The giant double continent of Eurasia has 8 official brown bear subspecies, although the number is up for debate. Common ones include the Eurasian (or European) brown bear and the East Siberian brown bear, and rare ones include the Tibetan blue bear and critically endangered Gobi bear. The Syrian brown bear has the distinction of being the smallest and lightest colour on average. This is the Middle East’s own bear, a species which still occasionally interacts with venomous vipers and herds of camels, though never on film.

The Syrian brown bear weighs 500 pounds on average, far below a grizzly bear or Kodiak. Its fur can be brown, but is most commonly a light sandy colour or blond, with a darker stripe on its back just below the neck. Others are multicoloured, with brown and blond hairs intermixed, like this bear caught on an Armenian camera trap in 2013.

The higher the bear’s altitude, the blonder its fur tends to be, and the legs are normally darker than the rest of the body. While blond grizzlies are occasionally sighted in Alaska, particularly in Denali, Syrian brown bears are the only bear to be consistently blond. They’re also the only subspecies to have white claws instead of black, outside of a small population pool in Siberia. Syrian brown bears have a similar diet to other brown bears, including nuts, roots and meat when they can get it (as there’s no salmon in the middle east).

Despite their name, Syria no longer has a breeding population of this bear. By the 1880s, bears were already rare, confined mostly to Syria’s tallest peak Mount Hermon and the surrounding woodlands. The last concrete evidence was a 1955 report which mentioned bear paws and skins for sale in Syrian marketplaces.

Likewise, the Syrian brown bear is wiped out in Israel, Jordan and Palestine, partly due to encroaching on human settlements and military exercises, and partly due to hunting for superstitious folk remedies like bear fat. It’s listed as critically endangered, but neither the WWF nor IUCN has an official estimate as to how many bears are left, unlike the Gobi bear at just 25 individuals.

As of 2021, the Syrian brown bear survives in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Armenia. In Iran, they’re in serious trouble from poachers, as their skins sell for $2000 on Tehran marketplaces. With economic sanctions crippling the country, villagers are desperate for any income. Compared to other bears, they still love rugged mountains, but spend more time inhabiting woods, such as deciduous and conifer in north-east Turkey and the dry forests of east Anatolia.

Unlike grizzly bears, Syrian brown bears are small enough to hibernate in hollow trees, which in America, is only the domain of black bears. This means that deforestation is another threat to these blond bears. Generally, it’s accepted that Syrian brown bears are endangered, but not critically so.

By far the most famous Syrian brown bear, and probably in the top 5 of famous bears overall, is Wojtek the soldier bear. He was discovered as a young cub in 1942, by recently freed Polish prisoners from a Soviet gulag who were marching across the Iraqi desert to start a new life as soldiers. They bought him from a poor boy by a railway station, using Persian coins and a Swiss army knife. Soon, the young cub was wrestling with the Polish solders, drinking beer, and smoking cigarettes, or swallowing the cigarettes whole.

Wojtek would sleep in the same tent as training soldiers, and when the Polish squadron were summoned to Egypt, the British boat wouldn’t allow Wojtek aboard, as he was classed as an animal. So naturally, they gave him the military rank of Private and an official code number.

By in 1943, he was promoted to corporal and helped to carry artillery shells in the battle of Monte Cassino near Rome. British soldiers swore for years afterwards that they’d witnessed a bear carrying shells, to the disbelieving smiles of their amused families. One day in Egypt, Wojtek ran around the beach scaring the sunbathing ladies. He also caught a thief hiding in the showers, who screamed so loudly that the guards ran in instantly.

In 1945, peace broke out. Wojtek spent 1.5 years in the Scottish town of Hutton, where the Polish squadron delisted, not wishing to face Stalin. Ultimately, he spent the last 20 years of his life in Edinburgh zoo, where he became stiff and depressed. But when old comrades visited and spoke in Polish, he would stand on his hind legs and salute like the good old days. Unusually for a Syrian brown bear, Wojtek was the standard brown colour.

When reading news stories about the latest bear antics, it’s surprisingly common to see that a Syrian brown bear was responsible. The subspecies is overrepresented (in a good way) in captivity worldwide, partly because of a plan hatched by two German zoos in Gotha and Heidelberg to re-establish Syrian brown bears in other zoos, to protect the future of the species.

For example, Jenny the Syrian brown bear wowed youtubers in January 2021 when she ran around a yard full of 2 foot deep virgin snow, so quickly that she seemed to have downed a monster energy drink. She tried to play with another blond bear, who gave it a half hearted attempt before the manic Jenny ran through a play tunnel and hugged a tree. This was the Orphaned Bear Centre in New York, which also contains Amy, Jenny’s bear best friend. Jenny’s favourite food is peanuts, while Amy loves grapes and is supposedly the smartest bear in the park.

England is no exception, as on January 23th 2020, three 2 year old Syrian brown bear cubs were separated from their mother in the Swiss Zoo du Servion, as would happen in the wild. Then they began the long journey to Hamerton zoo in Cambridge. They’re the only Syrian brown bears on UK soil. Brothers Jaiko and Newton are shy and bold respectively, while sister Laika favours a noisy approach.

Another headline was when Mango, a 19 year old Syrian brown bear in an Israeli zoo, had an operation to fix a sudden hind leg paralysis. His head was propped up on a pillow wrapped in a garbage bag, his fur shaved off his back, and body cut open for 6 hours while they fixed a ruptured disc between vertebrae two and three.

In Iraq, the Syrian brown bear never went extinct, but by August 2003, sightings had been rare for a while. According to an IUCN newsletter, they were believed to exist in the north-east Kurdistan mountains, but “little information has been available for quite some time“. They were also concerned about the impact of the still-raging Iraq war, with insurgents camping out in the bear’s mountain habitat.

These concerns were washed away in mid-February 2006, thanks to one corporal Chuck Ridings of the US military. It was 8:30pm, and Ridings was conducting a routine flying mission over the arid badlands, featuring a pilot and a gunner on the left and right flanks of the plane, while Ridings assisted with navigation. He was also tasked with watching an infrared scanner for enemy insurgents, which showed up on video as different shades of green, like The Matrix or a 1980s computer monitor.

Ridings had encountered bears back in the US, and as they reached a large lake, he noticed a familiar sheen and rear wiggle from a giant animal, running up a slope on the north shore. He peered closer, and suddenly exclaimed “that’s a bear!”. He knew it wasn’t a camel or goat, because he’d seen them before too.

Ridings grabbed the camera controls and kept them fixed on the bear. The plane was flying in strict formation, but Bill the pilot leaned to the right to allow Ridings to watch the bear for 20 seconds. In the excitement, Ridings forgot to snap a photograph, which he later regretted.

Later, the team discussed the sightings amongst themselves. They were shocked – none of them had heard of bears in Iraq before. When they entered camp that night, and told their squadron, there was disbelief, as tall tales were abundant among the Iraq-based US troops.

Undeterred, Ridings and his comrades searched for “bear sightings in Iraq” on google and found the bearbiology.org website (which is still online), which mentioned the Bear Specialist Group Coordinating Committee. Rydings picked a member at random and contacted them. 2 days later, they received a “very interested” request from the Committee for more information. What colour was the bear, the experts asked, and how big was it? Rydings said that his team felt ecstatic.

3 months later, an official report by the IUCN described the soldiers’ account as reliable, after a long email exchange. It was now official that bears lived on in Iraq. Better, they expected the soldiers’ sighting to have been by the Turkish border, in the bear heartlands, but it had actually been further south in Iraq, on the limits of the bears’ old range.

The bears were being adventurous, and 2010 saw more evidence for Syrian bears in Iraq when biologists surveyed 30 locations in the mountainous Kurdistan region of the northeast. 10 of them reported heavy bear sightings, including killings by hunters, with some having footage on their mobile phones.

Disney might think they’ve invented the concept, but the truth is that every country has at least one true story of animals adopting human children for no reason other than the goodness of their heart.

Spanish boy Marcos Pantoja was raised by wolves for 12 years and continued to walk on all fours. Hopes were raised briefly in 2019 when a North Carolina toddler claimed to have been cared for by a loving black bear mother in the forest, pulling him free from a bush he was stuck in. Unfortunately, the authorities announced that there was no evidence, but never fear, because Syrian brown bears are near.

In October 2001, a husband and wife of the nomadic Lomi tribes were walking home from their wheat fields in Lorena Province, western Iran, a cool forested region. They entered the tent, and realised with shock that their 3 year old toddler was missing. They searched the settlements, with no luck. 3 days passed, before their heads turned to the mountains. Surely, the toddler couldn’t have got that far.

Nevertheless, some local men set out and discovered a bear den. Inside was the toddler. He was completely healthy, and better, he appeared to have been breastfed. The kindly mother bear had nursed the stricken child. There was no mention of whether the mother bear had cubs of her own. One possibility is that they’d all died and the bear still had some motherly love to give.

Despite its name, the Syrian brown bear has been extinct in Syria since the early 20th century. The bears were never the plump, well fed salmon gorgers of Alaska, and over-hunting was the finishing blow. But in January 2004, tracks in the snow were photographed for the first time in decades, by a researcher called Issam Hajjar. Picture proof showed footprints at the top of a snowy ridge around 1900 metres in altitude.

The anti-Lebanon mountains are a long range which mostly lies in Syria, and forms most of the border with Lebanon. These mountains are full of smugglers, but more importantly, they peak at 2814 metres, and consequently, it’s common for these Syrian mountains to be capped with snow in November to March, or even low levels if a serious injection of northerly air comes south from Siberia.

Bear biologists confirmed that the paw prints were of a bear. Did bears secretly survive in Syria? Or was it a lone male straying from Turkey, which was destined to die after a few hard months of struggling to find food? They didn’t rule out the bear finding a snug cave to survive in, and in February 2011, 3 much larger sets of tracks were observed in a similar snowy area. The area was plentiful in wild juniper and human fruit farms, but surely, farmers would have noticed if a bear was pillaging. Nevertheless, biologists confirmed the paw prints as a bear’s.

A more mysterious “encounter” came on January 14th 2015, when a farmer hiking in the mountains snapped a picture of a blond-white animal. It was 50km north of the 2011 paw prints, and closely resembled a bear. However, the South Asian Brown Bear Expert team leaned towards it being a dog, and the locals, believing it to be a hyena, claimed to have stalked the now mythical animal and killed it. Hyenas are common in the anti-Lebanon mountains, and it’s unlikely that they would mistake it.

The picture also shows a hand plough for scale, and the animal looks too small for a bear, but a small female is a possibility – Syrian brown bears are one of the smallest subspecies to begin with. Biologists speculated that ironically, the Syrian civil war (which started in March 2011) was protecting the bears’ habitat, by keeping hunters from venturing out without caution.

For similar reasons, the black bears of Mexico have recovered significantly in neighbourhoods terrorised by drug running cartels. We at Bear Informer believe that it looks closest to a brown bear – check out the picture on page 8 here.

Luckily, there’s no proof that this “bear” was killed by the villagers, or that it was the same bear as 2011 and 2004. The prospects for Syrian brown bears in their homeland are looking up.

As of 2024, it’s a mixed bag for the Syrian brown bear, but this subspecies isn’t quite on the precipice of extinction. Half of the Iraqi population seems to care deeply for the bears, while the other half regards them as hunting fodder. There was great outcry in 2018 when army troops came across a bear sleeping, and shot it at point blank range. They later posted pictures of themselves smiling behind the corpse, and were widely condemned by conservationists.

But 1 year earlier, the first brown bear in 60 years was seen in Lebanon. It was roaming the Lebanese side of the anti-Lebanon mountains – could it have been related to the Syrian bear from 2004 and 2011? The video is fuzzy on the level of bigfoot sightings, but it’s unmistakably a mother bear and cubs.

2021 saw the most shambolic conservation attempt ever,  when 6 Syrian brown bears were rescued from captivity in the houses of cruel Iraqis. After rehabilitation, their cages were strapped to the backs of cars and driven high into the mountains. On a snowy ridge with the sun shining, trainers fed their beloved bears with a last gulp of water, and opened the cages, releasing them for freedom. Unfortunately, a crowd of 200 Iraqi locals gathered to watch.

The mood was jubilant, but as one bear left its cage, it turned on its saviours! It started chasing the crowds around the ridge, causing everyone to run around like headless chickens. The safety restrictions were laughable, as the cheering men and women were almost close enough to give the bear a stroke and a pat of encouragement. It seemed to be more playful than murderous though, or more of a practical joker, as after several sheepdog-style runs around the ridge, it took the hint from its trainers and wandered downhill into a patch of snow, never to return. This was one of the best bear videos in years.

The post All You Need To Know About Syrian Brown Bears appeared first on Bear Informer.

With its natural habitat being the vast, endless wilderness of Tibet and the Himalaya, the Tibetan blue bear is widely acknowledged as the most elusive brown bear subspecies in the world. Compared to the American grizzly or European brown bear, or the ferocious Siberian brown bear, blue bears are almost impossible to track down, which is fitting given their rare blue-tinged coat.

The rareness can be overstated by the internet at times, as a couple exist in zoos in Japan. But if your life’s mission is to find one in the wild, then good luck. Like the snow leopard, you don’t find blue bears – blue bears find you. The Himalayan ranges are so vast that a trek to mountains such as Annapurna (11th highest in the world) can take 10 days, with the same true for the Nepalese side of Everest. This is the blue bear’s natural turf, and if the blue bear wants to stay hidden, then that’s what will happen.

Not once have Western scientists managed to capture a wild blue bear, to perform the detailed analysis of the subspecies they desire – the best they’ve achieved is the fur and pelt. A Western explorer could spend years in the mountains without ever finding one (which might be best for his health).

Among the 9 Eurasian brown bear subspecies, the Tibetan blue bear is easily the most unique looking. The species isn’t quite as blue as its Smurf brethren, but it’s undeniably the bluest bear around, despite being part of the brown bear species overall. The bulk of its fur has a blue tinge unique to any bear, but there’s also a cream-coloured section that starts at the chest and spreads into a collar. The colour varies too, with particularly dark or light bears often being spotted.

Among the 9 brown bear subspecies, the Tibetan blue is middle of the pack for both height and weight. Its fur is particularly long and shaggy, a thick coat against the harshness of the Himalayan winter. Its ears are also very prominent, which could be an adaption to the echoing soundscape of the wide Himalayan valleys.

Another brown bear subspecies roams the same Himalayan turf – the Himalayan brown bear (predictably). This bear has more typical brown fur, though slightly lighter that a Eurasian brown bear’s. You might guess that the subspecies are barely any different, but genetic analysis has confirmed that the Himalayan brown bear and Tibetan blue bear are completely distinct. The blue bear is its own entity entirely, and a magical one at that.

The Tibetan blue bear is so elusive that its population size is unknown, although one good estimate is 5000. One threat is the superstition of the local Tibetans, who consider the bears to be worldly manifestations of evil spirits, and commonly kill them on sight.

Likewise, traditional Chinese Medicine recommends bear bile as the perfect folklore remedy. The bear lacks an official conservation status, and pessimistic environmentalists have occasionally claimed that the bear is already extinct, but thankfully, sightings continue to the present day. The most recent by a Western was in July 2019, in a remote Himalayan valley. They’ve also been filmed by cameras placed in Chinese national parks, as shown in this link, which features perhaps the greatest, most magical picture of a Tibetan blue bear you’ll ever find.

This article discusses an author who was updating a nature book called Lonely Planet’s China in 2020. A Tibetan driver encouraged him to visit a “magical valley”, and upon entering the monastery there, he noticed 4 stuffed yaks hanging alongside the pelt of a fearsome shaggy creature. The monks informed him that this was a Tibetan blue bear, and to quash all doubt, the monk whipped out his high tech smartphone, and showed him a picture he had recently snapped of 3 living blue bears. It was a mother and two cubs, walking through the same valley side by side, and the author confirmed the picture’s authenticity.

In 1960, famous mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary set out to the Himalaya to establish once and for all whether the yeti really existed. He was the first man to conquer Everest in 1953, and upon reaching Nepal, he visited a monastery called Khumjung, standing above a mountain village called Namche Bazaar. The head monk present him with a pelt he insisted was the fur of the mythological yeti. The local Nepalis could not be shaken in their belief that this creature prowled the valleys. After gaining the monk’s permission to take the pelt away for testing, and returning to New Zealand, several anthropologists reached the same conclusion: that it was the fur of the elusive Tibetan blue bear.

The theory undeniably makes sense, as Tibetan blue bears are so rare that they could easily fit with the elusive nature of the yeti. If you picture one standing on its hind legs, the unusually shaggy blue bear even looks similar to the iconic yeti image.

On the other hand, this was a single piece of evidence collected from a single mountain community. Does it really prove that the yeti is a purely mythical creature? It’s worth noting that Hillary didn’t rule out the yeti’s existence himself: “the yeti is probably a mythological creature, but I would be delighted to be proved wrong. There’s no doubt that the monks in the monasteries and many others believe in its existence”.

In 2013, two conservationists called Eddie Game and Hamish Reid set out to cross the Tibetan plateau, a vast wilderness north of the Himalaya packed with wolves, yaks and fierce winds. Their mode of transport was mountain bikes, but one day, while they sat by a river to recharge their energy, Hamish triggered a loud crack as he stood on a patch of ice.

Immediately, he heard a far louder sound: the roar of a distant bear. The seemingly gentle beast had been sleeping, but now, it was hurtling towards them with the speed of a freight train. Game and Reid did what they were trained to do and sounded their air horn. The bear kept running. They sounded the air horn again, and this time, the bear seemed to pause, 80 feet away from the explorers.

Game and Reid simply prayed, knowing that the air horn was exhausted. Then, with some apparent uncertainty, the bear turned around and headed back to the river. It stopped, glanced back at the men, and headed up the sand dune. Then it stopped and glanced again, before making a final decision and vanishing into the endless plains of Tibet.

Would Game and Reid have survived if they hadn’t sounded the air horn in time? Who knows, but what’s certain is that they encountered the incredibly rare Tibetan blue bear, as the high definition pictures they captured show. See them here.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Jing Wangchuk, the third king of Bhutan, was said to be fascinated with the blue bears roaming his kingdom. Yet despite owning the lands, he had never once managed to see them personally. So in 1971, the future fourth king hired Malcolm Lyell, the manager of a Dutch gun company, to venture into the wild and track one down, providing him with a map with territory marked as “sanctuary, blue bear”.

Lyell was the only European man granted permission to hunt for the blue bear in Bhutan. As expected, Lyell failed to locate a single bear, but he came extremely close. One yak herder he spoke to in Tasi Markhang (northern Bhutan) reported that a blue bear had been seen prowling the maize fields just the previous night. Several herders claimed to have witnessed blue bears in days gone by, calling them shy and reluctant to interact with people (despite regularly stealing their livestock). The trick, they informed Lyell, was to tie up a yak as bait and wait for the bear to emerge from the shadows.

By the expedition’s conclusion, Lyell had become equally fascinated with the blue bear. At the encouragement of Bhutan’s equally bear-mad fourth king (who took over in 1972), he returned on two further expeditions in 1974 and 1975, but failed in his quest for the blue bear once more.

The Tibetan blue bear was first classified as a subspecies by English zoologist Edward Blythe in 1854, after remains of its pelt and fur were brought back. But what about even earlier?

The three bears in the region surrounding the Himalaya are the Tibetan blue bear (right on map above), the Himalayan brown bear (left), and the desert-adapted Gobi bear (top). It’s believed that the latter two diverged from all other brown bear species around 650,000 years ago. This was during the Pleistocene epoch, when the Himalaya were the most heavily glaciated in their history. With the bears separated into islands by vast towering glaciers, and mountain passes which could no longer be passed, they were free to evolve in strange new directions.

Meanwhile, the Tibetan blue bear is far more recent, despite its appearance having grown far more distinctive than the Himalayan brown bear’s. Blue bears share a common ancestor with the North American grizzly bear and the common Eurasian brown bear, and diverged only 343,000 years ago. During an interglacial period, a group of bears separated from the pack and travelled east towards the Tibetan plateau. There, they began the slow transformation into the blue-coloured superstars we know today. These genetic facts were discovered in a scientific analysis from 2018.

The consistent theme with the Tibetan blue bear is blank spaces in the record. This bear is so mysterious that we barely understand its diet, mating patterns, or favourite sleeping patterns. The blue bear’s favourite habitat is believed to be near the treeline of high mountain slopes, but nobody is 100% sure. They’re said to travel extremely long distances compared to normal bears, in search of mates, but nobody is 100% sure. In addition to pinching livestock, the blue bear is believed to eat pines and nuts, but nobody is 100% sure.

That said, the Tibetan blue bear is known to be a particularly carnivorous bear, closer in diet to the feared East Siberian brown bear than the Eurasian brown bear. It’s known to enjoy a meal of marmot and pika, a small Himalayan mammal which looks like a mountainous rabbit. By contrast, the Himalayan brown bear is said to be a peace-loving vegetarian.

More mysteries include a supposed fact mentioned in Chinese articles that 1500 people are killed every year by blue bears, which seems unlikely, and whether blue bears are most active at sunrise or sunset, or whether the whole day is their playground.

Despite the rapid technological advances of humanity, the knowledge we’ve gained of physics, distant solar systems, medicine and technology, this bear somehow evades our grasp.

In every picture ever taken, the Tibetan blue bear looks as cuddly as your favourite teddy bear, but statistics show that it’s the most dangerous animal in the Tibetan region. They kill as many livestock as the average brown bear, and local herders have many a tale of wandering down the familiar corridors of their house to find a blue bear standing right in front of them.

To gain entry, the blue bear tends to smash in a door or window, which often leaves a trail of blood from cuts to its paws. Local herders commonly erect wire mesh to prevent bears from entering their huts, while others use firecrackers or even electric fences. Like the American black bears digging pizza out of bins, the blue bear has the intelligence to suss out where readily available food sources are.

Summer is the peak danger time, the time when Tibetan herders move to a second, high altitude home to carry out their duties. Occasionally, they’ll descend to their winter home to check on things, and this is when they typically come face to face with the blue bears that break in during their absence. Summer is also the peak season for gathering mushrooms and berries high in the mountains, sending the herders headlong into bear habitat.

Elusive they may be, but blue bears cause their fair share of mayhem.

Most zoos don’t tend to advertise their brown bear subspecies. The word “bears” alone is enough to draw in tons of smiling families eating ice cream. But Tibetan blue bears appear in a few zoos around the world, including China, as shown in these cute images. Unfortunately, the bears’ happy expressions mask the fact that they’re begging for food, and in 2011, an equally cruel video of a blue bear in Japan’s Oji zoo did the rounds. It was titled “Headbanging Bear vs Frolicking Students,” and showed a bear dancing around near the glass while two little girls cried with delight. But that bear was actually “bouncing”, a classic sign that bears are overheating.

Go back over 100 years to 1916, and you have this obscure newspaper cutting, revealing that Philadelphia zoo had just become the first on US soil to acquire two Tibetan blue bears. It mentioned their “white-tipped, blackish hair, which gives their fur a hoary appearance and imparts a light bluish tinge“. The zookeepers were relieved, as they were sceptical about whether Tibetan blue bears were even real! They also had trouble with the Germans, who controlled 75% of Atlantic animal shipping at the time. Whether they lived a happy life is unknown.

There’s no doubt that Tibetan blue bears were put on earth to be a mystery bear, not a sad zoo showcase. The only time a blue bear should beg is if he sees an Everest mountaineer eating a chocolate bar!

The post Tibetan Blue Bear: The Rarest Of All appeared first on Bear Informer.

One of the easiest differences to spot from a distance. Brown bears have a hump, while black bears don’t have a hump. Regardless of gender or subspecies, all brown bears have a hump. It could be the American grizzly, the Eurasian brown bear, the Tibetan blue bear, a Kodiak bear, or a Syrian brown bear (which tend to be blond), but there’ll always be a hump.

2 million years ago, brown bears decided that they needed a hump to dig for roots in hard soil, and dig out their hibernation dens on frozen mountainsides, not to mention fighting off other grizzly bears in salmon disputes. The hump itself is a tightly knotted area of muscle that blesses a brown bear’s forepaws with immense power, and a classic tell to remember is that when walking on all fours, the hump should be the highest point on a brown bear’s body.

Meanwhile, the black bear is universally hump-free. The highest point on their body is their extreme lower back, although the angles can be extremely deceptive if a bear is climbing a mountainside. Remember this saying: a raised hump for brown bears, and raised rump for black bears. Be careful, because like any muscle, the size of the hump varies in brown bears from massive to small.

1 million years ago, the American black bear shared the plains of America with sabre toothed tigers, American lions and dire wolves. Those ancient beasts are all long extinct today, but their legacy lingers on in the black bear’s shier and more reticent nature. Essentially, the aggressive genes all died out in battles with much larger predators.

Grizzly mothers are legendary for defending their cubs with a raging passion, until she’s convinced that the threat is gone – hence the old play dead strategy. However, black bears have the option of sending their cubs up a tree, which they usually take. A human male aged 18-24 is 167 times more likely to kill than a black bear. Generally, black bears much less territorial than grizzlies. Most black bear attacks are defensive, i.e. “he’s more afraid of you than you are of him”.

Starving black bears will occasionally prey on humans in wilderness areas, but they prefer smaller mammals like squirrels and carrion. Black bear attacks are actually less likely in inhabited areas where they scavenge garbage, because those bears have associated humans with plentiful free food. Who would want to spoil a free supply of pizza?

In a fight or flight setting, black bears usually default to flight. From 1900 to 1980, 23 Americans were killed by black bears, a tiny number given that 200,000 currently roam the lower 48 states.

Not only are a brown bear’s claws longer, but their shape is completely different. A black bear’s claws are rounded and 1-2 inches long, enabling them to scamper up trees with incredible ease. Round claws also aid the black bear in its favourite activity, tearing into rotting stumps and tree trunks in the forest. They do this to make their hibernation dens, and to search for tasty insects like carpenter ants. Sometimes, they feed on the tree itself, shredding the outer bark to access the tasty inner sapwood.

Another black bear trick is frilling, when they peel strips of bark upwards from the bottom of the tree to leave it bare. Using its claws, a black bear can shred up to 70 trees in one day. In fact, the mayhem which black bears gleefully unleash on trees is a significant difference to grizzlies itself.

Finally, black bear claws are consistently dark-coloured. Grizzly bears sometimes have dark claws, but the colour varies vastly, all the way to pale. A brown bear’s claws are only slightly curved, and average at 3-5 inches long. This increases their hunting (AKA mauling) abilities, but weakens their tree climbing abilities. Grizzly claws have the advantage when digging in hard frozen earth, to search for roots in their isolated mountainous terrain. The main similarity is that both species have non-retractable claws, like polar bears, but unlike a Bengal tiger.

These claws differences also affect the paw print. If your helicopter ever crashes in the wilderness (because movies are a 100% accurate portrayal of reality) and your heart sinks as you stumble across pawprints, then the ones with claws closer to the foot are a black bear’s. Claws further away indicate a brown bear, and the individual toe prints are usually more separated with a black bear, and almost touching with a grizzly.

The pad of a black bear is also more rounded than a grizzly bear’s, which is more square. If you take a ruler, it’s possible to put a clear line between the toes and pad of a grizzly bear footprint, but this is impossible with a black bear’s.

To keep hikers safe, the National Parks have invented the Palmisciano System. A hiker must draw a mental line betwen the lowest point of the big toe and the top of the main footpad. Extend this line all the way to the right. If the little toe falls above the line (more in line with the big toe), you’re about to make friends with a grizzly. If below, it’s a black bear. Essentially, a grizzly bear’s toes are more straight and ordered, whereas a black bear’s sweep downwards as they get smaller.

It isn’t a foolproof system, because the biggest, fattest and cuddliest black bear can easily be larger than a starving brown one with no fish. However, the average brown bear is visibly bigger and heavier than a black bear, from a distance and up close. Grizzly bears weigh 400 to 800 pounds, with females clocking in at 250-500. Black bears cannot compete with this size no matter what they do, with males averaging at 150-500 pounds and the females being barely heavier than humans, at 100 to 300 pounds.

Height is a similar story. Black bears stand 6-9 feet tall on their hind legs, and 5 feet at the shoulder. Male black bears achieve 5-7 feet and 3 feet respectively. Kodiak Island is a whole other story, where the males average at 800-1200 pounds and loom over all challengers at 9 feet tall. A black bear that washed up there would probably take one look and turn around instantly, unless he was an emissary of goodwill and alliance between the different species.

Don’t get too confident though. Again, huge black bears do exist. Brown coloured black bears exist, and so do big, bushy coats which make identifying a hump annoyingly difficult. If all three factors combine, it can make the species a surprisingly hard call. The odds of this misidentification happening and leading to your death have to be astronomically low, maybe 1 in a million, but some National Parks now warn against using size as an identifying feature.

From below the ears, a black bear’s face angles sharply downwards all the way to the snout. Black bears look more dog-like, and their eyes are set further apart. Grizzly bears, meanwhile, have a clear angle change between the snout and nose. Travelling up a grizzly’s snout is like a moderately steep hillside that ends in a sudden cliff when you reach the forehead. This is known as a concave or dish-shaped face. Grizzly eyes are closer together as well, and deeper set.

At a glance, a black bear’s face tends to look longer than the rounded face of a grizzly. The ears are another obvious tell, as a grizzly’s tend to be small, in contrast to almost everything else. They’re also furrier, while a black bear’s ears are much more prominent and rounded, and much more solid looking overall.

Things can get deceptive though: a high wind that fluffs up a black bear’s fur can make their eyes less prominent. A brown bear fresh from swimming in an Alaskan lake can have more prominent ears, because its fur will be matted down. The best place to check all this is from your trusty pair of binoculars, binoculars which don’t normally have plans to eat you.

Black and grizzly bears have closer dietary preferences than you might think. Most of the classic differences are created by circumstances. For example, the black bear has a reputation as a pizza-guzzling garbage rummager, but this is mainly because of its closer proximity to human settlements, with 200,000 living in the lower 48 states compared to 1700 grizzlies. In Glacier National Park, the garbage management was very poor until 1967 when two women were attacked, and the grizzlies there used to rustle with a passion.

Brown bears are slightly more carnivorous than black bears, as they tend to hunt larger prey like elk, moose and sheep, but black bears also hunt small mammals, including lamb, squirrels, beavers, mice and foxes. Their limitations are mostly due to their smaller size rather than innate preferences.

Officially, both bear species are omnivores, and their long distance senses of smell are equally excellent. Black bears even get in on the salmon-guzzling action, as evidenced by this youtube video, despite steep competition with grizzlies. Both species fatten up for the winter with endless amounts of berries, including buffaloberries in their prime Alaskan turf.

The biggest difference to grizzlies is the black bear’s fondness for insects, particularly ants hiding in rotten tree stumps. But Slovenian brown bears also have huge ant-hoovering tendencies – black bears are just more consistent. Yellowstone’s brown bears go wild for army cutworm moths.

Black bears and brown bears have many similarities in hibernation. Both eat nothing over 3-5 months in their den, living solely off body fat accumulated during the long summer of feeding. Their heart rates falls as low as 1 beat per 45 minutes, and both will awaken only occasionally. Both black bears and grizzlies can stay active in the winter if the weather allows, like the black bear colonies in Mexico or the surprisingly warm Kodiak Island.

The difference is location. Black bears hibernate inside dead tree logs, or even on top of trees, somehow keeping their balance. In Alaska, black bears sometimes climb to the top of hollowed out tree stumps, and jump down into the centre, which is only made possible by their smaller size and superior tree climbing skills. In the central USA, black bears will sometimes hibernate beneath roads and house porches.

Grizzlies also use masses of fallen logs sometimes, but much prefer caves and self-made dens dug on the side of remote mountains. They often rip apart vegetation and use it to insulate the entrances and floors of these secret hidey-holes, for a precious couple of degrees of bonus warmth. Brown bears dig a new den every year, but tend to return to roughly the same locations – if it aint broke, don’t fix it.

A black bear never has to consider any of this, because their claws aren’t equipped for digging dens.

Black bears are creatures of the forest, particularly moderately thick forests with plentiful streams and rivers for clean, fresh drinking water. Biodiversity is a must, with numerous plant species bearing fruits and nuts, along with modest forest clearings to allow shrub growth.

Thick trees of at least 20 inches are vital, to give the black bears a refuge for their cubs to climb into. They also require dead trees to manipulate in winter and create their cosy hibernation dens. These conditions are met by forests all over the USA, and consequently, there’s only 9 states with no confirmed black bears: Hawaii, Illinois, Delaware, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Indiana.

Brown bears are generally creatures of more open landscapes. They evolved not in the arctic, but subarctic steppe country. They like forests, but are perfectly at home in grassy foothills, steep mountainsides, and wide snowy plains. Put it this way: a grizzly bear is about ten times more likely to meet a polar bear than a black bear. Brown bears venture much further north into Canada, with the prize being tasty whale carcasses.

That said, an epic meeting was observed in 2018 in Wapusk, west of Hudson Bay – a polar bear, brown bear, and black bear crossing paths for the first time in recorded scientific history.

Thanks to their 2 inch rounded claws, black bears have the superpower of running up trees without even batting an eyelid. They’re the opposite to humans: amazing at climbing trees, yet clumsy at climbing ladders. How many times have you examined a tree in the park, looking for the most perfectly spaced branches to climb? With black bears, a straight, featureless trunk is no problem – all they need is bark to sink their claws into.

Most black bear cubs seem to be having the time of their lives when climbing trees, ascending the highest branches for no logical reason other than fun. There’s a dark side though: black bears sometimes kill their prey by throwing them off. Unlike squirrels, they descend trees with their hind legs first rather than facing down.

As for grizzlies, the old wives tales recommend climbing trees for survival, as grizzlies are unable to. The truth is that grizzlies can climb trees, but tend to be clumsier than their black bear cousins. A grizzly mother might send its cubs up a tree to save them from a marauding male, but generally, brown bears have no special love for trees: they’re just a tool.

The post Black Bears and Grizzlies: 10 Differences appeared first on Bear Informer.

In prehistoric times, before the very first Spanish settlers arrived in the 1600s, California was home to an estimated 100,000 grizzly bears. These weren’t your garden variety grizzlies – they were a genetically isolated subspecies native to California. Their Latin scientific name was Ursus arctos californicus, compared to Ursus arctos horribilus for grizzly bears and Ursus arctos middendorffi for the Alaskan Kodiak bear.

While one biologist estimated in 1918 that North America held 86 different brown bear subspecies, this was eventually whittled down to 5-10, and the Californian grizzly was deemed to be one of the illustrious few. Few photographs were ever taken, but the subspecies had subtle differences such as a larger skull than the average grizzly bear, and a heavier average weight of just under 1000 pounds for males. The fur wasn’t fully blond like a Syrian brown bear, but there was a noticeable lighter tinge.

In prehistoric times, the California grizzly would have competed with the sabre toothed tiger and giant sloth, while gorging on a culinary paradise of berries, honey, nuts, roots and shrubs. According to respected conservationist John Muir in 1910, the Californian grizzly ate everything in sight “except granite”. Deer, pigs, sheep, badgers and gophers were all hearty snacks for the Californian grizzly.

Their human competition was approximately 350,000 Native Americans, divided into 500 Californian subgroups. When European settlers arrived, they couldn’t help but notice that many Californian Indians had lacerated scalps, while others wore thick fur and were worshipped as great heroes for their hunting conquests.

The first ever description of a Californian grizzly came in 1602, when a Spanish priest described them as “so large that their feet are a good third of a yard long”. 1769 saw the first Californian grizzly shot dead, by members of the Gaspar de Portola expedition. This spot was later named canyon of the bear, or Canada Del Oso, and in 1772, Father Serra of a local Spanish mission sent his men into the very same canyon to hunt. After days of savage slaughter, they returned with 9000 pounds of grizzly bear meat, which they sent to their fellow missions in San Diego and San Gabriel.

This marked the unofficial start of the Californian grizzly bear’s demise. In those early days of exploration, the Spanish government paid colonists to start old fashioned farmsteads called “ranchos”, but bears were everywhere in California, and would pinch sheep and rip apart fields. Grizzly bear hunters earned a booming living, making coin not only from killing the pesky bears, but selling their valuable pelt, meat and oil. The oil was particularly popular for keeping people’s hair smooth.

The 1849 Gold Rush was another accelerator, with floods of prospectors exploring every nook and cranny of the state and shooting any obstacle that stood in their way. Unthinkably today, Californian grizzly bears were dubbed “vermin” by the locals. It was clear that man and grizzly could not live in harmony.

In newspaper cuttings from the time, there are endless stories of maulings and mishaps involving the Californian grizzly. In January 1858, for example, George Favier and four friends were venturing south from Sonora on a promising gold prospecting mission.

One night, Favier left camp to gather brush for fire, but turning around, he suddenly saw 4 gigantic grizzly bears charge into camp and wipe out 3 of his friends almost instantly. The fourth man fled, but didn’t make it far before death came his way.

Suddenly, the bear was charging towards Favier. Now it was his turn! He managed a quick swipe of his gold pick, before being knocked over himself. Springing up again, fuelled by pure adrenaline, he ran to a nearby tree and climbed for his life. The charging bear managed to nip at his feet and legs, but after a final burst of speed, Favier made it up the tree. Horrified, he watched from the branches as the four bears devoured his friends’ corpses.

The shocked Favier remained in the tree for 2 days and 2 nights, with no food or water to drink, before summoning up the willpower to descend. He then began a desperate trek for 100 miles in the direction he believed was northwards. After 2 days, half-dead and still without food or water, he had practically given up when a wooden cabin came into sight. Favier was nursed back to health, barely alive, but alive nevertheless.

James Capen Adams, AKA Grizzly Adams, was undoubtedly the most famous Californian grizzly hunter of the lot. A New York native, he originally dashed to California in 1849 to capitalise on the gold rush, but soon found that bear-napping was more profitable. Fremont, Lady Washington and Samson were three captured grizzlies who travelled all over California with Adams to perform in parades, theatres, and opera houses.

To some extent, Adams treated his bears with respect. Lady Washington became so loyal that she would cuddle up with Adams at night to keep him warm, and allow him to ride on her back. Adams shot many bears, but never for fun: he always used their hide, fur and meat. Adams formed a particularly tight bond with a bear named Benjamin Franklin, who even saved his life on one ill-fated expedition in 1855 when Adams was charged by an enraged female.

When Ben Franklin died in 1858, the newspaper obituaries were full of mourning, with one titled “Death of a Distinguished Native Californian”. During that same attack, Grizzly Adams’ skull was torn open, lacerating his scalp forever, and a silver dollar sized crater was left in his forehead. He struggled on, but didn’t know when to quit: repeated swipes from bears and even a “trained” monkey meant that the wound kept reopening, eventually leaving his brain exposed.

In 1860, Grizzly Adams died, officially from meningitis. Still he plotted from beyond the grave and returned a whole century later, with a hit TV show starring Dan Haggerty from 1977-78.

Grizzly Adams wasn’t the only bear man in showbusiness: hustlers from all over California would steal newborn grizzly cubs and teach them to wrestle for show, or even play musical instruments. Bear battles were a popular weekend attraction, with the bears purposefully enraged with a knife, before duelling an equally angry bull in a makeshift wooden stadium.

Ultimately, no kidnapped Californian grizzly was more famous than Monarch. His story started in 1889, when William Randolph Hearst decided to capture a wild bear as a publicity stunt for his newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner. For months, his efforts failed miserably, as bears were already becoming rare in California, but in October, he was tipped off by experienced outdoorsman Allen Kelly about an injured bear stranded on Mount Gleason in Ventura county.

Monarch put up a ferocious battle, swiping against his captors and gnawing on his chains so relentlessly that he broke several teeth and left a gruesome trail of blood. When ripping the cage failed, he tried digging. When digging failed, he tried charging.

Sadly, it was no use. Monarch spent 22 years in a bear pit exhibit in Woodward’s Garden in San Francisco, and his debut in 1889 brought 20,000 onlookers. His only consolation was a female bear who he had 2 cubs with. Monarch weighed 1125 pounds when he was finally euthanised in 1911, in an arthritic state.

Kelly was later mournful, regretting ever capturing Monarch: “the only creature meditating and planning evil on that mountain… was a man with a gun“.

In 1866, James Lovett shot dead a huge Californian grizzly which had been stalking the cattle of Bear Valley for several weeks. He hoisted it onto a wagon, and drove 8 miles to the house of Col. A.E. Maxcy, who placed it on a cattle scale. The weight was a shocking 2200 pounds, which was declared to be the largest Californian grizzly bear of all time. After skinning the corpse, they discovered an entire pound of lead inside the bear’s skull.

If accurate, this weight would blast through the modern day record for brown bear heaviness, which was a 1656 pound Kodiak bear in Alaska. Supposedly, Maxcy kept the bear’s skull as a souvenir on his desk, before selling it to a museum in Georgia or Tennessee in 1900. No trace of this skull has ever been found. However, Lovell did have a 6 year old daughter in 1866 called Elisabeth. In 1932, aged 72, she returned to the old Bear Valley homestead and gave a 3 page account of the bear attack, pointing out the oak tree where the bear had first charged.

This doesn’t prove that it was 2400 pounds, but fellow ranchman Waldo Breedlove Sr had been told that it was 1950 pounds (although he was only born in 1889), while rancher Clyde James heard from his father that it had only been 1000 pounds. We may never know. Was the Californian grizzly the largest brown bear subspecies ever to walk the Earth? Or was the cattle scale simply broken?

The crazy stories didn’t end there. In 1998, “An Illustrated History of Los Angeles Country, California” mentioned how a Mr John Lang gathered 2 local men in 1873, ventured into the mountains, and shot dead a 2350 pound grizzly bear which had massacred several cattle. However, John Lang wrote his own account for a newspaper at the time, describing a mere 1600 pound grizzly bear which he had shot in 1875, not 1873. Exaggerated rumours were everywhere with the Californian grizzly.

Stories abounded of grizzly bears continuing to fight after being shot with 50 or 60 bullets. In the 1850s, a San Francisco trapsman called George Yount boasted to writer F.H. Day that he usually killed 5 or 6 grizzlies per day. Hunters used to walk the streets of California with grizzly bear claws hanging from chains. As early as the 1840s, grizzly bear bounty hunter George Nidever (he hunted bears, he wasn’t one himself) claimed to have shot 200 over his lifetime. California’s governor Romualdo Pacheco boasted to have felled several hundred, including 8 or 10 in a week once, having apparently lost count.

Gradually, these crazy stories lessened, as Californian grizzlies became more scarce. By 1880, they were gone from the counties of Humbolt, Colusa, San Mateo and Mendocino. They vanished from Monterey County by 1885, and by 1900, the Californian grizzly was no more in Ventura Country.

In 1857, a humble miner named Charles Chubbuck was out hunting when he was startled by a passing partridge. He looked up, and what did he see, but a Californian grizzly bear standing on a rock about 12 feet above. Chubbuck raised his rifle quickly, but a sudden swipe knocked it aside. Knowing that bears are unable to run downhill (a classic folklore myth), he turned and descended 20 feet. But suddenly, 2 more bears emerged from the trees to his side. A paw flung from nowhere and dislocated his hip. Chubbuck couldn’t move – his only option was to play dead.

One minute later, Chubbuck felt hot breath, and a huge set of jaws closed around his head. He could feel the blood pouring, followed by a giant bear tongue licking it off his face. The bear climbed on top of Chubbuck until he heard a sickening crack come from his ribs.

But then the 3 bears started to quarrel among themselves, allowing Chubbuck to grab his trusted Bowie knife. When the bear returned, he jammed the blade hilt-deep between the grizzly’s forelegs. The bear yelped, but immediately resumed its assault. Claws ripped off some of his face, a paw scalped him from behind, and Chubbuck was fading out of consciousness. When he revived, he was in such agony that moving was impossible.

For 8 months, Chubbuck couldn’t even sit up in bed. His face bore the scars for the rest of his life, but 49 years later, he finally recounted his tale in a Massachusetts newspaper.

There’s various stories about precisely when the Californian grizzly met its end. One involves a farmer called Jessi Agnew, who resided near Sequoi National Park and had found several of his calves mutilated. He laid a trap in the forest with a large chunk of beef, and after 3 patient days, Agnew and his fellow cattlemen finally found a large grizzly bear ensnared by its left forepaw.

The raging bear tried to fight back, but was swiftly felled by a well-aimed rifle shot. It was the last of a formerly 100,000 strong species. Or was it? Rumours persisted for years afterwards. There was a sighting in 1924 in the Sierra Madre Mountains, but the pursuing hunters failed to locate a bear, or any evidence.

In 1924, workers in Cedar Grove claimed to have seen a mother bear and two cubs ambling by. The most solid later sighting was in October 1926, when a raid on a Tulare County apple orchard seemed to show all the signs of bear activity. Owner Alfred Hengst teamed up with a seasoned hunter called Jacob Rice, and the two set a trap which ensnared the marauding bear once again. They cooked the bear’s meat and extracted 17 gallons of lard, but most importantly, they sent the skull to the University Of California. As reported in Visalia Times Delta on March 5th 1930, scientific analysis confirmed it to be the skull of the grizzly bear.

After 1926, there were no more confirmed sightings of Californian grizzlies. By 1940, they were surely extinct.

For 10 years now, the movement to bring back the Californian grizzly has been well and truly underway. The US Fish and Wildlife Service received an official petition back in 2014, only to promptly reject it, trigging the formation of the Californian Grizzly Research Network in 2016. The idea isn’t to drop 100 bears onto the streets of Los Angeles via helicopter – the bears would inhabit the mountainous regions and back valleys.

Proponents point out that California has enough wilderness to sustain 500 healthy grizzly bears. Doubters argue that reintroduction is a Disney-level fantasy and that man and bear cannot simply co-exist. Proponents reply that Eastern Europeans and Alaskans manage it with only occasional mishaps. Doubters point out that the Californian grizzly bear is extinct, and that any bears introduced would have to be normal American grizzlies.

Some have proposed a herculean feat of genetic engineering where grizzly bears would be selectively bred to become Californian grizzlies once again. But one problem is that for such a commonly encountered species, scientists know surprisingly little about the Californian grizzly’s nature relative to other subspecies. The attitude was always shoot first and ask questions later, or run first and ask questions never.

No real progress has been made in the reintroduction quest, and in 2019, a federal grizzly bear specialist ran some tests and concluded that any grizzly comeback would fail due to a lack of core habitat. Nevertheless, the story of the Californian grizzly may not be over yet.

The post The Extinct Californian Grizzly Bear: 10 Facts appeared first on Bear Informer.

The most common brown bear in Eurasia. At its peak, the Eurasian brown bear  stretched from Great Britain to deep into the heart of Siberia. Today, they roam from the Pyrenees to Norway to north west Russia. Any news reports coming out of Romania or Slovenia of brown bears pinching chickens or honey will be about the Eurasian brown bear.

It’s also known as the European brown bear, and it’s a medium sized bear with an average male weight of 600 pounds and 400 pounds for females. The heaviest Eurasian brown bear ever was 1060 pounds, well below the Kodiak bear record of 1656 pounds, but easily exceeding the Yellowstone grizzly record of 715 pounds.

This subspecies has a normal bear diet, taking as much meat as it can, but enjoying berries, roots and honey when it can’t. The most obvious visual difference is a rounder skull compared to the grizzly bear or Kamchatka brown bear, and smaller, rounder ears. Their paws and claws are fairly large, and their fur is mostly dark brown, with blond bears uncommon compared to in Alaska, but not unheard of.

The western half of Russia has the highest numbers, but the next ranking countries are Romania (6000), Sweden (3000), and Finland (2000), while Slovakia and Croatia each have 1200.

This subspecies specialises in being huge. Bears of 1200 pounds or more are common, making them the biggest subspecies in Eurasia. East Siberia is indeed its habitat, spilling over into Mongolia and the far north-west of China. Being common in Russia, you might imagine that the two subspecies would intermingle, but there’s a sharp dividing line with the Eurasian brown bear starting at the Yenisei river, which is Russia’s third longest and runs straight down the middle of Siberia.

This is a very common subspecies, but because its natural habitats are so remote, it’s surprisingly unstudied. Nevertheless, the east Siberian brown bear has a much more aggressive reputation than its Eurasian fellow. They show no qualm in harassing hunters, stalking scientists through the snow, and even breaking into innocent villagers’ homes and stealing their beetroot soup. Most disturbingly, it seems to have no taste for honey – if ever there’s a sign that a bear’s a villain, then that’s it.

The east Siberian bear is one of the darkest subspecies, but there’s a population near the upper Yenisei river which has a shining white colour on an otherwise chocolate-coloured body. Its fur tends to be long and soft (no, they don’t secretly want to be hugged), while their heads are longer, closer in shape to a grizzly bear. There’s also debate about the East Siberian brown bears of Kolyma and Anadyr in Russia’s far east. They’re significantly smaller, and some scientists consider them to be an unidentified subspecies.

Ursus arctos beringianus was first classified as a separate subspecies in 1851 by Charles Mittendorfi. This is the huge, mighty bear of the Kamchatkan peninsula of Russia’s far east, a wildlife haven teeming with fish, birds and volcanoes. 

The Kamchatka brown bear is still plentiful, with 10,000-14,000 bears inhabiting an area of the size of California. Nevertheless, it ranks with the East Siberian as the most heavily poached subspecies, mainly for their gall bladders, which the Chinese believe have special medical powers. Like Kodiak island, Kamchatka is a capital of salmon, holding 25% of the world’s supplies in July. Consequently, Kamchatka bears commonly reach 1400 pounds in size, rivalling the east Siberian brown bear.

Its skull is broader than bears such as the Ussuri brown bear, and the forehead is steeper. The fur is dark brown, but occasionally with a violet or cinnamon tint. Blond bears aren’t uncommon either. The Kamchatka brown bear isn’t especially aggressive, but it also lives far away from human habitats and rarely becomes addicted to human food. 

The Kamchatkan bear is believed to be the direct ancestor of the Kodiak bear, in one wave of migration, while the grizzly bear is believed to have originated from east Siberian brown bears in a separate wave.

A close relative of the Kamchatka brown bear which has been isolated for long enough to subtly change. This bear most famously controls the Japanese island of Hokkaido, but also the far south east of Russia and northeast China. Appearance wise, its skull is narrower and more elongated, and its fur tends to be darker, even black, which once led biologists to believe it was a black/brown hybrid. 

The Ussuri bear once existed on Honshu, the main island of Japan, but died off many an era ago in the late Pleistocene. Nowadays, it is restricted to Hokkaido and the Kuril peninsula islands, which once formed a land bridge from Kamchatka when the sea level was lower during the ice age. This sub-species has a sub population called the Ininkari brown bear which lives on two of the Kuril islands, Kunashiri and Etorofu. This version is unique for its snowy white upper body, which has a sharp dividing line between a blue-grey lower body.

The Ussuri brown bear is a fairly large subspecies. The famous “diagonal slash” bear of the 1915 Sankebetsu killings in Japan weighed an estimated 749 pounds. The Ussuri brown bear also has the distinction of co-existing with the Siberian tiger in north-east China. The latter wins a slight majority of the battles, but only if its initial pounce on the bear’s jugular veins succeeds. Otherwise, the bear tends to win with its greater endurance and smashing club-like paws.

This cuddly looking bear is said to have a particularly aggressive temperament, raiding the winter homes of yak farmers when they disappear into their mountain lodges for a few months. This bear has a few myths surrounding it: wikipedia claims that’s it’s almost never sighted and is known solely through pelt and fur scraps, but that’s untrue, as captive animals exist in zoos.

Nevertheless, the Tibetan blue bear is a relatively mysterious subspecies. It inhabits the deserted valleys of the eastern Himalaya and the Tibetan plateau, the vast wilderness where Everest climbers used to march through before the Nepalese south side became more popular. Its fur is a brown-blue colour, but with a majestic white colour that circles from neck to chest. This is by far the easiest bear to identify in a Eurasian bear lineup. It’s a medium sized bear and its favourite animal dish is unique to bears: the Himalayan pika, which it burrows into the earth to find in its dens.

This bear can be found in China and Nepal, from the plains to the high mountain peaks: this camera trap image shows a mother and two cubs in a high snow field. The Tibetan blue bear is theorised by some Non-Believers to be the real origin of the yeti folklore, hulking shaggy beasts witnessed by terrified villagers whose legend was only exaggerated by scraps of fur.

Another Himalayan subspecies, but this time further to the west, including the bulk of Nepal and stretching into Pakistan and north-east India. This subspecies is critically endangered, heavily targeted by poor Pakistani villagers for the valuable gall bladder and with only 200 estimated to remain. Its fur is more of a standard brown, but with a red tinge, and during autumn yellowish tones can temporarily appear. Another name is the Himalayan red bear. 

Many Himalayan brown bears have a pale v-shaped mark on their chest too. It’s a relatively small bear, with a small head and rounded ears and a fairly pointy snout. Its temperament is surprisingly peaceful, perhaps because it’s by far the largest mammal in its range and has little competition. However, that doesn’t stop them from pinching goats from angry Pakistani farmers.

During summer, this bear regularly ascends to heights of 5500 metres, well above the highest point in the alps (Mont Blanc). Rather than evolving from each other, it’s believed that the Himalayan and Tibetan blue came in different waves of migrations from the west. The Himalayan brown bear separated from Eurasian brown bears around 658,000 years ago. They were then blocked off by great towering chunks of glacier during the ice age, before the Tibetan blue bear broke off around 342,000 years ago, and were blocked off in a different area of the Himalaya. 

The most endangered subspecies in Eurasia. Gobi bears put the plight of Himalayan brown bears to shame, as there are only 40 remaining as of 2015. The Gobi desert is the world’s 6th biggest and is mostly located in Mongolia. A variety of geographical factors like the Tibetan plateau and the great Siberian anticyclone combine to prevent this place from getting a drop of rainfall, and consequently, there’s very little plant life. However, animals such as black-tailed gazelles, wild ass and wolves still manage to eek out an existence, including the bears, or Mazaalai as Mongolians call them.

The immediate difference is shaggier, more ruffled looking fur compared to the sleekness of a European brown bear. It’s exactly what you’d imagine a desert bear to look like, and the colour is also lighter, with even lighter patches on the chest and neck. With the scarcity of food, the Gobi bear is predictably a bit smaller than others, and one unique feature is rather blunt claws. It’s an extremely vegetarian bear and particularly loves wild onion and rhubarb roots, which it digs for with its long claws.

Things are looking up, as Mongolian ministers made 2013 the year of the Gobi bear. 76 year old Harry Reynolds bear biologist launched the Gobi Bear Project in 2004, and since then numbers have grown from 29 to 40, with the helping hand of winter food dumps and GPS tracking collars. Yet the Gobi bear also has the least genetic diversity of any brown bear subspecies. This subspecies is still teetering over the edge of oblivion.

The Middle East’s own loveable bear subspecies, and one with several special features. Firstly, it’s the subspecies which most commonly has a lighter coloured coat. Brown ones exist, such as Wotjek the famous WW2 military bear, but light sandy brown is common, as is a brown/blond combination of hairs which makes your eyes feel funny. This adaption occurred to help it blend in with the desert, and without human interference, the proportion of blond ones would have probably increased over the millennia.

Secondly, the Syrian brown bear is the only subspecies to have white claws. Finally, it’s the smallest subspecies in Eurasia, with males averaging at just 450 pounds to the females’ 300 pounds. The Syrian brown bear can be found in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, and maybe, just maybe, Syria itself. Paw prints in the snow were observed in the anti-Lebanon mountains of northwest Syria in 2004, and again in 2011.

The Syrian brown bear is commonly hunted in Iran for its fur, which sells for $2000 at town marketplaces. Its existence was reconfirmed in Iraq by a US soldier flying overhead in a helicopter back in 2003, and numerous historical references to docile bears being led into the golden palaces of pharaohs hint that they once roamed Egypt as well.

Italy has two populations of brown bear. The first is an 80 strong pool of Eurasian brown bears in the southern alps of Italy’s far north, which was a reintroduction from Slovenia in 1999. The second is the Marsican brown bear. This potential subspecies lives in the Apennine mountains in central Italy, in the 190 square mile Abruzzo National park about 40km east of Rome. This is a place not of towering mountains, but rolling forested hills, cosy fields and swamps.

We say potential subspecies, because there’s a still continuing debate. Some biologists consider this to be a Eurasian brown bear, but others dub it Ursus arctos marsicanus, pointing to evidence that it diverged well over 5000 years ago. The Marsican bear is unusually shy and docile  – all the aggressive bears have died out due to living in close proximity to human settlements. Its fur tends to be darker with a lighter coloured head, and it’s slightly smaller than its cousins, with males averaging at 478 pounds and females at 310 pounds.

Unlike in north Italy, this bear never fully died out, but with only 60 bears remaining, the Marsican brown bear is also critically endangered. Nevertheless, numbers have recovered significantly from a low of 40 in 2005. Efforts include building reflective surfaces into highways to warn bears of approaching car lights, removing 24km of barbed wire fencing, and upgrading water storage tanks which 3 bears once drowned in.

The only extinct brown bear subspecies on this list. Nevertheless, the Atlas bear existed well into modern times, even the 1950s if the wildest rumours are to be believed. This was the North African brown bear, residing in modern day Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia. No living person knows precisely what the Atlas bear looked like. No pictures were ever taken, and amazingly, no museum specimens were ever preserved. Reports suggest that the atlas bear had reddish-brown fur on its underbelly, with a shorter than average muzzle and snout, but a weight of up to 1000 pounds.

As recently as the 1990s, biologists dismissed the whole concept of a North African bear, blaming the sightings on escaped bears imported by the Romans, but fossilised bones dating back to 600BC disproved their theories. Reports of Atlas bears were common in the early 1800s, but sightings fell off a cliff around 1860. Kidnapping by the Romans for battles in colosseums with bestiari is commonly blamed, but hunting by the local berber was much more important, particularly when modern firearms were invented – some hunters claimed to have personally killed 25.

The last recorded sighting was in 1870, but the species almost certainly persisted for another few years, or even decades, in isolated mountain pockets. Ultimately, it joined the barbary lion as a great extinct mammal of this region.

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It’s no secret that the cave bear is a legendary, extinct animal, which was an everpresent part of ancient cavemen’s lives. The dates are far from nailed down, but the cave bear probably lived from around 1 million years ago to 24,000 years ago. The extinction was later than the Neanderthals, but significantly earlier than the woolly rhinos (12,000 years ago) or the woolly mammoth, whose last fragmented populations died only 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island.

Both brown bears and cave bears are thought to have had the same common ancestor: the Plio-Pleistocene Etruscan bear (Ursus etruscus), which lived from 5.2MYA to 80,000 years ago, and was slightly smaller than modern bears. It’s estimated that the two diverged 1.2-1.4 million years ago, well before polar bears split off. The cave bear lived all over Europe, from the modern day British Isles, to Italy and even northern Iran. However, the alps were undoubtedly its stronghold. Austria, Switzerland, southern France and northern Italy have easily had the highest quantity of skeletons discovered.

Modern brown bears regularly take shelter in caves, but cave bears took it to the next level, using them as their exclusive hibernation domains. Prehistoric paintings have been discovered of cave bears, yet there were far more of regular brown bears, showing just how much time they spent huddled away in remote cave passages.

Cave bears were a gigantic species. Males averaged at 1000 pounds compared to 600 pounds for the modern grizzly. The classic image of a ferocious cave bear on its hind legs looming over a cavemen crowd was very much real. However, at 500 pounds, females were way smaller, so small that they were misidentified as normal brown bears, or an unidentified dwarf bear species. Archaeologists spent years wondering why they could only find male cave bear skeletons. Today, 90% of museum specimens are male.

The cave bear is believed to have been relatively herbivorous. We know this from the teeth found in its skeletons, which are significantly more ground down compared to modern bears, hinting at a life spent chewing on tough vegetation. Its favourite foods were believed to be nuts and acorns, but it was still able to eat meat during leaner times, particularly smaller mammals and carrion. In old cave bear bones unearthed in the Carpathian mountains of Romania, scientists have detected elevated levels of nitrogen-15, an ingenious modern method for detecting animal protein consumption in long-dead animals.

The cave bear is probably the most frequently discovered prehistoric large mammal of all time. From the middle ages to early 1900s, hundreds of thousands were discovered in deep, dark caves all over Europe. Terrified villagers often believed them to be dragons. Imagine being a daring local lad in a 1700s Austrian village, guided down a local cave by only your lantern while your friends egged you on. Turning a cave passage, you suddenly stumble across the 200 pound skeleton, resting against a wall only half-illuminated. This is a story that legions of people would have experienced.

Cave bear skeletons were so abundant that in the latter stages of World War 1, the Germany army ground them down en masse to make phosphorous, a raw material for bombs and grenades. It’s a thought that would make archaeologists recoil in horror, but the skeletons were too many to count: new bears would occupy the same caves over the course of 1 million years (or close), leading to an exponential build up. Elderly bears would die inside the caves during hibernation, having failed to fatten up enough in the bulking season. Occasionally, cave lions and cave hyenas would sneak in and kill the infirm ones at the back. Cave lion skeletons have also been found deep within cave bear chambers, hinting that some paid for the attempt with their lives.

30,000 years ago, our ancestors knew exactly what cave bears were, but for the last thousand years, people didn’t have a clue.

The earliest records of European cave exploration were in the 15th century, and these already mention large bones, but instead, they were considered to be unicorn fossils, which were harvested for folk health remedies. By 1656, progress was being made: Horst theorised that giant bones in Germany’s Einhornhöhle cave (which translates to “unicorn cave”) could belong to bears, lions and humans.

How about the first pictures? They were sketched in 1673 and 1676, by Paterson Hain and Vollgnad respectively, who stuck to the familiar belief that they were the bones of dragons, living in the Carpathian caves of eastern Europe. These dragon references are everywhere in the 18th century. A 1739 text by Franz Bruchman also describes a dragon skeleton discovered in the cave of Liptovien in Hungary.

The official discovery happened in 1774, when Johann Esper published the first massively detailed diagram of a skeleton in his book Newly Discovered Zoolites of Unknown Four Footed Animals. He judged it to be a prehistoric polar bear skeleton, which wasn’t the worst guess in scientific history. Quickly though, people realised that it was much larger than any living bear species. Finally, in 1794, a Mr Rosenmueller proclaimed that the bones belonged to an extinct ice age bear, which he called ursus spalaeus, the latin name which still stands today.

Why did cave bears go extinct? Climate change may have been a factor, as the ice ages beginning 100,000 years ago could have steadily ground them down, until the ultimate extinction 24,000 years ago. Unlike woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos, cave bears were less of a cold-loving prehistoric creature. With their herbivorous diets, a sudden retreat of plant life leaving only hardy shrubs and berries could have been a disaster, compared to the more flexible and omnivorous brown bear.

The cave bear’s larger sinuses may have been involved, cavities in the skull which hold gases like nitric oxide. In cave bears, the sinuses triggered hibernation, but they also tend to change the skull’s shape in animals, forcing the back teeth into being more developed. It’s believed that in cave bears, their front teeth became so woefully underpowered that they couldn’t switch to meat effectively during colder periods, except in small doses.

Interestingly, the skeletons across various caves in Spain and France had extremely similar DNA halotypes within each cave. It was like there were individual pools of cave bear lineages all across Europe. It’s possible that they gave birth and raised cubs entirely “at home”, which would make migrating to new areas very difficult, making cave bears a very inflexible species. Yet another theory is that the cave-bear had an unusually small brain relative to its body size, and was “stupid” compared to brown bears.

Scientists currently estimate that cave bears and mankind co-existed for 20,000 years. The question is inevitable: did humanity’s arrival hasten their demise? The current theory is that cave bears were so hemmed into their narrow niche that when cavemen finally looked to caves for shelter, the consequences were disastrous. The cave bears were probably met with a volley of arrows and spears, and forced to hide out in the bitter cold, which they weren’t adapted to. The more versatile brown bear was able to hibernate in exposed areas (and still can, obviously), like thick clusters of trees, making its own dens.

The cave bear population first plummeted around 40,000 years ago, when homo sapiens started fanning out northwards and eastwards. Coincidence? Proponents point out that the cave bear population had been stable for tens of thousands of years beforehand, withstanding endless ice ages. Tribes of humans could have driven the cave bear away from its summer foraging grounds as well. It’s confirmed that cavemen hunted cave bears, thanks to flints embedded in ancient vertebrae.

The current 2022 theory is that human tribes did the initial damage, with an intensifying ice age beginning around 24,000YA performing the final “coup de grace”.

One controversial theory is that prehistoric humans worshipped cave bears, popularised by the 1980 book The Clan Of The Cave Bear. The theory was dismissed, but in 1924, scientists evacuating Drachenloch cave in Switzerland discovered manmade stone chests. Inside were several cave bear skulls, deliberately placed. The arrangement appeared to be artistic, ritualistic. In 1920, French scientists discovered a cave later named Chauvet in the southern Ardèche region. In dim light, they stumbled onto 150 cave bear skeletons, alongside clear footprints embedded in clay. But that wasn’t all: one skull was positioned in the centre of a stone slab, in a separate chamber. There’s no proof that this was a scene of worship, but the walls were lined with cave paintings of hyenas, lions and cave bears. The occupants of Chauvet cave were dated to 32,000 years ago.

For hunting, there’s plentiful evidence. A cave called Höhle Fels in the German mountainous region of Swabian Jura contained numerous cave bear skeletons, one of which had a vertebra embedded with flints from a prehistoric spear, dating back 29,000 years. Back in 2000, this was considered to be an epic discovery.

The current consensuses is that ursus spalaeus, or the cave bear, went extinct 24,000 years ago, mainly because that’s the latest conclusively dated skeleton. A serious decline in genetic diversity started around 50,000 years ago, and by 35,000 years ago, the cave bear was seriously less common in Central Europe. Nevertheless, there isn’t a bear expert on Earth who will profess to know the exact date.

South of the alps, cave bears survived for much longer, which could be because of a warmer climate making their herbivorous foods more abundant. It also hung on in the northwest Iberian peninsula for significantly longer. Could pockets of the cave bear have survived beyond 24,000 years ago? It’s likely, but not for much longer, mainly because skeletons of cave bears are incomparably common. Tens of thousands of skeletons have been discovered in European limestone caves over the centuries. Unlike rarer Neanderthal skeletons, where new discoveries are constantly forcing scientists to revise their dates, we’d almost certainly have discovered the smoking gun for a later cave bear extinction date already. Yet nothing is inconceivable.

Throughout the medieval period and middle ages, the legend endured in the tiny Austrian village of Mixnitx that a local cave held the bones of dragons, and possibly living ones too. These villagers knew nothing of the existence of cave bears, and the passages gradually became known as “dragon’s cave” (Drachenhöhle).

The truth is that Drachenhöhle was perhaps the most heavily concentrated tomb of cave bears in the whole alps, with an estimated 30,000 skeletons at its peak. At 925m in elevation, it looks like a typical cave from its hillside location, with a wide 12 meter by 3 meter entrance. However, this easy accessibility means that Drachenhöhle was used by successive generations of hibernating cave bears. In some places, the phosphate sediment from old bones was 12 metres deep. Drachenhöhle also contained the oldest human remains ever found in Austria, dated back to 65,000 to 31,000 years ago. Evidence of the first human exploration dates back to 1387, and in 1904, a cave tourist called Jean Striemer was stuck in Drachenhöhle for 3 days, before 2 female friends remembered that he had gone there and brought him food and water.

Many of the Drachenhöhle’s bear skeletons ended up Landesmuseum Joanneum in the large Austrian city of Graz, although a vast amount were ground down for phosphate by the Germans in World War 1. Nowadays, this cave bear hotspot is a popular tourist attraction. It’s completely undeveloped, and visitors must step over several dangerous piles of rocks during the tour. There’s no cost of entry… except maybe your life. The reward is the chance of seeing numerous ancient cave bear bones embedded in the cave floor.

In 2020, some Russian reindeer herders were going about their duties on Bolshoy Lyakhovsky Island in the northern Siberian wilderness. Suddenly, they spotted a matted bundle of fur by a melting, muddy riverside. It was a snarling bear head, but not just any snarling bear head. It was a prehistoric cave bear corpse with its nose intact and its teeth so sharp that they seemed to be preparing for a bite. Later, scientists dated the mummy back to 22,000 to 39,500 years ago, and discovered that its fur, internal organs and soft tissues were astonishingly undamaged.

Recently, a woolly mammoth mummy and a preserved 40,000 year old wolf’s head have been found on the same islands. It was the first ever intact cave bear discovery, but probably not the last. Coincidentally, a juvenile cave bear was discovered around the same time, but hundreds of miles further south in Yakutia.

After decades of reconstructions and guesswork, we now have true visual confirmation of what a cave bear looked like in its prime. The mummy is so well preserved that you can see how the cave bear’s head differs to a modern brown bear – high and long versus round and compact. It’s early days yet, but the next plan is to find extractible DNA, and food in it stomach to analyse the diet. Russian scientists from the North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU) in Yakutsk are now on the task. Could clone armies of cave bears patrol the alps in 20 years time? We’re getting ahead of ourselves here – they still have the woolly mammoth to take care of.

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Katmai National Park is one of the undisputed bear capitals of the world. Located in Alaska, it’s where the famous Grizzly man Timothy Treadwell hung out for 13 straight summers before being eaten alive in 2003 and achieving immortality on the silver screen.

In 2010, 40 year old photographer Steve Kazlowski had heard rumours of a blond grizzly bear wandering the opposite shores of the icy bay he was camping close to. Soon, rumours turned to fact, as a 700 pound blonde grizzly approached a 700 pound brown grizzly right in front of him. This had all the makings of a brutal conflict, but as the bears growled, stood on their hind legs and locked paws, Kazlowski noticed that the usual aggression was lacking somehow.

Instead, the bears played with each other on the shores of the bay until the sun set. Over the hours, they lost their balance repeatedly on the slippery rocks. With plenty of salmon swimming around nearby to attract their attention, it’s a wonder that the feeding bears didn’t suddenly turn aggressive.

This blond bear was a consistently creamy colour, unlike other blond bears, who occasionally have brown legs or hind quarters. It stood 8 feet tall on its hind legs, and appeared to be slightly larger than its brown playmate. According to Kazlowski, who approached to within 50 feet at one point, “This was a game that was friendly, but could always turn to a fight if things got out of hand“.

Blonde bears, friendly and playful bears – this was a double rarity.

It all started on April 26th 2020. Cara Clarkson was enjoying a relaxing hike with her family in Banff National Park, when she spotted two grizzly bears feeding near a wire mesh fence by the trans-Canada highway. One of the bears stood out, as its entire coat was the lightest shade of blond, almost matching a polar bear. Because its eyes lacked the telltale pink colour, it clearly wasn’t an albino bear, but rather an incredibly rare genetic colour phase. As Canmore-based grizzly expert Mike Gibaeu put it: “I’ve seen a really, really blond grizzly, but never a white one“. Cara Clarkson thought that the bear was a wolf from a distance.

The internet quickly burst into action, and the blond was granted the nickname of Nakota. She was estimated to be 3 1/2 years old, but by May 5th, local authorities were warning of a flood of tourists that could put her life in danger. Drivers were ordered not to stop and take pictures, even if Nakota turned out to have a friendly yogi bear temperament. By June, Nakota had already escaped collision with a transport truck by a narrow margin.

Local bear trackers announced that they’d known about Nakota for a while. The blond and brown grizzlies were actually siblings, who had already caused mischief that spring when they tucked into grain spillages by a train derailment. They’d even forced a highway fence to be made higher after using a snowdrift to climb over it.

In the northernmost reaches of Japan, where samurais slung their swords and extinct wolves once roamed, perhaps the rarest bear of them all lies hidden. It’s called the Ininkari bear, and is a subspecies of Japan’s native Ussuri brown bear which has evolved a rich blue-blond coat.

These bears live in the Kari mountains of the southern Kuril islands, themselves located in the north-western reaches of the Pacific ring of fire. The mountains are part of an archipelago of islands which begins with the huge Hokkaido and stretches northeast from Japan to the easternmost tip of Russia.

Instead of a consistent lighter shade, the Ininkari bears’ upper half is a very light blond similar to the grizzlies of Denali, while their lower half is darker, but with tinges of blue like the Tibetan blue bear. There’s plenty of standard brown bears on these islands, but the bears who are blond stick rigidly to this divided pattern.

Unlike normal brown bears, whose fur can gradually change over time, Ininkari bears have blond fur from birth. They look like no other bear on Earth. They were first documented in 1791, in a Japanese painting called Ininkari-zu by an Ainu chieftain. His name? Chief Ininkari.

Sometimes when reading the news, it feels like any unique animal is at automatic risk of extinction, but happily, these bears have survived well on the Kuril islands. There are no natural predators, and local Russian hunters always claim to treat them with reverence.

Denali National Park is located in the Alaskan interior and is home to America’s highest mountain, the 6190 metre high Denali (or Mount McKinley). The park currently has 300-350 grizzlies, and for whatever reason, a disproportionate amount have shaggy blond fur. The phenomenon hasn’t been studied by scientists, but pictures uploaded to the internet by tourists once they return home are incredibly easy to find.

This youtube video, for example, shows a mother blond bear and two cubs tucking into vegetation on an open plain. A 1991 article in the LA Times talks about a huge blond grizzly with no fear of humans, who was attracted to a campsite in Denali by the wafting smell of shrimp Cantonese. The campers crammed the food into a bear-resistant plastic container in a half panic, and thankfully, the blond bear decided to move on. One hiker spotted an amazing grizzly with black hind quarters, black legs, and a white-black mixture on the face and torso, while this fantastic video shows a blond grizzly in full flow, galloping down a Denali mountainside and ruling over its native habitat, complete with melting patches of snow in the background.

The most likely explanation is genetics, of course, a pool of blondness which mother and father bears have passed down to a steadily growing list of descendants. As a side note, grizzly bear tracks have been spotted all the way up on Mount McKinley glacier.

In May 2016, a gigantic white bear was shot dead in Nunavat, Canada by local hunter Didji Ishalook. It sounded like nothing unusual, but this massive white bear had the body shape of a grizzly.

Ishalook had seen the blonde bear standing on a hill near Arviat, around 230 miles north of the notorious polar bear hub of Churchill. He initially mistook it for a polar bear or arctic fox, and it evidently wasn’t an albino, lacking the obvious pink eyes.

To the tabloid media it was perfectly obvious: this was a rare grizzly-polar bear hybrid. The two species can not only produce offspring, but fully fertile offspring, having diverged on the evolutionary tree of life only 200,000 years ago. For decades, pizzlies were solely the domain of overenthusiastic zookeepers, but on April 6th 2016, a hunter near Banks Island in Canada shot one dead on the tightly packed sea ice. For the first time, local Inuit were forced to come up with their own word for pizzly, and global warming was widely blamed.

Soon though, Nanuk’s Department of Environment stepped in, collected DNA samples from the new bear, and sent them off to a genetics lab. Their conclusion was resolute: no polar bear parent. Instead, this was a blond grizzly, an equally fascinating fluke of nature. The majority of its fur was blond, but all 4 paws were pure brown, and the torso also had a faint brown undercoat. Ishalook announced that he would make a rug from its fur.

Another tragic blonde bear shooting, this time in the Canadian province of Yukon. Over in British Columbia, there’s a unique population of black bear called the Kermode bear, but more popularly dubbed the spirit bear, because of a significant proportion which have pure white fur. Their paleness is said to give them an advantage while fishing in the sheltered forest creeks, and naturally, when a white-tinged grizzly was discovered in Yukon, social media users dubbed her the “spirit grizzly”.

Her fur was slightly different to the playfighting blonde grizzly above, as she had a clear brown undercoat, but overlaid with a thick layer of ash-white coloured hair. For the past 2 summers, the white spirit grizzly had entertained parked drivers by turning up to nibble on dandelions by the highway.

Unfortunately, the spirit grizzly was shot dead on May 22nd 2013. A hunter simply parked along Tagish road and fired at close range when she emerged from the undergrowth.

This triggered an eruption of rage on social media. Edna Helm, a member of the Carcass Tagish first nations community, said that seeing the bear grow into adulthood had brought joy to their hearts. “I hope he haunts your soul, if you have one“, she warned. Even hunting proponents slammed the callousness of waiting by a roadside and shooting the first animal to turn up. A man called Greg Karais started an internet campaign to ban roadside hunting along all major Yukon highways.

Not an individual bear, but one of the 9 confirmed brown bear subspecies to inhabit Eurasia. The Syrian brown bear numbers in the hundreds to low thousands and is now restricted to Turkey, Iran, Armenia and Lebanon, with occasional tracks being spotted in Syria itself. Being a citizen of scorching desert climates, it isn’t surprising that the Syrian brown bear has a much lighter coat on average. It tends to be light brown to straw blond, and is the only bear species on Earth to have consistently white claws. This Armenian camera trap footage taken in 2013 is an excellent example. It shows a small bear approaching the camera in mountainous terrain, before looking spooked and dashing off quickly after about 10 seconds. The fur seemed to be a straight mixture of brown and blond hairs, with no consistency, creating a multicoloured bear.

Back in 2018, a bear broke free from an animal shop (god knows what it was doing there) in Basra, Iraq, and wandered the streets for several hours, causing everyone to whip their mobile phones out. This bear had a more consistent light brown/dark blond colour, while another video of rescued Syrian brown bears in New York shows a pure blond tone.

That said, there are no hard rules in the bear world. Private Wojtek of the Polish army was a rich brown colour, and he was undoubtedly the most famous Syrian brown bear of all time, fighting in the battle of Monte Cassino of 1942.

Perhaps the most mysterious bear on planet Earth, outstripping even the Tibetan blue bear for mystery. The blonde-coloured Sailugem bear hadn’t been sighted in the Altai mountains since the mid-20th century, when Russian zoologist Dr Genrikh Sobamsky made the first primitive sketches and asked ICUN to list it under red for extremely endangered.

One day in 2018, Kaichi Guides was conducting a bird watching trip in the same mountains, searching for species like Himalayan vultures. On June 22nd, the group was sitting on the Russian side of Point X, the point where 4 countries intersect, also including China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. Suddenly, the tour guides Erkin and Alexander waved at the rest of the group, and urged them to follow down a rocky beige slope.

There, after 6 long decades, was a Sailugem bear. Its fur was incredible, with three distinct colours. A blond section included its head and back, while the upper limbs were a ghostly white. Finally, the lower limbs were brown, combining into a fantastical whole to create a Harry Potter appearance. This “brown” bear looked totally different to the bears of Alaska, yet the Sailugem bear is so rarely sighted that scientists have no idea whether it’s a fully fledged subspecies, or a weird subpopulation like the Ininkari bears of Japan.

Blond bears are much less common in western Europe compared to the United States. The blond genetics must have only become prominent after they crossed the Alaskan land bridge 100,000 years ago, but as of 2015, things may be changing, as Italy had its very own blond bear roaming the countryside.

The Alpine region of Trentino is home to 80 bears, clashing with local civilians, with politicians arguing constantly over whether a cull is necessary. One day, a local goat farmer was analysing a camera he’d installed to monitor his flock at 1700 metres, but instead saw a huge blond bear rummaging around for food. This bear had a particularly massive hump on its back, and was consistently blond, with the odd brown patch on its legs. Coincidentally, it was only the second bear sighting in Val Bregaglia, Lombardy of the last 20 years. This particular bear didn’t have a radio collar, meaning that tracking it was impossible.

The mayor warned local residents not to venture into the forest to try and meet the bear. If anyone spotted tracks, he warned, they should turn around and exit the area immediately. According to local police, the bear “had an anomalous blond colour“, but was also “good natured“. He had already been spotted once in 2014, scratching his back against a tree, but had become fairly elusive since.

No news on whether he’s a friend of Papillon, the world famous escape artist bear.

Lake Clarke National Park lies in the southwest of Alaska, and is a popular holiday location for hikers and campers alike. It’s also a popular holiday location for bears, and in July 2019, Shayne McGuire from California received a nice surprise when a blond bear wandering straight into her campsite near a wooden lodge, before hanging around for a few days. This bear was fairly normal within the overall abnormal phenomenon of blond grizzlies – a blond bulk of its body with darker brown patches on its lower legs.

It seemed that this blond grizzly was 3 years old and had recently been rejected by her mother. She was probably finding her way in the world, and didn’t seem aggressive in the slightest.

One of the best bear moments of 2018 arrived when the blond grizzly stopped and inspected a grizzly bear warning sign. Was she having a laugh? She seemed particularly mischievous, as according to one tourist, “she sat down batted those expressive eyes at us“, before suddenly scooting closer. The blond bear was captured in photos playing with a ball, wandering along the shores of a lake, and frolicking in the wild grasslands.

Lake Clarke is a major salmon hotspot, often attracting 20 bears at once to the popular feeding grounds like Chinitna Bay or Silver Salmon Creek. McGuire claimed that she’d only seen one blond grizzly on previous expeditions.

The post 10 Blonde Bear Sightings Around The World appeared first on Bear Informer.

To most people, Kodiak bears are the biggest, cuddliest and most Teddy-like bear species living on Earth. Most people know them as the stars of those viral youtube videos, with waving bears in zoos who are secretly hoping for people to throw them some salmon.

Scientifically though, Kodiak bears (ursus arctos mittendorfi) are simply one of the 5-9 subspecies of brown bear in North America. They live in Alaska, but exclusively in the isolated Kodiak archipelago of the state’s southwest. This cluster of islands includes Barren Islands, the most northerly, Afognak Island, the second largest, and Kodiak Island itself, the largest of the archipelago.

Kodiak bears have been separated from American grizzly bears (ursus arctos horribilis) for an estimated 15,000 years. There’s often confusion about the names, but both are subspecies of the overall brown bear species, just like European brown bears (ursus arctos arctos) or Syrian brown bears (ursus arctos syrianus). The rule is that all grizzlies are brown bears, but not all brown bears are grizzlies.

Unlike the Himalayan brown bear, the Kodiak isn’t at imminent risk of extinction. In 2005, there was estimated to be 3256 in existence, which has steadily increased since, with a bear density of 0.7 per square mile. A Kodiak bear’s yearly life cycle of hibernation and summer gorging is similar to most bears. So is their fur, which is normally dark to light brown, with the occasional blond bear showing up, and others having red tinges.

You don’t have to be David Attenborough or Bear Grylls to know that Kodiak bears are huge. So huge, in fact, that they’re the second largest bear on Earth after polar bears, and can sometimes outstrip them.

The average inland male grizzly weighs a respectable 500-700 pounds, with females reaching 300-400 pounds. Kodiak bears dwarf this, with an average of 800-1200 pounds for males and 450-750 for females. If a grizzly female met a Kodiak female in the wild, she’d probably mistake it for a male and rush to protect her cubs.

Consequently, Kodiak island was the site of the largest confirmed brown bear of all time, a 1656 pound mammoth shot dead by JC Tolman in 1894. The same is true for the heaviest bear in captivity, a Kodiak bear called Clyde who weighed 2160 pounds when he died in June 1987, after becoming “zoo fat”. The larger males can stand 10 feet tall on their hind legs, and 5 feet tall on all fours. It can be hard to translate internet pictures to a real world scale, but picture that the back of a large Kodiak bear (on all fours) would reach a shorter than average person’s forehead.

One year, bear biologist Vic Barnes travelled to Kodiak island to weigh some recent corpses of bears shot by hunters. The three largest males were 1245lbs, 1483lbs, and 1519lbs, while the largest sow weighed in at 757lb. According to bear experts, 17 of the 20 largest brown bear skulls ever measured came from Kodiak Island. The biggest ever measured 30.75 inches across.

Part of the gigantic size of Kodiak bears is down to genetics, but another chunk is due to the abundant schools of salmon surrounding the island’s shores. Kodiak Island is a notorious salmon bonanza, with over two million red sockeye entering the island each year, swimming upstream to the mountain rivers where they were born in order to breed (and then die instantly). Only the Kamchatka peninsula of Russia’s far east is comparable for vast annual salmon migrations, and the bears enjoy every minute of it.

Kodiak Island has all 5 species of salmon in Alaska, with June being the peak season for Chinook, AKA king salmon, and cohos or silver salmon peaking in September. This gives the bears luxurious consistency in their diet. Unlike the famous Brooks River of central Alaska, where the salmon run peaks in late July and August, the average Kodiak bear can feed almost nonstop throughout its frenetic summer bulking season.

Consequently, adult male bears on Kodiak Island eat an average of 6146 pounds of salmon per year, compared to the impoverished bears of Denali who eat almost none. Females average at 3007 pounds, and scientists determined all this by collecting the shed fur of bears and analysing the mercury (a heavy metal found in fish) content in each hair.

If a brown bear could scan a property website and choose its own slice of wilderness to live in (although whose to say they can’t), Kodiak Island would be top of the list.

The feast doesn’t end when it comes to berries either. The favourite of a Kodiak bear is undoubtedly the bright red elderberry, found in tangled clusters all over the archipelago. Like the blueberries of Denali, these berries are easy to devour in vast quantities.

If elderberries are plentiful, then Kodiak bears will actually abandon their salmon spots, which happened in 2014 during an usually warm summer which forced the berries to ripen early. Scientists have calculated that the optimal protein intake for a pre-hibernation bear is 23%, and this happens to be the exact level in elderberries, compared to 80% in salmon. Kodiak bears instinctively sense this.

With such vast quantities of berries and salmon, relations with the local deer and mountain goats are particularly peaceful on Kodiak Island. Bears will prey on them occasionally, but their food sources are trusty and well-established, compared to the inland grizzlies of Alberta or central Canada, who sometimes become thin, desperate and unpredictable.

Like anywhere, some of the bears on Kodiak Island are laser eyed hunting professionals, while others are clumsy amateurs who drop fish initially, but gradually improve over time. The Ayakulik river is one of the island’s main salmon channels, but unfortunately for bears, it’s usually far too deep to fish in. However, one of its tributaries called Red Lake Creek is very shallow, lined with loose gravel. Consequently, this tributary is one of Kodiak Island’s main bear hotspots.

Kodiak bears might have the most mass of any brown bear subspecies, but there’s one quality they lack – genetic diversity.

When scientists examined an immune system pathway controlling the response to infections in Kodiak bears in 2007, the nuclear genetics showed close to zero diversity. It’s all down to being trapped on an island, and this poor diversity could hurt the bears badly if a mutant animal virus or freak parasite swept through the island one day.

Right now, the population is perfectly healthy, and there are no signs of inbreeding. Nature knows best, as like other bears, female Kodiaks are less adventurous, and normally establish their territory close to their mother’s. Males, meanwhile, establish their range hundreds of miles away and breed with the females nearby, which keeps the genetic diversity healthy. That said, Kodiak bears aren’t super adventurous by bear standards, and according to scientists, they’re swimming between the main two islands (Kodiak and Afognak) much less than previously believed.

Overall, the bears on Afognak Island (the second largest in the Kodiak archipelago) are significantly less genetic diverse. Mitochondrial DNA, which only examines the maternal genetic line, reveals only two separate female lineages on Afognak compared to 7 female lineages on Kodiak island, a similar amount to Katmai National Park of Alaska.

Speaking of the two islands, they’re two very different bear habitats. Kodiak is more mountainous, while Afognak is covered with forests which the bears can vanish into, making aerial surveillance almost possible.

According to archaeological evidence, Kodiak Island has been inhabited by human beings for 7500 years. It started with the Ocean Bay people, who were displaced by the Kachemak 4000 years ago. It’s believed that these early cultures hunted Kodiak bears with bows and arrows, but viewed them as spirit animals with similar souls to humans, who were nevertheless closer to God. As a sign of respect, the hunters would leave their heads in the fields where they were shot. 900 years ago was when the Alutiiq natives arrived, and at this point, the amount of Kodiak bears in the archaeological record suddenly increases, as through their numbers were swelling and bear-man conflict had rapidly spiked. The bears was were called “takuna-aq” in the Alutiiq language.

By 1789, Russian colonist Grigori Shelikhov had become convinced that Kodiak Island was chock full of natural resources to exploit, particularly the plentiful local sea otters. The Alutiiq resisted at first, but their wooden bows and arrows were no match for the high tech machinery of modern warfare. While Kodiak bears weren’t as coveted as sea otter fur, an average of 2668 bears hides were exported from the Russian Alaskan colonies each year during the 19th century. Russians moving to Kodiak were encouraged to bring large dogs to scare the Kodiak bears away, who were frequently shot to protect cattle.

By 1867, the once plentiful sea otter colonies had plummeted, and Russia got cold feet about its new colony. They flogged Alaska off to the United States for $7.2 million, and bear killings immediately skyrocketed, with 568 hides exported each year from 1867 to 1880. The Lacey Act of 1900 provided the first legal protection for Kodiak bears, but as the march of technology made travelling easier, big game hunters flocked to Kodiak to take on the ultimate prize. Kodiak bears fell to their lowest ebb, and in 1925, the Alaska Game Commission declared that all non-Alaskan bear hunters now had to be accompanied by guides. The subspecies gradually turned the corner, and in 1941, Franklin D Roosevelt rode to the rescue: he signed an executive order creating the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, which covered Uganik Island and the entire southwest of Kodiak Island.

Still, salmon farmers and cattle ranchers campaigned vigorously for a cull. In the 1960s, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game secretly hired a couple of ex-WW2 pilots to fly over the archipelago and shoot the bears down from the comfort of their cockpits. These guys used an M1-Garland rifle mounted on a Piper Super Cub, a white-coloured, old-timey 2 seater aircraft first produced in 1949. Local bear enthusiasts caught onto the shadowy scheme and informed Outside Life magazine, who ran with it and published a sensational exposé called “The Kodiak Bear War”. The 1970s saw the modern hunting regulations laid down, and since then, the Kodiak bear subspecies has been in rude health.

Are Kodiak bears as brutal in temperament as their massive size suggests? Apparently not. Kodiak bears are far from cuddly wild teddy bears, but unlike the East Siberian brown bear of Russia, they’re not notorious for being particularly aggressive.

According to fishermen, the bears of Kodiak Island seem more frightened of each other than interloping humans. One weapon that guides carry is a blunt bow and arrow, designed not to kill the bear, but to warn it. Injuries happen every other year, but Kodiak bears have only killed 1 human being over the past 75 years, compared to 10 deaths in Glacier National Park, which is a miniscule number itself.

Naturally, there’s a legal hunting industry as well. As of 2021, 180 Kodiak bears are legally shot dead every year. 496 permits are up for grabs, with 5000 Alaskans typically applying. Hunters from outside of Alaska must pay between $10,000 and $21,000 for a professional guide. Because it’s illegal to shoot dead a mother bear with cubs, 70% of hunting victims are males.

The end result is that 3300 Kodiak bears were shot dead between 1961 and 1986, shepherded by Kodiak Island’s 15 licensed bear guides. Opponents call this cruel, while supporters argue that the bear population is thriving. One of the biggest controversies erupted in 1996, when the Make A Wish foundation granted a dying 17 year old boy’s request to shoot dead a Kodiak bear with his dad. Actor Pierce Brosnan said that he would entertain the boy on the set of Dante’s Peak if he gave up his long held ambition.

One of the unique aspects of Kodiak Island is that roughly 25% of its bears don’t bother to hibernate. Local fisherman regularly observe fresh pawprints in the snow during winter, and in January 2020, three marauding bears were shot dead on the streets of Kodiak city after rummaging through trash cans. Mothers with cubs will always hibernate, but food is so abundant on Kodiak island that the dominant males can hunt all year round.

Being surrounded by the ocean, the climate of Kodiak is surprisingly mild. The average January high is 2 degrees Celsius, and the all time record low was only -27C, which is warm and toasty compared to inner Alaska. Even Scotland fell to -27.2C in January 1982.

Kodiak bears also have the smallest home range of any American bear, at around 250 square kilometres for males and 130sq/km for females. They den at similar sites every year, digging a fresh hole into the same mountainside. One of their favourite spots is the alder thickets of Kodiak’s southwest, where the thick network of roots below stabilises the soil and prevents the den from collapsing onto the unsuspecting bear’s head. In the north, they prefer frozen mountainsides, where ice does the stabilising job.

Another fun fact is that Kodiak Island has very few natural rock caves, meaning that most of a bear’s dens must be dug with its long, sharp claws. You’ll never take refuge in a cave only to get a 1500 pound surprise on this island.

The Latin name of the Kodiak bear came from H.B. Marriam, who visited Kodiak in 1896 and confirmed their status as the largest brown bear subspecies in the world. He dubbed them ursus arctos middendorfi after the prestigious Russian naturalist Dr. A. Th. Von Middendorff.

Back then, biologists believed that the brown bear had 86 different subspecies in America, before this was narrowed down massively to the modern 5-9. Kodiaks made it through the filter, although today, a minority of scientists still argue that Kodiak bears aren’t a distinct subspecies, but an extremely fat, salmon-gorging version of normal grizzlies. However, ignoring their massive size, Kodiak bears have a proportionally broader skull than inland grizzlies.

When did the subspecies diverge? The truth is that nobody is 100% sure. The accepted theory is that Kodiak bears broke off when the ice sheets that acted as a bridge to mainland Alaska melted 10-12,000 years ago, but another theory is that they were part of separate migrations from Russia altogether. The grizzly bear may have come from the East Siberian subspecies, with Kodiak bears evolving from a separate wave of Kamchatka brown bears. This would mean that technically, grizzlies and Kodiak bears diverged much longer ago. It may be no coincidence that the Kamchatka brown bear is the most massive subspecies in the whole of Eurasia (despite being relatively peaceful).

The post Kodiak Bear, The Hugest Brown Bear Subspecies appeared first on Bear Informer.

Brown bears are generally creatures of the mild and cold, so it’s not surprising that 9 of the officially recognised subspecies live in Eurasia, with another 7 roaming North America. The atlas bear, however, was the only brown bear subspecies to inhabit the vast continent of Africa.

Its heartland was the namesake Atlas mountains, where it lived alongside Barbary lions (also extinct), leopards, and wild boar. These mountains have a reputation of being dusty and desolate, but the habitat isn’t too terrible for bears: there’s open forests, fast flowing mountain streams, and wild deer aplenty. Mount Tobka, for example, reaches heights of 4165 metres (the range’s highest peak), and Algeria even has a couple of rudimentary ski resorts.

That said, the Atlas bear’s heartlands also included the lowlands of Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. During colder historical periods, its range may have extended into western Egypt, but as far as historians know, the Atlas bear was confined solely to north Africa. They were forever blocked from migrating southwards by the bone-dry Sahara desert, a massive and impenetrable obstacle. 

The only other confirmed bears to inhabit Africa were Syrian brown bears which occasionally strayed over the border into Egypt, unless of course, there’s a camouflaged bear hiding in the Congo rainforest which nobody has ever noticed.

Unfortunately, the Atlas bear is long gone, without even a Tasmanian tiger-style rumour to save them. Its story was a close parallel of the much-loved barbary lion, AKA the atlas lion, a North African subspecies famed for its massive black mane that extended halfway down its belly. This lion went extinct in the early 1900s, and the atlas bear died out slightly earlier, with the official date being 1870.

The Romans are most commonly blamed, by kidnapping them for gruesome battles in colosseums, but the Roman empire ended in 476AD. Instead, the main culprit was massive overhunting by the local Berber tribes, whose orchards were constantly pillaged by the bears. Sightings were plentiful until 1850, but no hard evidence such as pelts, fur or droppings was discovered throughout the entire 20th century.

In fact, not only is the atlas bear extinct, but no pelts or fur were ever preserved for analysis. Strangely, not a single piece of atlas bear remains can be found in a museum.

Despite having gone extinct over 25,000 years later, the atlas bear is significantly less researched than the prehistoric cave bear. With the barbary lion, we have some stunning black and white photographs of it sitting on rocks with its majestic mane, but no photographs of the atlas bear are known to exist. Scientists never conducted any serious expeditions to watch atlas bears in motion, to analyse their diets, sleeping patterns or interactions with humans.

Despite the lack of photographs, the Romans encountered atlas bears so constantly that we still have a decent idea of their appearance. According to legend, the subspecies was particularly stocky, but their height and weight ranked close to last for brown bears, though with a disproportionately large head. The females were said to be even smaller than American black bears. The fur was the standard brown/black, but with hints of red on its underbelly, unlike the near-yellow Syrian brown bear or the Tibetan blue bear. Their diet, meanwhile, consisted of nuts, acorns and roots, but while atlas bears tended to be herbivorous, they weren’t averse to eating small mammals such as crillion.

According to stories from local Arabs in the 19th century, the atlas bear was particularly fond of honey. The Atlas bear would climb up a tree with nimble skill, break open the bark and remove the hive, before gorging on the honey until full. Then the local Arabs would scrape out the wax which the bear had ignored and take any remaining honey globules. Another recollection was that Atlas bears stood up on their hind legs to fight people.

The claws and muzzle were slightly shorter than usual, and the Romans reported that atlas bears had the longest coats of all bears, with each hair being 10-12 centimetres long. However, ancient mosaics clearly show that the Atlas bear had all the classic brown bear features – a hump, an upturned concave nose, and small, rounded ears.

As the Roman empire steamrollered through North Africa, they picked up all sorts of wild animals, including bears, with an eye on their spectacular colosseum battles. Roman warlords engaged in no less than 33 enationes bestiarum africanarum (African animal hunts) during the mighty reign of Augustus, as an all-out celebration of their mighty conquests. No less than 3500 wild animals were slaughtered during these gruesome bloodbaths. Emperors Titan and Traja butchered 9000 and 11,000 animals apiece, the latter to celebrate his conquest of Dacia in 101AD.

You’d almost admire Emperor Commodus if he wasn’t so bloodthirsty; he personally managed to kill 100 “Numidian bears” in the arenas during his lifetime, as reenacted by the 1964 epic The Fall Of The Roman Empire. This was supplemented with a rhinoceros, a tiger, a giraffe, ostriches, 6 hippos, and 3 elephants, which demonstrates how bears were overwhelmingly the favourite opponent. Commodus’ weapons of choice were scythe-shaped arrows which he fired into their necks. During his gladiatorial career, a magistrate called Domitius Ahénobarbus supposedly fought against 100 Numidian bears and 100 Ethiopian tribesman (not what we’d expect from a magistrate today), as relayed in a text by the famous Pliny the Elder.

Another trick was releasing prisoners into the bear enclosure to execute them. To make the bears aggressive enough for these gladiatorial battles, the Romans would starve them, to induce a state of wild desperation. Something tells me that Greenpeace wouldn’t approve of this today.

One major mystery about the atlas bear is how they ended up in the arid mountains of Algeria and Morocco in the first place. The nearest species geographically are the Iberian brown bear of the Spanish Pyrenees and the light-coloured Syrian brown bear roaming Iraq and Syria.

The instant explanation would be an ice age land bridge forming between Gibraltar and Morocco. At its narrowest point, the strait is only 7 miles across, but unlike the English channel (the now sunken Dogerland), the ocean there is extremely deep, and it’s believed that no land bridge has ever formed.

Instead, the first possibility is that the Syrian brown bear gradually migrated westwards, during cooler times when the Mediterranean coast was luscious and more able to sustain life. Afterwards, as dust and desert reclaimed north Africa, the inbetween bears in Egypt and eastern Libya would have died off, leaving the separated western pocket free to evolve into the atlas bear subspecies. The final possibility, of course, is that some absolute maniacs of European bears swam across the strait in one mammoth effort, being only 7 miles wide and all.

One old theory is that Atlas bears were never native to Africa, but were actually feral European bears, brought over by conquering Romans and Carthagians, and later escaping from battle arenas. However, this theory is completely disproven by ancient bear skeletons discovered in the Takouatz cave in Algeria, which dated back to 7000BC, predating the arrival of Romans by eons.

Over the last 200 years, the Atlas bear has had a strangely high number of doubters, with some categorising it alongside the Yeti or sasquatch. Some scholars have argued that the Roman colosseum bears were simply European bears. A significant proportion undoubtedly were, but in the old Roman literature, an extremely common term is “Numidian bear”. For example “The bears of Numidia prevail over the rest, but only in fury and in the length of their coat“.

Numidia refers to the empire of North Africa spanning Algeria, Tunisia, and western Libya, the precise range of the Atlas bear. Even the description of a long coat matches the reports of 19th century Arab tribes. Later in 800AD, crown prince Charlemagne was offered a “Numidian bear” for the ceremony before his coronation, by Ibrahim ben-Aglad, the emir of present day Tunisia.

Also, Roman historian Dio Cassius described how a gladiator called Publius Servilius “caused the killing at a spectacle of three hundred bears and other African wild beasts in equal numbers”.

The Atlas bear’s existence was still doubted as late as 1932, by mammologist Angel Cabrera, and even in 1991, by Kazimierz Kowalski and Barbara Kowalska-Rzebik. By 1998 however, archaeologists had carbon dated a small bear bone from a cave in the Algerian Djurdjura back to 440-600BC. In 2007, yet more bear bones were discovered, this time in Morocco, and dated back to 778AD.

If there’s any doubt remaining over the Atlas bear’s existence, then the first hand accounts of Berber locals quash them completely. As the French colonised Algeria in the 19th century, several naturalists were sent to document the local wildlife, with the most productive of all being Jules-René Bourguignat. In 1870, an Algerian tribesmen informed Bourguignat that back in 1845, his friend had shot a bear, and pursued it for miles without dealing the finishing blow.

Over in Libya, a boastful member of the Ouled-Orab tribe claimed to have killed approximately 30 bears in 1830, while a member of the same tribe claimed to have injured a bear on the slopes of Jebel-Ghdir near Benghazi. Several Berbers gave Bourguignat first hand information on the bear’s love of honey, and tendency to fight while standing on its hind legs.

Even geographical names confirm the existence of bears in historical times. A ravine called Chabet-el-Dèb lies near the town of Cirta in Algeria, which translates loosely to “bear ravine”. Between the Algerian towns of Bône and Guelman, a spot exists called Guelaat-el-Dèbba (stronghold of the bear), and close to the Algerian town of Jemmapes lies a river called Oued-el-Deb (bear river).

Bourguignat himself had several hair-raising encounters with Atlas bears, which fell just short of witnessing one in the flesh. In 1867, in a cave near Jebel Thaya in the Constantine region of Algeria, Bourguignat unearthed some fossilised bones, including 3 bear mandibles, which appeared to be from a whole new species. Sitting alongside them was a lamp whose style clearly dated back to the 6th century AD, proving at the bare minimum that bears had been around in the historic era.

The bones belonged to a relatively small bear, which was “stocky, tightly packed and short on legs“, with a “relatively large head, not very elongated, terminated in a very narrow muzzle“. Bourguignat believed that he’d discovered an entirely new species, and in a letter, he communicated his findings with a Mr Letourneux back in France, a seasoned imperial officer.

In response, Letourneux revealed that during his long career stationed in Algeria, the Arabs of Edough told him that bears were plentiful in the area, and routinely devastated the vines of their orchards. 50 years earlier, an Arab had told Letourneux that one of the last bears in the country had been slayed by his father.

In 1870, the quite obviously bear-obsessed Bourguignat had an even more vivid encounter: a fresh bear footprint, which he estimated to be no more than 3 hours old, judging by its impeccable imprint in the mud.

The footprint was so fresh that the water squeezed from the earth by its pressure was still resting on the banks of mud on either side. The print was obviously too deep to have been created by a human. Bourguignat was exploring the cave with several Arab associates, and when they first witnessed the footprint, they exclaimed “dèb, dèb“, the local dialect for bear.

On a separate expedition, Bourguignat discovered fresh bear bones, which a doctor friend deemed to be no more than 15 years old. He also received reports from two Arabs called Ben-Djemil and Ben-Aoun living in the town of Edough who insisted that until only recently, a top priority of there’s had been defending their orchards against marauding bears, confirming the rumours that old man Leternoux had relayed.

In his writings, Bourguignat commented on another local saying: “The work of the bear makes the bee hunter happy“. This referred to the atlas bear’s habit mentioned by other Arabs, of removing a beehive from a tree, scooping out the insides, and leaving it behind for the locals to finish off.

Doctor Victor Reboud was another experienced atlas bear investigator, having visited Algeria on an archaeological trek in 1875. He noted several more suggestive local expressions, including “rude as a bear” and “he growls like a bear”.

The accepted theory today is that the last ever Atlas bear was shot dead in the Tétouan mountains of Morocco’s far north, back in 1870. Yet the Atlas bear’s range was always vast, covering Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya. What are the chances that the last ever north African bear happened to stray into the arms of human hunters?

The population undoubtedly plummeted during the 1800s. For example, an Englishman called Alfred Pease who lived in Algeria from 1892 to 1896 reported that while rumours of bears were still in overdrive, concrete sightings were a thing of the past. From 1850-1900, French colonialists explored Algeria in massive detail, naming whole new valleys and peaks, and bear encounters were still almost non-existent. Yet nobody is omnipotent.

As late as 2005, a student called Dady Seter interviewed locals in the Djurdjura massif and Akfadou forest regions of Algeria, and was informed of 5 bear sightings dating from 1940-1950. In the village of Ifigha, he showed an elderly woman some clear photographs of bears, and suddenly, she started to relay an ancient story. During the Algerian revolution, which started on November 1st 1954, the woman and several friends were working in an olive field, when a mother bear with two cubs approached from the wild. The group only survived by climbing a tree and waiting patiently until the bears left.

Could this have been a real atlas bear, perhaps one of the last 50 or even 20 survivors? It’s unlikely, but no other animals resembling a brown bear are native to North Africa.

The overwhelming likelihood is that pockets of Atlas bears survived for several more years after 1870, and quite possibly into the early 20th century.

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