, this would be one of the vividest pieces of bear footage ever shot, rivalling the £10 million productions of David Attenborough with ease. But is it real? The universal consensus is no. The bear is far too shiny and seems to float around the forest setting like a ghost. Its movements are too smooth. The forest background is blurred, yet the bear looks crystal clear.

All signs suggest that this youtube video with 38 million views (as of June 2022) actually contains a CGI bear copy and pasted from Skyrim.

When it comes to bears, Japan is a country of two halves. The northern island of Hokkaido is packed with brown bears of the Ussuri brown bear subspecies, but the main island of Honshu doesn’t have a single one. Or does it? In 2016, an 18 year old snowboarder almost broke the internet after 20 successful years of operation when she posted footage from her go-pro helmet.

She had just returned from the Honshu-based ski resort of Hakuba47, and was so cheerful that she started singing Work by Rihanna as she skied down the snowy mountainside. What she didn’t notice was the bulky shadow of a brown bear. 10 seconds in, a brief glimpse of a watchful bear appears, and 30 seconds in, the bear is chasing her at high speeds down the snowy slope, while the girl sings happily, totally oblivious. She claimed to have only noticed the bear when she viewed the footage the next day.

“This was at Hakuba 47 in Japan, filmed yesterday! Be careful people!!” she posted. But instantly, some were sceptical of the fact that the video had a producer and director in the credits. This would have been the first brown bear sighting in Honshu for millennia, yet conservationists didn’t bat an eyelid. The acting performances were stuck in a 1950s b-movie, as the bear growls nonstop throughout the video, in a sound effect surprisingly similar to, you guessed it, Skyrim. Some speculated that this was the same bear from the bike chasing video.

Rendlesham Forest in Sussex was already a place of heavy superstition, after UFO sightings in December 1980 gave it the moniker of “Britain’s Roswell”. In March 2009, things took another twist when 3 separate brown bear sightings were recorded.

This was strange considering that brown bears had been extinct on British soil since 1000AD. One woman called Jenny Pearce had been exploring the woods with her 3 year old son, when she “saw it moving through the trees ahead. It was much bigger than a dog”. She scooped up her young son and fled. Meanwhile, youtube user nickdeptford uploaded a video with two blurry photos, taken in 2008 and 2009, of a hairy brown mass eating vegetation.

Conservationists rejoiced, but the authorities panicked and urged dog walkers to take care. Some speculated that a bear family had escaped from a local zoo, and a local policeman mused that “I think a bear could survive in Rendlesham Forest“.

The truth? It was all a promotional stunt for a performance of “A Winter’s Tale” by William Shakespeare, which contains the classic stage direction of “exit stage left, pursued by bear”. The crew admitted to inventing the bear story from start to finish. The youtube video was deliberately blurred, and nickdeptford was secretly an actor called Jimmy Grimes who was a dab hand with photoshop. Jenny Pearce was a figment of Jimmy’s imagination, and her fake email account was his handiwork.

The Rendlesham bears vanished in a puff of smoke, but it didn’t stop some from believing.

2019 saw a news headline ripped straight from the pages of Hollywood: a “living mummy” rescued from a Siberian cave after a brown bear had stored him as a future meal for 30 days. His skin was covered with rotting sores, and his body was severely emaciated. He could remember his first name, Alexander, but not his surname or age.

The story was first posted on the Russian tabloid website EADaily, and soon went viral, accumulating hundreds of thousands of views. Alexander had survived the cave of nightmares by drinking his own urine, and was only saved when the dogs of passing hunters started barking and refused to go on. “The bear preserved me as food for later”, he explained. Alexander was now being treated in hospital, and could only open his bright blue eyes and wave his arms. But he was alive, and it was a true miracle.

Or was it? It turned out that the “living mummy” was actually a severe psoriasis patient. He hadn’t been close to a bear in months, let alone a cave. The crusty, emaciated pictures were all too real, but Alexander had actually fallen into a depression and let the festering sores get out of control. Every element of the story was made up. It was about as accurate as that 2017 story of a bear roaming Siberia with an IZH shotgun. Eventually, Alexander’s mother turned up to whisk her poor boy away from hospital, and probably buy him some moisturiser.

In 1996, a new record for brown bears was set – the first bear to break the laws of physics. This superbear managed to place its right forepaw inside a tent’s door, yet still have its right forelimb fully outside the door.

Or at least that’s what a photograph from 1996 shows. Like the old rumours of snakes in KFC ball pits, this was a viral email hoax that purported to show the last picture ever taken by respected bear photographer Michio Hoshino, before he was mauled to death 5 seconds later.

The photograph consists entirely of a blue-coloured tent and a gigantic bear head with its fangs bared, already stepping into the tent. The bear has very sad eyes, as though he’s already apologising. Elements of the story are true, as the real life Michio Hoshino was a professional photographer who died on August 6th 1996 in the Kamchatka peninsula of Russia after being dragged out of his tent.

So where did the picture come from? A photoshop competition of course! It’s an excellent job on the surface, but there’s a few telling flaws, such as the amount of light on the bear’s head. It’s clearly daytime outside, but Hochino met his end at 4am, not 12pm noon. The shadows of the plants indicate that the sun lies to the right, while the light on the bear is clearly coming from the left. The strange blending of the leg puts the cherry on top.

It sounded like the natural progression of reality TV. 30 contestants, including 15 men and 15 women, would be dropped on a remote Siberian island in Tomsk and left to survive for 9 long months, in a real life imitation of the Hunger Games. 200 fixed webcams would be placed around the 9km island, which was said to be infested with brown bears due to migrants fleeing northern wildfires. The competitors would have to fish, hunt, and build primitive shelters. Most controversially, game2: winter had a “death clause” where competitors agreed that if they were murdered over resources, it was their own fault.

Game2: winter was the brainchild of Yevgeny Pyatkovsky, who had become a multi-millionaire with an app that blocked annoying debt collector calls. He said: “This is the raw Siberian taiga: anything can happen, and we might not be on time to solve an emergency.“. An initial promo poster featured a roaring brown bear head superimposed onto a background of cold, white snow. When asked for his motivations, Pyatkovsky replied “To earn money, this is my main task“. The plan was for 100 criminals to break free from a nearby jail, whom the survivalists would have to capture for a bonus from the sponsors. People were disgusted with the show’s brutal concept, but couldn’t tear their eyes away.

The truth, of course, was that Game2: winter was never happening. It was a social experiment, as announced on June 1st 2017. A few people were suspicious from day one.

This is the only fake video with a slight question mark hovering over it. You’re probably familiar with Timothy Treadwell, the world famous grizzly man of Alaska whose last moments were accidentally captured in a 6 minute audio recording. Werner Herzog, director of Grizzly Man, is the only person to have listened to the full tape, which he immediately handed to Treadwell’s close confidant Jewel Pavolak, telling her to destroy it. She locked the tape in a vault, but that hasn’t stopped a fake video from appearing on youtube, with over 3 million views.

The audio is professionally performed and extremely shocking. The youtube page is full of sober comments that humans are low down on the food chain, but the consensus among Treadwell experts is unanimous: close but no cigar. Many of Treadwell’s lines like “get out here, I’m getting killed out here”, and Annie’s “Play dead!” are repeated precisely.

However, one dodgy-sounding effect is said to be the sound of heavy rain hammering against the tent. Plus, the tricksters couldn’t resist the usual Hollywood bear growls. On reddit, one audio engineer chimed in and said that they were clearly taken from a public domain animal sounds FX kit! In the real tape, the bear is said to be silent. It’s even rumoured that Herzog himself has declared the tape to be fake.

That said, there’s still a slight element of mystery. Several people on the internet have sworn to have heard the real tape on the local news the day after Treadwell’s death, one of whom was drinking in a local bar. It’s said that the police and coroner were also given a copy, and if so, it’s conceivable that a junior employee could have leaked them. If you love unsolved mysteries, then the Treadwell tape is one that lives on.

The BBC is famed for its wildlife documentaries, and perhaps the most popular in 2013 was the Great Bear Stakeout. Chris Martin spent several weeks in Katmai National Park in Alaska, the former territory of Timothy Treadwell. In the first episode, a tragic scene was shown where a mother bear lost her cub in the water, who was later washed away, presumably drowned. The footage repeatedly cut between the distressed bears and Martin standing on a beach, with his haunted expression saying it all about the harsh brutality of nature.

But there was one problem – Martin wasn’t even there! 9 months later, it emerged that the footage of Martin and the bear cubs had been spliced together from separate sources. Martin was doing a radio interview where the harrowing cub scene was scheduled for discussion, and naturally, he mentioned that he wasn’t actually present and couldn’t tell them much.

Apparently, the producers had staged Martin’s reaction in order “to tell a narrative and to enhance the viewing experience“. The rest of the program had been through “the guide’s eyes”, and therefore, it was important to pretend that Martin was meters away. The BBC Trust admitted that it had weakened viewers’ trust, and edited the scene for iPlayer, the BBC’s digital service.

Something similar happened in 2011 with David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet documentary series, where shots of breathtaking arctic wilderness were immediately followed by a polar bear mother nursing her cubs, who later turned out to be in a zoo.

In 2007, rumours spread from mouth to mouth, from street to street in rural Colorado that a family of grizzly bears had been sighted in Aspen. Better yet, a clear photograph had been taken, which was far superior to the blurry photographs of Bigfoot.

Grizzly bears were widely believed to be extinct in the Colorado Rockies, with the last officially confirmed sighting being in 1979 when Ed Wiseman stabbed one with a fallen arrow shaft. Occasional rumours had appeared, but now, the gossip on local Colorado websites had reached fever pitch. The supposed photo showed a happy family of grizzlies eating, and it was rumoured to have started when a family’s nanny took the bus to Maroon Bells to go hiking. After getting lost, she stumbled across the grizzly family, and flashed the photo with a small digital camera. Suddenly, a spike of fear came over her, and the nanny fled back to the safety of the bus.

It was a magical story, but the truth? The photo was taken from a poster from 1987, emblazed with the words “The Last Great Symbol of the Wilderness”. It was taken by photographer Chuck Bartlebaugh, who instantly recognised it and professed his annoyance that his work was circulating the internet without royalty. In all honesty, the photo was far too professional – blurriness would have made it more convincing. Since then, there have been no confirmed sightings of grizzly bears in Colorado.

The post Top 10 Fake Bear Headlines/Videos appeared first on Bear Informer.

Norway, 2012. The Nilsen family were relaxing in their Oslo home, waiting patiently for the long hunting season to come. They would be based out of their 26-square foot cabin in Jarfjord in the country’s frozen north-east, which the family had stocked with a hearty supply of meals, snacks and beer. But when Even Nilsen’s mother and grandmother unlocked the front door of the wooden building, what they witnessed was total devastation.

The cabin itself was torn apart, and the pair were hit with a stench that revealed the obvious presence of bears. A mother and cubs had torn off part of the wall, climbed through, and devoured the family’s hidden marshmallows, jam and chocolate spread. The honey wasn’t spared either, but apparently, the party had really started when the bears located the family’s beer stash. Between the 3, they had gulped down 100 cans. It looked like this was more than one cub could handle, as the bed sheets were rumpled as though one bear had collapsed to sleep the night out.

“They had a hell of a party in there,” said Even Nilsen, owner of the cabin: “It’s almost like taken out of Goldilocks and the three bears”. The saga ended on an ominous note, with speculation that the bears now realised that they could break into a cabin whenever they felt hungry, or of course, whenever they fancied a can of Stella Artois.

Early 2012 marked a grim chapter in the long recovery of brown bears, as the small population in Austria, reintroduced in the 1990s, had gone extinct yet again. The last confirmed bear was Moritz, but in 2011, no sightings were recorded at all. The pool had evidently failed to multiply enough to cling on.

Conservationists were puzzled, because neighbouring Slovenia has a population of 400 bears, despite being much less mountainous. The reintroduction efforts started by accident in 1972, when a male bear named Ötscherbär wandered into Austria from Slovenia and managed to survive in the woods. From 1980 to 1993, 3 bears were introduced to Austria and over the next 2 decades, at least 35 lived there.

“Unfortunately there is no bear left in the Northern Limestone Alps,” said Christian Pichler of WWF Austria. The main bears in Austria lived in the Ötscher region of the Lower Austria province, and did well until the turn of the century, when secret poaching and unlucky accidents (including an avalanche) suddenly started to pile up. The WWF also blamed the small pool of bears introduced in the first place.

Austria was once considered to be prime bear country, but by the 16th century, peasants and farmers were authorised to shoot this “vermin” by any means necessary. An order rang out on June 23rd, 1788 to destroy any bears and wolves remaining in the Austrian empire, and the last bear in Austria was officially shot dead in Tyrol in 1912. The last bear in Salzburgerland died in 1838, in 1840 in Styria, and in 1884 in Carinthia.

In April 2012, a bombshell DNA analysis emerged which changed the entire timeline of the polar bear’s ancestry. The previous consensus was that polar bears split off from existing brown bears around 150,000 years ago, and quite possibly in Ireland. But the new study found that polar bears may have actually been around for 600,000 years, far longer than previously thought.

The scientists compared samples from 7 black bears, 18 brown bears, and 19 polar bears. Grizzlies and polar bears remained more closely related to each other than black bears, but the study concluded that they actually shared a common ancestor, rather than polar bears evolving directly from brown bears.

Instead, the old Irish findings may have come from interbreeding long after polar bears first diverged. The resulting hybrid (grolar bear) might have fooled scientists into thinking that the fossil was only a half-evolved polar bear, a work-in-progress.

Consequently, polar bears and grizzlies were deemed to be more of a separate species than previously believed. This dampened the calls for polar bears to be redesignated as an ursus arctos subspecies. Part of the mystery with polar bears comes from their skeletons all falling into the ocean as the sea ice melts, removing them from geneticists’ clutches.

This study made such a splash because it used nuclear DNA (taken from inside a cell’s nucleus) rather than the less accurate mitochondrial DNA of older studies. This same technique discovered the modern belief that Neanderthals and modern humans bred with each other in the distant past.

In summer 2011, an 800 pound grizzly bear was spotted limping around Denali National Park in Washington state. His leg was missing, and in its place was a gruesome stump with bright red blood dripping from it. The consensus among bear enthusiasts was that Tripawed, as he was later dubbed, would never survive the winter. How could he possibly gather enough food? Yet by May 2012, he was spotted leaping over a guard rail in Denali National Park. “They said he looked very agile,” said wildlife biologist Pat Owen.

Apparently, Tripawed looked much healthier than the previous summer, when the wound was visibly fresh. By now, it had healed over nicely. Nobody knew how Tripawed had lost his leg in the first place, but one theory is that he stepped on a trap intended for a fox or lynx.

Soon after, Tripawed managed to sniff out a tasty caribou carcass which had been lying by the road for a week. He dragged it away to a more secure forest location, and spent the next week extracting every morsel of food he could from it. Apparently, this caribou munching was the final proof that Tripawed was in good spirits. The only problem was that he now had to dig with one paw instead of two. Rangers considered tranquilising Tripawed and fitting him with a radio collar, but decided that his life was already hard enough and left him be.

Evil is afoot in the icy plains of Siberia. In July 2012, police in the far eastern city of Ulan-Ude received a tip off from local mushroom hunters enjoying a fun day outside. Arriving on the scene, they discovered a grisly graveyard of 11 bear skeletons, lying side by side. Telling, each one contained a near identical bullet hole in its skull. Only poachers could have been responsible.

The bears were apparently caught in traps by their paws, traps so well designed that even an 800 pound bear couldn’t break free. Then the hunters had approached and shot them in the head in a methodical manner. The rest of the skeletons had their paws cut off.

The reasons were obvious: the poachers were profiting from the booming Chinese market for rare animal parts in folklore medicine. The bones were found in a quiet suburb, but police believed that the slaughter had taken place in the wilderness, with the bones being hastily dumped in a graveyard to disguise which region the poachers typically operated in. The bears were skinned, and even their fat and bile were removed, which are equally popular items on the black market.

Sadly, the poachers were never discovered, but the clock was ticking. The same report mentioned how two weeks earlier, 115 bear paws were discovered in a Mercedes crossing the Russian/Chinese border. A kilogram of bear paw can net you $1000 in China.

One morning in February 2012, two bears cubs awakened in a hibernation den to realise that the entire north of Greece was now their personal playground. The story started in late 2011, when Nikitas the bear and his brother Little John were rescued from the wild. At first, conservationists tried to reunite the cubs with their mother, but when they failed, they began feeding them bottled milk themselves. The Arcturos Bear Rehabilitation Centre had a pen area which encouraged all the survival skills they would need in the wild – trees to climb, nuts to forage. Gradually, Little John and Nikitas became bigger, faster, stronger.

Meanwhile, out in the nearby wilderness, the team was patiently constructing a hibernation den. It took 3 days to prepare, digging through deep snow and installing a webcam so that the bear’s progress could be monitored.

When the day came, both Little John and Nikitas were sedated. They were given one last medical check up by the vets, and fitted with a radio collar to track them. Then the bears were transported from the facility in comfortable blankets and laid down in the hibernation den.

Gradually, the cubs awakened. In a snowy scene, the bears ventured outside into their new world for a second, before going back inside to doze and play with each other. Then they completed their hibernation, waited until spring, and disappeared completely – which was exactly what everyone wanted.

Norway only has 150 brown bears as of 2020, but unfortunately, the land of Vikings and trolls seems to be somewhat cursed. In August 2012, a man was driving down a mountain road approximately 170 miles north of Oslo, minding his own business, when he noticed an elk crossing the road incredibly slowly. Satisfied that it wasn’t a fancy dress party gone wrong, he swerved the wheel and avoided the animal at the last second, with all the driving skills he could summon. But one thing he didn’t have was luck, because he then drove straight into a brown bear which was happily minding its own business.

Thankfully, the man was uninjured. Surprisingly, the car came off worst in this story, with the bear simply running away. Wildlife experts tracked the bear and found blood strains consistent with internal bleeding, but no update was ever given, which is a positive development, because it means that no corpse was found. These events took place near the tiny rural village of Hanestad.

Did the man breath a cartoonish sigh of relief just seconds before the bear torso emerged from the fog? We’ll never know. Were the bear and elk friends, or maybe even planning something? Nothing is impossible.

2012 was the year when Bulgarian bears pulled all their publicity-grabbing skills out of the hat. It started positively, when Bella the brown bear randomly decided to give birth to 3 cubs in Ayazmoto park zoo. She was a former circus bear, and this was her tenth consecutive batch of annual cubs. She was a breeding machine, making 20 cubs in total with her boyfriend.

By October though, the government had commissioned a census of the brown bear population. Farmers were furious, as the first 9 months of 2012 had seen a record 50 attacks on livestock in the Southern Rhodope Mountains. One village called Starnitsa had seen 7 attacks in 2012, and a 91 year old woman claimed that two of her sheep had been eaten. Residents claimed to be apprehensive about killing a bear even if it was ripping their backyard to shreds, because the penalty was a 5000 BGN fine. The government was accused of siding with bears over people.

The surprising thing? Just 8 days later, on October 25th, the Bulgarian government completely ignored the people: they decided to scrap all hunting quotas for brown bears and impose a total hunting ban. The quotas were originally introduced in 2011, but the EU had been bullying them to abandon the policy ever since.

Fun facts: Bulgaria has 400-700 brown bears as of 2020, divided into two subpopulations which rarely intermingle.

In Montana and Wyoming, a rugged mountain range stretches north to south for 75 miles, with one portion occupying north-western Yellowstone and the rest lying in Gallatin National Forest. We’re talking about the Gallatin range, and according to frantic web reports in 2012, grizzly bears are slowly but surely reconquering its slopes.

The Gallatin mountains are rugged and cool, with plentiful forests, but not the thick deciduous forests of black bear country. Over in Yellowstone Park, conservation efforts had been so successful that the 500 grizzlies were competing heavily for food resources. Expansion was inevitable, and in 2012, bands of marauding grizzlies were reported to be moving northwards. Steve Herman and his wife Betsy were particularly interested, as they’d been tracking the grizzlies for 6 years beforehand, finding 300 samples of matted hair in the forest. In 2012, Gehrman estimated that 21 males and 7 females were now roaming the northern Gallatin range.

For the first 3 years, the signs showed up in a limited region of the southernmost Gallatin mountains, until gradually, more and more bear fur started appearing in the northern reaches. Gehrman was “real curious” as to what would happen next, but biologists now feared that a conquering grizzly army could soon be looming over the rapidly expanding town of Boseman. Apparently, it was inevitable that the bears would reach the bustling highway. If only we could tag the first one and give him a medal!

As of 2022, the prophecy is being fulfilled, as grizzly sightings are now appearing in Gallatin newspapers more than ever.

One morning in a simple Liverpool zoo, the Norse god of mischief decided to embody himself on Earth as one playful newborn bear. Loki the cub was born in a makeshift hibernation den on December 14th, and throughout 2012, he made headlines aplenty, starting with his public debut on May 11th.

According to park manager Gary Gilmour: “He is a fantastic wee chap and is very playful”. After leaving his hibernation den with his mum Nellie, Loki climbed a small tree and got stuck on a branch within the hour, before taking a detour to a playful splash pool. Loki wasn’t trapped in a grimy cage; he had a wide open safari park to explore.

On October 18th 2012, Loki ripped open a Jack-o-lantern which spilt its scrambled egg contents all over him. 4 days later, zookeeper Nicola McCleery smeared a pedalo with strawberry jam and hid some grapes inside it. Nellie and son leapt on the pedalo and spent the whole day playing with it. The goal was claimed to be “mental and physical stimulation”.

When December 14th rolled around, Loki had a birthday party fit for a king. He was presented with elephant dung, which he rolled around in with sheer ecstasy, and some wood chippings which he used to groom himself. His lunchtime consisted of fruit cake decorated with dog biscuits, and he also received an old tire and ball to play with.

Sadly, Loki’s sister died a few days after birth. But Loki lives to this day (see this video).

The post The Top 10 Bear Headlines Of 2012 appeared first on Bear Informer.

The headlines rang out all over the world. The origins of polar bears had finally been discovered – they were secretly Irish! No, they hadn’t been spotted wearing green clothing and hats emblazed with four leaf clovers. Instead, fresh archaeological evidence indicated that all living polar bears were descended from brown bears living in Ireland, according to 17 sets of ancient bones and teeth found in 8 caves. This scuppered the original belief that they evolved on the ABC Islands of Alaska.

The oldest discovered brown bear fossils in Ireland were 43-38,000 years old, and had DNA most closely related to today’s brown bears in eastern Europe. That was an expected result, but the brown bear fossils from colder prehistoric times, 38,000-10,000 years ago, had a strange yet undeniable connection to polar bears. In fact, they had the closest connection of any brown bear fossils yet.

The updated theory was that polar bears originally diverged from brown bears around 400,000 years ago. They then spent thousands of years roaming the icecap as a separate species, until around 30,000 years ago, when they moved south with the expanding icecap and bred with the brown bears of Ireland. Hybrids were born, and those hybrids were the maternal ancestors of all polar bears alive today. The proto polar bears which never made it to Ireland all died out.

Or so the headlines claimed. Two years later, the entire theory was discredited by new evidence. Fun fact: the best place in Ireland for brown bear fossils is Poll namBear, or Cave Of The Bears.

Sitting in his cell in Kingman Arizona State Prison, Tracy Province was undoubtedly highly placed on the bad guy list of America. His crimes included a brutal murder and robbery back in 1992, but on July 30th 2010, he and his fellow inmates Danil Renwick and John McCluskey managed to escape when their alleged accomplice Cassyln Welch hurled cutting tools over the barbed wire perimeter fence.

The escape went unnoticed for hours, by which time the villainous group had murdered a retired couple and burnt their car to destroy all traces of evidence. Strangely, this made Province so despondent that he asked Welch to drive him to Yellowstone Park.

In January 2011, Province revealed in a police interview how he had hatched a simple plan: inject himself with a lethal dose of heroin, lie down, and offer himself up as bear food. By his calculations, this would be totally painless.

Province reached the rugged mountain slopes, and actually began to prepare the drug. All he needed now was the bear. But at the last moment, a voice in his head told him to step back. Province walked back to his car and travelled to Indiana to visit family instead.

Alas, Province was recaptured in the sleepy town of Meeteetse, Wyoming after 2 weeks on the run. He was holding a hitchhiking sign inscribed with “Casper”, with a small 9mm handgun in his pocket. As for Renwick, he washed up in Colorado and was captured after a fierce shootout with police, while McCluskey and Welch were cuffed in Springville, Arizona.

The Syrian brown bear is one of the rarest and most special subspecies in the world. Despite people generally associating bears with woods and mountains, this desert bear used to roam the entire Middle East (not just Syria), but is now extirpated from Egypt, Israel and Jordan. Snowy paw prints from 2004 indicate that it may survive in Syria itself, but the consensus is that a few hundreds bear survive across its heartland turf of Iran, Iraq and Turkey.

Back in September 2011, the saga took a sad new twist when a brown bear wandered into the Iranian villages of Eidershan and Heris, just south of the city of Saleb. It was searching for food, and quickly ransacked some local orchards. The villagers attacked, but this only enraged the bear; 4 villagers were injured and 1 ended up in hospital in Tabriz. Environmental protection officers then arrived on the scene to save the bear, but a quarrel soon broke out with the local villagers. They never got the chance to fire their tranquiliser guns, and instead, local hunters unleaded 8 bullets into the bear’s body, killing it instantly. Another Syrian brown bear was gone, and vicious accusations flung back and forth in the local area over who had made the fatal mistakes.

In happier news, those fabled paw prints in Syria showed up again in 2011, and they were spotted in the same location: the anti-Lebanon mountains.

This is a story which you know won’t end well. In a terrible case of luck, 12 year old Olle Frisk was skiing with his friends at the popular Swedish ski resort of Funäsdalen on March 28th 2011. The circumstances were murky, but somehow, Frisk lost control and veered off piste. Then he saw a strange bump appear in the snow, which gradually shook itself free to reveal a mama bear’s head underneath.

The boy plunged into the bear’s cave, and almost instantly, he felt the bear’s massive weight pressing against him. Razor sharp claws ripped into his back while fierce teeth sank into his legs. He played dead, and miraculously, it worked. After some deliberation, the bear concluded that the threat was gone, and walked away. After several heart-stopping seconds, Fritz crawled out of the cave and shouted for his friends, who yelled at the top of their lungs to scare the bear away.

The boy’s luck was particularly poor, as some bears have been observed taking up to 8 minutes to rouse from their hibernation slumber, even when their cubs are being attacked and calling for help. Tragically, all 3 cubs were executed by the Swedish authorities, as the mother failed to return.

From his hospital bed, Frisk wished that they’d been spared: “I don’t see why our lives should be so much more important than the bears”. The same report showed pictures of deep red, but steadily healing claw marks on his back.

The date was March 16th 2011, and the Russian Duma had just passed what felt like a peace offering to the country’s gigantic population of bears. It was a “Rules Of The Hunt” legislation, a set of laws which finally banned the decades-old practise of shooting brown bears as they hibernate in their winter den. This practise was a disaster for newborn cubs, who lacked survival skills such as hunting and foraging and commonly starved to death without their mothers. Now, they would finally be protected.

International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) had been campaigning for this move since 1995, and had gathered 400,000 signatures in favour of the Russian law. The new law ordered that Russian brown bears may only be hunted in two seasons: April 1st to May 31st, and August 1st to November 30th. If, for example, you were about to fire the bullet, only for the clock to strike midnight and make it December 1st, you’d be out of luck – sorry.

At 100,000 animals, Russia has the world’s highest population of brown bears, divided into subspecies such as the East Siberian brown bear, the Kamchatka brown bear, and the common Eurasian brown bear of the Pyrenees and eastern Europe. The law also made it illegal to hunt bears under 1 year old, and mother bears with cubs under one year old.

Separately, IFAW operates a bear rehabilitation facility in Russia’s Tver region, which had released over 150 orphaned bear cubs back into the wild as of 2011.

Throughout 2011, Slovenia was so transfixed by its latest lovable animal mascot that the whole country practically shut down. His name was Medo, which is Slovenian for bear. In May, the 4 month old cub wandered into the garden of Matevz Logar and his wife, and refused to leave. Soon, he was playing happily on the furniture, climbing trees like a monkey, and rough housing with Matevz, his apparent new father. Slovenians’ hearts melted by the millions when pictures were released of Medo hugging the family Rottweiler, and a now private youtube video shows Medo suckling from the family cow. He was particularly fond of rolling on the family’s furniture, and the theory was that he was abandoned by his mother.

The Logars begged the government for permission to keep him, proposing a 35 foot enclosure to meet all his bear needs. But wildlife authorities argued that the lovable teddy bear would soon be a 500 pound beast capable of ripping limbs off with accidental swipes. Reluctantly, the Logars agreed, but a single day before the Four Paws animal charity arrived to remove him, Medo vanished from the family home. It was bear-nap of the cruellest level. His enclosure had been broken into, and Slovenia was frantic with worry.

Several days later, a man “found” Medo not far away, after the authorities offered a 1100 euro reward, and he was whisked off to a bear orphanage. 

Erin Bolster was a 5ft 10, 25 year old guide working for Swan Mountain Outfitters in Glacier National Park. On July 30th 2011, she set out for a forest tour on horseback with 8 male customers, including a father and his 8 year old son. The team made good progress down the lush forest clearing. The weather was fine, and all went well, until Bolster’s horse Tonk inexplicably stopped. Bolster sensed trouble, and suddenly, a white-tailed deer dashed out the vegetation to her left. This was followed by a charging grizzly bear which was later estimated to be 700-750 pounds.

Most of the horses fled in panic at the mere sight of the grizzly, joining the herd of deer. However, the horse carrying the 8 year old merely ambled away, with the boy desperately trying to cling to its back. The bear took notice, and changed direction towards its newly acquired target.

The problem was that while on horseback, the riders were forbidden to use pepper spray, in case it blinded the horse. So Bolster did the only thing she could – she whacked Tonk and encouraged him forward. The scared horse moved forward and formed a protective barrier between the bear and boy. Couple with the loud offensive shouts from Bolster, the bear stopped 10 feet away, looking uncertain. It geared up for another charge, but at Bolster’s insistence, Tonk did the same.

Finally, the bear turned around and galloped into the vegetation. The boy was in shock, but the father was hit hardest, having tried and failed to encourage his own horse to form a shield. All in all, it was a victory for horses, but the question of whether bear or horse would win a real fight remains unsettled. Bolster wasn’t worried, calling it a one in a million event. Tonk the horse was leased, but this story pushed Bolster over the edge into buying him.

From a distance, the bear appeared to be wearing a majestic nose ring, like it had appointed itself king of the jungle, or maybe king of the sub-arctic steppe. The day had come – finally, grizzly bears were learning to wear jewellery! But this wasn’t a decoration at all – it was a fishing lure which had become snagged on its nose tissues.

The Chilkoot river of Alaska is popular with bears and fishermen alike, due to the plentiful salmon that swims in its waters. It’s normal for 19 bears to surround the river during the height of summer, and any lures that accidentally snag on the bears’ hides tend to fall off quickly. But Anthony Crupi, who had coincidentally spent several months monitoring this bear with a radio collar, knew that the nose area was another story. All 3 barbs were stuck in its nostril, and worse, the wound was becoming infected.

So on August 10th, he and his team tranquilised both the cub and its mother. The fishing utensil came free in no time. “I pushed in and backed it out, just like you would a hook in a fish’s mouth. It came out real easy”, said Crupi. To seal the deal, they injected the cub with Bio-mycin, the animal equivalent of penicillin, before rubbing a topical antibiotic into its wounds. Happily, the bear weighed a healthy 160 pounds and was in “great condition”. 3 hours later, the bear stood up on its hind quarters, stretched its limbs, and went on its way again.

In Ukraine, there was once a type of bear called the “vodka bear”. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a rare subspecies, but around 80 animals kept in zoos which commonly appeared on television and were forced to drink vodka to the amusement of rich guests, many of whom were drunk themselves.

This barbaric practise stemmed from the Russian empire which Ukraine was once part of. Some of the vodka bears were even forced to perform to patrons of bars and restaurants, despite the fact that feeding bears alcohol is banned in Ukraine.

In June 2011, Environmental Minister Mykola Zlochevsky announced that these harsh days of cruelty were finally over. The charity Four Paws International stepped in, and by December, dozens of bear owners had agreed to release the bears to a new sanctuary that Four Paws was planning on the border with Hungary, called the Brown Bear Rehabilitation Centre. The remaining vodka bear owners would be forced to release them, according to Four Paws. The new facility would even have a “bear ambulance” to transport inebriated bears. The main hero was Dr. Amir Khalil, a South African vet who had already rescued “dancing bears” kept in cages in Bulgaria.

Critics argued that the Ukrainian government only rushed to the rescue because they were about to host the Euro 2012 football tournament and a flood of nosy journalists was imminent. The first bears to be rescued were Rosa, Potab, Mashenka, and Yura, but Rosa was already a fully-fledged alcoholic.

Every year, grizzly bears seem to reveal new and unexpected skills, so much so that biologists may be getting worried. The latest was a nameless female bear residing in Montana, who had been fitted with a radio collar for over 1 year by wildlife biologists back in June 2010.

This bear was obsessed with water, as initially, she was relocated to a remote region, before being drawn back to her familiar haunts of Flathead Lake, a body of water measuring 197 square miles. The researchers spotted her swimming for 8-12 hours at a time, which isn’t on the level of polar bears with their 200 mile marathons, but far exceeds the most storied Olympic athlete.

She started by swimming from the Painted Rocks landmark to the large Cedar island, where she lay and relaxed for 24 hours. Then she jumped back into the lake and headed southwest, swimming for 3 uninterrupted miles to Wild Horse Island, where she stayed for 3 days. Her record took place in the southern portion of Flathead Lake, where she swam for 7 uninterrupted miles. She took a 1 day rest on the tiny Bird Island in the centre of the lake, before jumping back in.

Finally, she grew tired of Flathead Lake and journeyed east towards Swan Lake in the Mission Mountains, where she finally settled down, according to the biologists. Eventually, the radio tracking collar dropped off as it was programmed to do. The bear’s 1200 mile journey would have been epic over any terrain.

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