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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The end… for now.

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

Imagine that Freddy Krueger was not only real, but a whole race of Freddy Kruegers existed. And imagine that they were 800 pound monsters with brown fur who didn’t bother with the whole dream-invading nonsense. That’s what a nervous silverback gorilla faces the moment he steps into battle on a windy Alaskan mountaintop or a circular clearing in the jungle (the location for the fight hasn’t been determined yet).

It’s easy to understand a bear’s massive size from photographs, but its claws are often underestimated. They are each 4 inches long, primarily designed for digging roots, but also fighting. A brown bear’s claws are like 4 kitchen knives strapped to their fingers.

Meanwhile, gorillas have only fingernails like us. Their fingers are more designed for picking fruits from the jungle. Bears pick berries, certainly, but use their flexible prehensile lips instead. Their claws are fully fitted weapons of mass destruction which a gorilla would have to duck and dodge with 100% accuracy if he’s going to stand a chance. Just one impact of a bear’s claws could finish the gorilla, ripping his skin open.

Furthermore, gorillas haven’t evolved to withstand claws. They’re more focussed on dodging poisonous snakes and neon-coloured frogs. Leopard attacks happen, but they’re too rare to exert evolutionary pressure. The bear would just pick the gorilla off, and get back to its salmon stream.

Part of the reason for those overcocky gorilla supporters is that bears look fat and lazy from a distance. They are fat, yes, but this is only hibernation fuel. Beneath the blubber is massive, insane knots of muscle, but the blubber itself provides a 5 inch thick armour against attack. No matter how strong a gorilla is, its assaults would just bounce off the bear. The gorilla’s only hope would be relentlessness, to inflict so many smaller wounds that the bear finally gives up.

Gorillas are the opposite. There’s no thick layer of blubber defending them. A bear would only have to land one accurate slash with its claws to rip the gorilla open. Like all primates, they have very thin skin which bleeds easily, and this blood loss would mean that a single bear paw wound could cause the gorilla to gradually lose energy. The moment that happens, the gorilla would lose its edge in the nimbleness stakes, and with its smaller size, nimbleness is what a gorilla relies on. If a bear got tired, it could still do massive damage with a clumsy swipe or stumble.

Gorillas may have such a fearsome bite that the mere sight of their skull triggers superstitious nightmares, but how would that work in a practical situation? For an instant kill, the gorilla would have to pierce the bear’s neck with a 100% accurate shot. If it misses by an inch, then Samuel Silverback is well and truly trapped. He’s in the enemy’s lair, and a million sledgehammer bear strikes would immediately rain down on his back.

But wait a minute. What the bear fans may underestimate is the advantage a gorilla’s intelligence gives it. People are still debating whether dolphins and chimpanzees are more intelligent, but gorillas are another contender – it’s just less visible intelligence, focussed towards social structures rather than war.

These days, gorillas are smart enough to disarm poaching traps in the jungle. While brown bears are smart enough to move a plastic bucket in order to access a tasty treat hanging from a wire, and arguably one of the smartest large mammals, no biologist would seriously argue that their intelligence approaches a gorilla, let alone outstrips them.

Koko the gorilla, a good friend of Robin Williams, could paint, play music and turn on the TV herself to watch cartoons. She was skilful at sign language, and in a fight, a gorilla might quickly identify the weaknesses of its lumbering opponent. It would identify that its sharp fangs would be best placed in its neck, or might deploy tools like a nearby tree log, which would be as light as feather for the gorilla when swung in the grizzly’s face.

A gorilla might have the wits to manipulate its surroundings, like crossing a log bridge over a river which it knows is too heavy for a bear. Bears are far from dumb brutes, but in a fight, their only modes are wrestle, bite and smash – there’s no 3D thinking. A bear’s one advantage is superior tree climbing skills, but neither are great at it, and the gorilla would have the wisdom not to attempt it.

If the two contenders were duelling on a rocky plain, only the gorilla would have the smarts to notice a nearby boulder, pick it up, and hurl it at the bear’s head. When you look a gorilla in the eye, your gut instinct tells you that there’s a lot going on in there.

Furthermore, the gorilla has more strength in relation to its body size than any animal other than insects, such as the leafcutter ant. Gorillas are perfectly capable of lifting cars, and while the strongest human alive can bench press 750 pounds, a gorilla maxes out at 4000 pounds. That’s an insane display of strength.

Sure, grizzly bears have been seen rolling boulders out of the way on mountainsides. They can upturn garbage dumpsters to get at the sweet, sweet garbage juice inside, whereas it would take two people to merely budge it, but the gorilla is an evolutionary wonder. Its density of fast twitch muscle fibres is second to none, the type of muscle tissue most significantly linked to strength.

A bear’s muscle mass is larger, but less effective per square inch than a gorilla’s. Imagine what a straight punch to a bear’s face would do. Even human beings have scared bears away with a punch on the nose before (and great white sharks). It could knock the bear out of the fight right there, causing it to flee into the forest holding its nose. Not to mention that a gorilla can pick up heavy items like boulders and hurl them at the bear. A bear would struggle to capture a gorilla in its bear grip to deliver the finishing move. The gorilla would burst outwards with an almighty display of strength.

Being huge doesn’t mean that a bear is perfect in every way. Usain Bolt, for example, is the fastest human being of all time, with a top recorded speed of 27.8mph. Yet even he wouldn’t claim to be the strongest human, or have the hardest punch. Biologists once found that when not angered, gorillas are 4.5-9 times stronger than a human, while a bear is just 2.5-4 times stronger. Gorillas are a uniquely strong animal where normal rules don’t apply.

Not even the most avid bear fan can deny that the silverback gorilla has a stronger bite force than an adult male grizzly. PSI is the commonly accepted measurement for the amount of force a jawbone can exert on its prey. Humans clock in at 162, while the Nile crocodile has the highest on earth, at 5000. A brown bear is respectable at 1150 PSI, which is sufficient to bite through a tree branch, a frying pan, and thick human bones. However, a silverback gorilla just edges it out at 1300PSI, which is the strongest in the primate kingdom.

You can’t underestimate the impact this would have on a fight. A gorilla would only have to sink its teeth into a brown bear’s paw for it to yelp in pain and instantly lose 50% of its stomach for the fight. If it got several nips all over the bear’s body, it would be in big trouble.

There’s no doubt that an accurate strike to the bear’s jugular vein would end its life, as the gorilla’s teeth are easily long and sharp enough. In fact, bearing its fangs in a war pose might be enough to spook the bear itself, giving the gorilla a psychological advantage. As for the bear, its jaws are strong, but a gorilla’s forearm is strong. A focussed gorilla with reflexes at the top of its game could grab an approaching bear jaw, put its feet in the perfect position for leverage, and calmly wrench the bear’s jaws apart again. The bear would stagger back, shocked at this rare challenge.

Just look at their sharp fangs. They don’t need them for eating meat. No, they need them for fighting! Bears are no exception – if they stray into the gorilla’s jungle domain, then there’s a colourful gorilla target on their back. A bear might be blubbery, but a gorilla’s fangs are 2 inches long.

What if the bear tried the same jaw wrenching trick itself? With the bear’s body structure, it would never be able to do the same thing regardless of strength, because its forelimbs have the wrong positioning. They’re designed for swiping, digging and wrestling. They’re too stiff compared to a gorilla’s flexible arms, which have a lot in common with our own.

This is a wider advantage for the gorilla too. Look at a gorilla’s arms – they are very similar to humans, just furrier and thicker. This gives them far more possibilities in a battle. A bear can swipe, but it cannot punch you in the face. A bear trying to punch is like King Charles trying to rap. No matter how hard it tries, it just can’t do it, but a gorilla can make use of sticks, rocks, and punches. A particularly skilled gorilla could even run at a swinging vine, clutch on to it, before swinging back in the other direction and kicking the bear in the head like Tarzan.

Meanwhile, a bear lacks the body structure. Gorillas are also more nimble, with a lower centre of gravity. They could dodge plenty of a bear’s blows, get around a bear’s back. Just picture humans taking on a woolly mammoth. We may have had spears, but the concept of a lumbering beast whose body is overexposed remains true with the gorilla.

Part of it is perception. People in the USA or Canada have a non-stop series of bear mauling stories every year to reinforce their reputation as a ferocious animals. Bears have been getting free PR for years, and they’re not objecting. Meanwhile, gorillas are the underdog, waiting in the jungle with a wry smile, knowing they’ll be underestimated when the day comes.

Bears may be killing machines, but they feel fear in a battle, the urge to retreat. Remember that they’re more scared of you than you are of them! Bears don’t have an on-off fighting switch, and an educated gorilla could exploit this, delivering tactical blows to play with the bear’s emotions.

Bears are born with decent predatory instincts, and hone them further with 2-3 years of training by their mother. They watch her hunt massive elk and moose, and wait by the dens of arctic ground squirrels.

Meanwhile, gorilla babies are not taught by their mothers to hunt. Their training involves picking the correct fruit, social skills, and tricks for their nomadic lifestyle. A gorilla is no slouch at defensive fighting, the fang bearing display you see, but the only meat gorillas eat is insects crawling along leaves. When faced with a 1000 pound grizzly bear, he won’t have a clue what to do. There’s no automatic instinct to go for the neck with his teeth, the gorilla’s best choice, or the ability to sense weakness in its prey and press home the advantage.

In fact, if a bear was bleeding and staggering around the rainforest, the gorilla probably wouldn’t sense it. He might keep baring his teeth in a show of aggression, while if a bear was winning, it would undoubtedly sense it, and activate an all out final flurry of bear limbs and teeth which the gorilla couldn’t withstand.

Bears skills are also well honed by fighting each other for the best salmon spots, and they’ve learned to sense fear and submission. A bear is a born killing machine. What gorillas don’t realise is that bears are part of the evolutionary order of carnivora, like wolves and seals. Until 20 million years ago, they were almost completely meat eating, until primitive bears decided to try berries for the first time, but the old evolutionary layer of hunting instincts remain.

A fight in the wild lasts 1-2 minutes, but each second matters, and a brown bear would cram much more predator instinct into those seconds than a silverback gorilla. Gorillas are only separated by humans on the evolutionary tree by 10 million years. We may like meat, but when was the last time you saw a cow and suddenly slipped into a hyperfocused tunnel vision state where you knew precisely which body parts to strike to kill it?

One hard fact that gorillas lovers cannot deny, no matter how hard they try, is that they can’t see in the dark. Gorillas are primates and they have similar night vision to us – they barely see in the dark at all. Bears, on the other hand, have a layer which re-reflects the minute quantities of light entering their eyes, multiplying its strength several times over. Dogs also have this, and it’s why both dogs and bears’ eyes turn white when photographed at night.

The myth that bears have poor eyesight is just that, a myth. If the battle was taking place with the sun setting, as all great battles should, and a wispy cloud went in front of the sun for a minute, the darkness could spook the gorilla.

A bear’s speed is also inarguable. Bears can reach 35mph with ease, and 40mph is possible for freaky specimens which we’ve never observed. Meanwhile, gorillas top out at 20-25mph. Their half-walking, half standing body structure isn’t well suited to running. In fact, with Usain Bolt reaching 27mph, gorillas are slower than human beings.

The rule of this battle is a fight to the death – one animal must die – but if a bear ran away to get a breather, the gorilla wouldn’t be able to stop it. A gorilla would be caught up effortlessly, before receiving a slash on the back. It would have to commit itself to the big bear battle once and for all, whereas the bear can be more flexible in its approach.

With adrenaline surging through the gorilla’s body nonstop, its reactions might start to go haywire, costing it the highly precise punches and bites which would be essential for victory. It seems like all the odds are stacked against the gorilla. Billy bear can be clumsy and still win, while Samuel Silverback needs everything to go right. He can’t afford any mistakes.

Despite everything we’ve said, one fact is undeniable in this debate – bears have been witnessed being killed by smaller animals in the wild. Bears are tough cookies, undeniably, but there’s a perception from Hollywood that they’re unstoppable beasts whose eyes glow red and who’ll remember you if you dare to throw a frying pan at them, and deliberately come back for revenge the very second you blow out the candles on your birthday cake next year.

The fact is that a Siberian brown bear weighs 600 pounds on average, while a male Siberian tiger averages at 450 pounds. Overall, they are reasonably evenly matched, yet the tiger emerges victorious in a slightly majority of cases, 65% versus 35% for the bear in one study. Why? Because Siberian tigers know how to kill. This is the angle that the gorilla would go for, intelligently using the advantages it possesses instead of brute size and strength.

Some say that as herbivores, they lack the predatory instinct of bears, but if they’re so meek and incapable of fighting, what’s the point in all that muscle? Bear fanatics might say it’s purely for intimidation and that a gorilla hasn’t been in a fight in its life, but gorillas are capable of taking out lions in the African savannah.

It’s often pointed out that leopards prey on gorillas. This is true; a 1965 book called One Traveller’s Africa has a quote saying “A terrible black leopard has appeared and killed 4 gorillas – four that we know of“. But this is partly because gorillas sleep on the floor like humans in their beds. They also have poor night vision, meaning that most leopard kills are sneaky pounces rather than the 1 on 1 fight we’re discussing.

Overall though, putting a brown bear against a gorilla is like an AK-47 versus a water pistol. It’s like a dog versus a tabby cat. Gorillas are powerful animals, but bears are in another league. We might admire their strength, but thinking they can beat brown bears isn’t just wishful thinking – it’s delusion. A bear is so overpowered that if they fought 100 times, the gorilla wouldn’t win once.

Even if gorillas are freakishly strong, they’re far lighter at 400 pounds, and a bear’s strength would be more than sufficient to swat the gorilla aside and send it flying towards a tree. The size also gives the bear an advantage without trying. How is a gorilla supposed to get to a bear’s neck to inflict the killer blow when they stand 8-10 feet tall and a gorilla is only the height of a normal human? A gorilla would have to climb up the bear’s body like a ladder, before realising that it lacks the predatory instincts of a Siberian tiger, which evolved with one purpose in mind: to pierce its prey’s jugular vein in a single pounce. It would be hard for a gorilla to get close.

Here, the gorilla’s intelligence would work against him, because he would see those claws and instantly feel a spike of fear. It would make him very cautious to approach the bear.

Even when he made his play, aiming for the bear’s neck with his teeth, his body would be screaming to flee and he would be torn between the two instincts rather than moving in full attacking flow. His head wouldn’t be fully in the game.

In the wild, many victories in battle are achieved with a final burst of no holds barred aggression, and the gorilla wouldn’t be able to access those higher gears. A bear can rip the bark cleanly from a tree just by scratching an itch on its back.

Verdict: the brown bear wins.

The post Brown Bears Vs Gorillas: Who Would Win? (The Classic Debate) appeared first on Bear Informer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post 10 Bear Cam Tales From Brooks Falls, Alaska appeared first on Bear Informer.

A Canadian town of 900, where car doors are kept unlocked and all citizens walk around with two heavy rocks in their pocket. Why? Because Churchill, on the west coast of the ice-choked Hudson Bay, lies directly in the polar bear community’s annual migration route.

For six weeks in October and November every year, dozens of polar bears roam Churchill’s outskirts, as they impatiently wait for the sea ice to reform. Churchill has been dubbed “the polar bear capital of the world” and ranks first for tourism, with 10,000 polar bear hunters (with their eyes, not guns) visiting yearly.

Since 1982, only one person has been killed by a polar bear here, a homeless man who was rummaging in a dumpster only to feel a huge shadow descend on him. However, it’s perfectly common to pull back your curtains at 9am only to find a polar bear’s head staring back at you. Churchill residents have endless stories, including bears stuck in hospital doors, and miraculously scaring bears away with their cellphone light. Polar bears rummaging in bins and casually walking the streets are a common sight.

Churchill has become particularly infamous for its polar bear jail. The town’s first defence is guards who fire loud cracker shells, but the most nuisance bears are darted, tranquillised and held for thirty days before being drugged and airlifted by helicopter back onto the sea ice. The bears are also starved in the jail, to imprint the dangers of Churchill onto their brain.

Churchill is the most accessible polar bear viewing spot on Earth. Times have changed since the 1970s, when scientists would crouch on the tundra all night cradling shotguns; now you can ride the outskirts of Churchill in an iron-coloured, double decker, bus-sized tundra buggy.

However, it still feels like the polar bears own Churchill sometimes. Just remember that the town is only accessible by train and helicopters. Green coloured signs reading “POLAR BEAR ALERT. Stop! Don’t walk in this area” are dotted everywhere, with strangely innocent looking polar bear pictures.

Possibly the last place on Earth where woolly mammoths survived, clinging on until 4500 years ago compared to 10000 on the Siberian mainland. Wrangel Island has a storied history too; when the US ship Karluk sank in 1914 and its survivors dispersed onto the sea ice, Wrangel Island is where five men headed for refuge (their starved bodies were discovered later).

Today though, the place is swarming with polar bears. In fact, this icy, mountainous island has the highest density of polar bear breeding dens of anywhere on Earth. Wrangel Island contains a big chunk of the Barents sea polar bear subpopulation, which numbers 2500 bears.

Originally, Wrangel Island had two weatherbeaten permanent settlements, but in 1972, the Soviet Union declared the island to be a nature reserve and relocated them. Since then, polar bear numbers have been climbing. 500-570 were spotted in 2017 compared to 200-300 in previous years. The polar bears are so confident that Russia’s scientific research stations have windows equipped with iron bars to prevent break-ins. The rangers have to carry pepper spray and flare guns at all times.

In 2017, a tourist ship was sailing the icy outskirts of Wrangel Island, when it spotted a dead bowhead whale on the shore. Soon, no less than 230 polar bears arrived to feast on its carcass. You’ll find polar bears relaxing on Wrangel Island from mid-August to November as they wait for the ice to reform, accompanied by 100,000 Pacific walruses and thousands of seals. The polar bear shares the inner island with only one land mammal, the Arctic fox.

5000 years ago, polar bears and woolly mammoths lived side by side on Wrangel Island. Today, it’s the bears who are in command.

There was a time when Arviat was an isolated human settlement with a smattering of polar bears, but nowadays, Arviat is the opposite. Arviat is a small village of 2500 people in Manitoba region of Canada, with bowhead whales, seals, and arctic foxes galore. It’s part of the Hudson bay population, which numbered 840 in 2016, but locals insist that polar bears have boomed since 2000.

Nowadays, it’s perfectly normal in Arviat to witness a polar bear mother playing with her cubs on the distant ice. Hunting cabins are constantly fearful of bears poking their noses in. Trick or treat was once popular on Halloween in Arviat, and so was autumn berry picking, but unlike 50 years ago, you can now see white, fluffy bears walking the streets daily in autumn.

The invasion came to a head in 2010 and 2011, when 11 polar bears were shot dead in self defence. Since then, locals have invented solutions like relocating frozen meat into indoor steel containers indoors instead of simply storing meat on their roofs. There’s also an FM radio which is constantly being interrupted to announce new sightings, and a WWF-appointed guard called Leo who patrols the town with spotlights and bangers.

Miraculously, in the last 20 years, only one man has been killed, a hero who screamed his lungs out to distract a polar bear from mauling a girl in 2018.

The reason for this bear mania is identical to Churchill: its location on Hudson Bay’s west coast, causing polar bears to accumulate in October and November. Superstitious local hunters believe that if you shoot a polar bear’s head with a rifle but miss, the polar bear will give you a headache lasting for days. Arviat village elder Johnny Kartek once stated that “bears attack down the family line, like a curse”.

Svalbard is the northernmost settlement in Norway, and it’s obvious why – it’s the northernmost settlement the polar bears will allow. Svalbard is a collection of islands deep within the Arctic circle, and contains a big fraction of the Barents sea polar bear population.

The bears in Svalbard actually increased from 685 in 2004 to 975 in 2015. They aren’t starving, straggly bears either; these days, they’re supposedly “fat as pigs“. Hunting on Svalbard was once rampant, but in 1973, a law was passed protecting them. On Svalbard, you can only shoot a polar bear in strict self defence, and are forced to report to the governor afterwards.

Shootings of polar bears have thus plummeted in recent decades, allowing the bear population to keep on growing. Since 1971, only 5 people have been killed by bears. In 1971, 1977, and 1995, the victim wasn’t carrying a weapon, while in 1995 (a different attack), the victim was carrying a tiny pistol. Pictures of polar bears with their faces pressed against windows are a dime a dozen, but overall, this popular tourist destination coexists fairly peacefully.

Cruise ships are constantly sailing past, with people on deck desperately trying to get a glimpse of bears as they prowl the coastline searching for seals and dead whales. Along with Churchill, Svalbard is the most popular polar bear tourism destination in the world. Svalbard has dozens of islands, but the most polar bear packed region is King Karls Land, with twelve dens per square kilometre.

Svalbard has strict regulations. All cruise ships are required to have a special polar bear guard aboard. On land, it is mandatory to carry a gun outside of the population capital Longyearbyen. Shops in the township even have special deposit boxes for storing your gun.

Barter Island is a frigid slab of ice located directly above Alaska’s north coast and Kaktovik is its biggest settlement, the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the USA and a former cold war missile defence outpost. Once, those inhabitants were mostly humans. Today, they’re mostly polar bears.

It only takes a two minute walk away from this 270 strong settlement to find dozens of polar bears gathering on the beaches. They spend October and November each year waiting for the sea ice to reconnect the Alaskan mainland, but like in Arviat, they’ve recently been venturing into the ramshackle, traditional Inuit town more and more.

Local guides are forced to patrol the streets, armed with shotguns containing cracker shells and non-lethal lead bullets called beanbags. One reason is the federally protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is immediately south of Kaktovik and is paradise on earth for polar bears who just want to roam the snow and eat seals.

The local Inuit culture also plays a role. Wildlife organisations want to preserve whales, but each year, they allow Inuit hunters to kill 3 bowhead whales in Kaktovik using traditional methods. This happens in autumn, and the oh so tasty carcasses attract polar bears from far and wide.

In the 1990s, Kaktovik attracted 50 human tourists per year. By 2011, they were attracting 2000. Crafty local Inuits have started to rake in money by offering guided tours.

Kaktovik is a bleak place, the end of the road for human civilisation, with no roads beyond the airfield and buildings constructed from abandoned shipping containers. The polar bears just add to the experience. As for deaths? Somehow, none have been reported for decades, but in July 2019, a man was charged with shooting dead a polar bear which climbed into his backyard to snatch some whale meat he had accidentally left there.

If history takes a weird turn over the next century and humans and polar bears engage in an all-out war for Arctic supremacy, then Belushya Guba will be remembered as the first battle.

In February 2019, this Russian town of 560 hit headlines globally when 52 polar bears invaded its streets. As the easternmost point in Europe, and the northernmost settlement in Russia, located on the Arctic Novaya Zemlya islands, Belushya Guba constantly has polar bears on its outskirts. But that months, dozens showed up at once.

They invaded residential and government buildings, blocked parents’ paths to the kindergarten, and rummaged through bins all over towns. 52 bears were spotted over two months, and local administrator Vigansha Musin claimed that he had “never been such a mass invasion of polar bears”.

Adding to the problems was Russia’s total ban on shooting polar bears unless in extreme self defence. A polar bear sitting innocently on a bench in the local park doesn’t qualify under Belushya Guba’s laws. At first, the military patrolled the town with cracker bombs, but the polar bears quickly realised that the ammo was harmless and continued their invasion.

One video showed a polar bear breaking into an apartment block next to an empty pushchair. Another showed an oblivious man strolling right past a giant polar bear. One optician even recorded a polar bear outside his clinic banging on the doors.

Despite the town’s population largely being military personnel connected to Russian nuclear testing, the polar bears assumed total control. Stray dogs were released to scare the bears away, which failed, and mass honking of car horns also didn’t work. As the weather darkened, the polar bears began blending in with the snow. Special buses were ultimately deployed to ferry kids to school.

Resolute Bay is the sort of place where school can be cancelled for the day due to rampaging polar bear mobs. Its Inuit name translates to “place with no dawn”, its population is 200, and it’s located in Canada’s Nunavat district, with a storied history as a resting post for the epic northwest passage expeditions of yore. Resolute Bay looks like a setting from The Thing; it’s one the world’s coldest settlements and its polar bear, seal and beluga whale populations are correspondingly high.

In 2014, Amanda Anaviapik headed to the grocery store in the midst of a blizzard to buy some junk food. Suddenly, she heard two large heavy footprints behind her and dogs growling. She span around, only to scream with terror at the sight of colossal white polar bear. Luckily, the scream spooked the bear so much that it instantly fled; Anaviapik did likewise.

Resolute Bay is a place where almost everyone has their own story like this. Like Arviat, Inuit locals claim that polar bears are multiplying. Resolute Bay is part of the Lancaster Sound region and in 1979, polar bear numbers were estimated at 1675. In 1998, that had increased to 2457. Who knows what could have happened since?

This study has some fascinating statistics: out of the 24 Nunavat communities where self defence polar bear kills happened between 1970 and 2000, Resolute Bay had 16% of them.

In 2003 in Resolute Bay, humans and polar bears came face to face 146 times between September and November. In 142, the polar bear was scared away with deterrents like shouting, throwing rocks, cracker shells, rubber bullets or vehicles. In 28 out of 31 interactions where the cause was actually determined, the polar bears were lured in by the smell of food. Only 4 of 146 bears in Resolute were shot dead, which is still a massive total for just two or three months.

With the Lancaster Sound’s healthy polar bear population, the polar bear citadel of Resolute Bay won’t be changing any time soon.

Russia’s answer to Svalbard, a polar bear-packed archipelago of 192 snowy Arctic islands, except even more remote and even less inhabited. Franz Josef land is only 560 miles away from the North Pole, closer than anywhere else in Eurasia. It’s part of the same polar bear subpopulation as Svalbard, the Barents Sea group, and they patrol most of the islands in the archipelago.

As Franz Josef Land is part of Russia’s Arctic National Park, tourist visits are almost never permitted. But when they are, guides must carry flare guns and automatic weapons at all times. Only a handful of buildings exist in Franz Josef Land, with no permanent settlements. When tourists visit, it’s perfectly common for them to climb to the top of a snowy hill, only to look around and see 5 polar bears circling them, forcing them to escape with a bright, fiery flare gun. The polar bears here are so distant from civilisation that they have no fear of humans and treat us as prey.

For us, Franz Josef Land is a bleak wasteland. For polar bears, it’s the equivalent of a tropical oasis, with arctic foxes, seals, and whales galore to feast on. The exact number of polar bears is a mystery, as Russia refuses to release the data, but bears are visibly everywhere, and healthy and fat too.

Franz Josef Land was also the site of an old Nazi base which was abandoned in 1944 after the scientists ate polar bear meat and got sick with trichinosis. Incredibly, this base was only discovered in 2016, but the polar bears have probably had the knowledge for years. Theoretically, the polar bears might have ran the Nazis out of town.

This Canadian Inuit hamlet has a beloved tradition – fermenting walrus meat on the shoreline. Consequently, they also have a tradition of being attacked by polar bears.

Hall Beach is the oldest known settlement located inside the Arctic circle, with a population of 742 and 92% Inuit. In January, the average temperature is -32C, while in July, the figure is 6C. Polar bears are a daily sighting in autumn, so much so that for local citizens, seeing a sheep would be just as amazing as a polar bear would be for an Englishman.

Once more, the Inuit locals claim that polar bears are more numerous nowadays, and statistics back them up; polar bear numbers in the Fox Basin region increased from 2300 in 1994 to 2580 in 2009-2010. There’s so many polar bears that in 2013, Hall Beach had its hunting quota stripped after shooting dead three female polar bears which strayed into the village. They lodged a court case, arguing that it was self defence and that they had no choice.

Kids are constantly having to peer round corners on their way to school in autumn; whether they find this scary or just plain fun is unclear. Historically, Hall Beach had survived independently, by hunting the plentiful walrus herds, but these days, their revenue from tourism has shot upwards, thanks to those walruses, the polar bears, and the wreckage of an old WW2 bomber on the outskirts.

As for the fermented walrus meat, traditional Inuit medicine states that so-called “igunaq” can cleanse the digestive system. Consequently, hunters often ferment the raw meat underground during the autumn, attracting the polar bears, which only get hungrier and hungrier when the meat ends up being invisible. Hall Beach’s huge amount of polar bears is directly correlated with its huge amount of walruses.

Few places make more headlines for polar bear invasions than this snowy, reindeer-farming village in Russia’s far east. Ryrkaypiy is another walrus hideout, literally translating to “walrus jam”, and the polar bears have taken notice.

In 2013, two whales were washed ashore in a storm and stranded, causing 43 polar bears to arrive. Policemen put up posters in Ryrkaypiy warning people to stay indoors at night. They were even ordered to stay in groups and not to drop food litter on the streets to prevent the polar bears from detecting the scent. Like in Belushya Guba, shooting the polar bears was strictly forbidden.

In 2017, a nearby herd of walruses suffered a mysterious die off when they fell off a 38 meter cliff, and the scent of their corpses attracted 20 polar bears. The bears had their stomachs filled with blubber for days, but it didn’t dent their curiosity. The polar bears walked though the streets and one bear even tried to squeeze thorough a gap in a window.

Locals set up patrols, but 2018 saw the tradition continue. 25 bears strolled into town, and this time a lack of sea ice was to blame, trapping the bears on the coastline. Ryrkaypiy locals deployed signal rockets and rubber bullets, but the unperturbed polar bears rummaged through bins, scared old ladies and generally caused havoc.

Finally, the bears were outsmarted when locals scooped up the remains of nearby dead seals and dumped them further along the coastline. The reason why Ryrkaypiy is such a polar bear hub is its position on the annual migration route, but some would call it a cursed town.

The post 10 Polar Bear Hotspots Worldwide appeared first on Bear Informer.

Buried in the annals of time, this polar bear attack happened when they were still called the “ice bear” and not confirmed to be an actual species.

William Barentz was leading an expedition to find the northeast passage in 1596, when his ship became blocked by ice briefly. Anchoring it to ground ice, he allowed his men to step ashore for a while, two at a time.

While two men talked and stretched their legs, little did they know that a polar bear was sliding up behind them, assuming they were seals. It was on its stomach and silent, using its centuries old method of hunting.

Suddenly, one man felt arms clasp round his stomach. He thought it was a practical joke, but in shock, his friend yelled out “a bear!”. Within seconds, the polar bear bit the man’s head to pieces and began to devour him, while the second man fled to the ship.

Quickly, a squad of 20 crew members arrived armed with musket and pikes. Yet the powerful polar bear killed another crew member with a quick swipe, suffering no damage.

Several men fled to the ship. The others half a conference; two men were already dead, so what was the point of carrying on? Yet three of the bravest men turned around for a final confrontation with the polar bear. Crew member William Geysen immediately shot the bear in the head, but somehow, it still didn’t die, merely stumbling forward.

The finishing blow came when Geysen thumped the polar bear in the head with the butt of his gun. It fell to the ground, making a loud crashing noise, and Geyson seized the opportunity by leaping onto the bear’s back and slitting its throat.

The men gathered the remains of the two dead men, and buried them under rocks, since the arctic ice was far too solid to dig a grave in. They skinned the bear to create a 13 feet long pelt, and later cooked its meat.

From that day forth, arctic expeditions knew never to underestimate a starving polar bear.

An ancient story which proves that a polar bear can leap 24 feet if it feels like it. One day in 1668, Captain Kees de Jong and his whaling crew were paddling around Arctic waters hunting, when they decided that it was bedtime after a hard day’s work.

Suddenly, a polar bear emerged out of the shadows onto the sea ice. It jumped into the water, and the whalers knew what they had to do. Quickly paddling up to the bear with another boat, de Jong immediately threw a lance into the bear’s stomach, seriously wounding it.

What came next was a classic case of overconfidence. Convinced that it would die within minutes, de Jong casually followed the polar bear around so that he could skin its pelt. He refrained from making another attack, not wanting to redden the beautiful white fur.

The bear then climbed onto a piece of ice and lay down with its head in its paws like a resting cat. De Jong decided it was time to finish the bear off, until all of a sudden, the polar beat leapt 24 feet into the air and landed right on the captain.

De Jong fell over, lost his lance, and prepared for a mauling. But suddenly, another boat and a man with a boat hook approached, and the bear ran away. Coming near to the boat, one whaler prepared to lance it, but de Jong shouted not to, as he feared that the polar bear would jump aboard and maul everyone.

Instead, he threw a lump of wood, which the bear chased down like dog. 8 men pursued the bear, and de Long threw another lance, which missed. The polar bear suddenly seemed to become intelligent and guarded the lance, bearing its teeth at them. Then the bear fled again. The pursuit was on, but soon after, the bear finally succumbed to its wounds and died.

For years afterwards, de Jong was known as “the man under the bear”, and he would retell the story endlessly. The pelt of the polar bear was passed down through his family for generations.

Lord Nelson is one of Britain’s greatest military heroes, thanks to his tactical genius in the battle of Trafalgar against Napoleon in 1805. But back when he was just 14, he had a polar bear encounter that many believe to be myth.

In 1773, he was a midshipman aboard the bomb vessel, Carcass, which teamed up with Racehorse and set sail for the northeast passage under the command of Commodore Phipps. Within weeks, Nelson had saved the Racehorse’s crew from a herd of enraged walruses.

One day, Nelson and a friend ventured out onto the ice near Spitsbergen, claiming that they were looking for polar bears. By nightfall, the captain was increasingly worried, as Nelson hadn’t returned. Suddenly the mist cleared, and Nelson was standing on the ice, pointing his musket at an angry polar bear.

He fired the gun, but it wouldn’t work, and as the polar bear charged, he flipped the musket around to whack the bear with its butt instead. Nelson was about to be mauled, but he fought back valiantly. Suddenly, the ship’s guns fired a booming blast, scaring the bear and causing it to flee. Nelson was dressed down by the captain, but replied “I was in hopes, sir, of getting a skin for my father”.

Today, this story is still mysterious. Stories differ over whether Nelson actually whacked the bear’s face with the musket, or was just about to. Some historians believe that this happened to a different crew member, while others believe that it never happened at all.

Apparently, Nelson never wrote about the polar bear himself, only a witness. Another version claims that Nelson was saved when the sea ice split apart and he and the polar bear were separated.

This encounter is truly lost in the dusty old books of history. Little is known about Captain Cook, captain of the arctic explorer Archangel.

All that’s known is that Cook landed on the coast of Spitzenberg with his surgeon and mate in 1778. While wandering the beaches, a polar bear suddenly appeared from behind an ice hump where it had been hiding. It took everyone by surprise, materialising out of thin air. The polar bear galloped forward, opened its mouth, and seized Captain Cook between its jaws.

The captain had seconds to act or have his bones broken. Somehow, while in a polar bear’s mouth, Cook stayed completely calm, and shouted at his surgeon two words which would save his life: “shoot it!”.

Another thing which saved his life was the surgeon’s aim, the shot of a lifetime. He fired his rifle at the polar bears head, destroying its brain and killing it instantly with one bullet. He was standing 40 yards away. Captain Cook fell down, brushed himself off, and the three went on their way.

Nothing else is known about this story. Textbooks which reference the encounter date back to 1788, which is easily close enough that the story is probably true. Numerous more textbooks from 1820, 1831 and later reference the tale as well.

In 1869, the German empire was finally beginning to unify, and was desperate to prove that they were a proper empire. This of course meant ships trapped in ice floes, crew members stranded on islands, and death-defying polar bear fights.

In 1869, the ships Hansa and Germania set sail for the Arctic, but within months, Hansa had sunk. By March, the crew was preparing for a sleigh ride northwards, while scientists milled around the camp collecting data as planned.

On March  6th 1870, while sitting inside a cabin, three men heard a ear piercing shriek. They poked their head out, and heard a cry of “a bear is carrying me off!”. At 8:45PM, Dr Borgen had ventured out to collect meteorological data. He had a talk with Captain Koldewey, before walking to the shore.

While returning to the ship, and just 50 yards away, Borgen heard a rustling noise to the left. According to his diary, a polar bear appeared and grabbed him so quickly that he had no time to dodge or use his gun. He instantly felt his scalp ripping open; the bear had bitten his skull like it would bite a seal.

Captain Koldewey rushed out the hut, and saw a bear dragging Borgen across the ice. Raising his rifle, he fired a shot, but the polar bear only dropped Borgen’s head and picked up his arm.

“300 paces” later, the bear finally dropped Borgen. He woke up to see Captain Koldewey staring down at him saying “thank god, he’s alive”. Meanwhile, the bear stood waiting uncertainly, before the rifle fired a fresh bullet and it dashed off into the night.

Later, Borgen claimed to have felt zero pain or fear. He did, however, have 6 inch strips of scalp hanging over his face, serious skull lacerations, and 20 wounds from being dragged over the ice. The polar bear was never seen again.

On March 14th 1895, a pair of Norwegians decided to set sail for the Arctic in a pair of wooden canoes strapped together. One of them, Hjalimar Johansen, was a stoker with no arctic experience whatsoever. The other was Fridtjof Nansen, a famed explorer who was the first to cross the interior of Greenland on skis.

Nansen and Johansen brought 3 teams of dogs and 700KG of equipment. Their mission: do the impossible and reach the North Pole. Unfortunately, the sea ice was so twisted and deformed that they were constantly devising new routes, figuring out how to move forward.

By April 8th, they decided to settle for the furthest north land record, and travel southwards again. Summer set in, and on August 8th, Nansen was loading their kayaks to travel a freshly opened gap between the sea ice when he heard a scream of “get the gun!”.

Johansen was lying on his back, with a polar bear towering above him. The bear had sneaked up from behind and knocked him down with one swipe of its paw.

There was a problem though – the kayaks had to be saved. Nansen tried to anchor them to the ice, but heard Johansen say “look sharp, if you want to be in time”. Johansen literally had his hand on the bear’s throat, holding its snapping jaws back with all the strength he could muster.

Suddenly, the dogs came to rescue, distracting the bear and allowing Johansen to crawl away. The bear swiped at the dogs, sending them rolling across the sea ice with a howl and a whimper. Nansen grabbed his gun, aimed, and killed the polar bear with one shot.

The only injury Johansen suffered was a slightly wounded hand. Nansen also joked that the polar bear had tidied Johansen up by scraping some grime off his cheek. In his diary that evening, Johansen wrote “Everything thus turned out well, even though it could have ended so sadly“.

Roald Amundsen was one of the greatest polar explorers ever, the first man to reach the south pole, beating Robert Falcon Scott by 34 days. Yet even he wasn’t immune to a polar bear attack.

In 1918, Amundsen departed Norway aboard his ship the Maud in order to sail through the northeast passage. In the winter, his ship was frozen into the shoreline of the north coast of Asia, and here, events took a turn for the worst.

First, Amundsen tripped over the dogs while descending the gangway of the ship and broke his shoulder. Then one day, while Amundsen stood on the shore, his dog dashed towards him barking and howling.

Suddenly, out of the gloom, Amundsen heard a heavy panting, and the shape of a polar bear emerged, along with a very cute cub. The bear was chasing the dog, but stopped, and stared at Amundsen. Amundsen stared back.

Quickly, Amundsen turned 180 degrees and ran for the ship, but the bear followed. As he ran, the panting sounds behind him were getting heavier and heavier.

Just as he reached the gangway, a heavy paw whacked his injured shoulder, knocking him down to the snow. After reaching the south pole, this was surely the end for Amundsen, but Jacob the Dog rode to the rescue, barking and distracting the polar bear. Both animals ran off into the distance, while Amundsen staggered aboard the ship, injured but not fatally injured.

The next day, Jacob the Dog returned to the ship, without the polar bear.  Did Jacob win the fight? Or did the bear and dog strike a deal? Nobody knows, but Amundsen later described the encounter as “a race between a healthy, furious bear and an invalid”.

According to Amundsen, his life didn’t flash before him. Instead, when the bear prepared for its final swipe, “a scene passed before my eyes which, though vivid enough, was certainly frivolous. I lay there wondering how many hairpins were swept up on the sidewalk of Regent Street in London on a Monday morning“. He then declared that he needed to see a psychologist.

A fatal polar bear attack, but the woman did save lives and receive a posthumous medal for bravery. While camping near Hudson Bay, 66 year old Moses Aliyak and his 12 year old grandson Cyrus Aliyak attempted to retrieve their  boat, which had drifted away earlier in the day.

However, they instead found an angry, 2 metre tall polar bear standing by the shore. Moses distracted the bear by throwing rocks, allowing Cyrus to dash back to the tent, while Moses was quickly attacked and suffered lacerations to his face.

Meanwhile, Margaret Amarook was at a nearby spring, replenishing their water bottles. She wondered why nobody was coming to help her, and returned to the camp to find Cyrus hiding.

Suddenly, the bear returned, and Hattie Amitnak, 60, and 10 year old Eddie ran out of the tent. The polar bear swiped Eddie across the face, sending him rolling, and then Hattie became a hero: she ran away to district the bear.

Sadly, she was then mauled to death. Standing a few metres away, Amarook said that the bear turned and looked at her. Then she discovered Moses, who was unrecognisable, with blood dripping down his face. He told Margaret to leave him and find help, while he hid in the tent.

After sending a prayer, Margaret headed for the campsite of David and Rosie Oolooyuk, who had a radio, only to turn around and see that Moses was fleeing after all.

Later, wildlife officers tracked down the bear. It was within 3KM of the campsite and estimated to be 1.5 years old. Nobody else suffered lasting injuries, and Hattie Amitnak received a posthumous Medal Of Bravery in 2001 for successfully distracting the bear and saving the children.

If you wander into the polar bear’s domain with a 8cm pocket knife, there’s a good chance that you’ll be eaten (or kept as a pet), but also a slight chance that you’ll survive. This theory was successfully proved by Eric Fortier in July 2001.

On Baffin Island in northern Canada, Fortier and his companions Patricia Doyon and Alain Parenteau went to sleep in their tent one night. Suddenly, at 3am, Fortier was jumped awake. He felt what he thought was a dog leaning against his tent, and calmly decided to push it away.

But seconds later, his girlfriend saw a huge, paw-shaped shadow floating sideways. The mysterious paw started to rip the ceiling apart, causing Fortier to yell a warning to Parenteau in a nearby tent.

But it was no use: the bear was alerted to Parenteau’s presence and began mauling him. Apparently, the type of screams suddenly changed. Fortier jumped to his feet, and grabbed the only weapon he had available: an 8cm long pocket knife.

The 6 foot tall Parenteau tried to stand up, but the polar bear knocked him to the ground again. Fortier threw a rock, which distracted the bear, but it then attacked Patricia Doyon.

What happened next was a blur, but apparently, Doyon tripped over and was lying down. The polar bear bent over to sink its teeth in, but just in time, Fortier dashed over and knifed the bear below its jaw two times. After howling, the polar bear stumbled off into the night.

Fortier looked down to find his knife covered in blood and fur, and realised the problem: they were totally isolated. Fortier and Doyon, decided to strap two wooden canoes together, and set sail for the nearest civilisation in hope of getting medical assistance.

In 2003, Fortier was granted a bronze Carnegie Medal for supreme bravery. Paranteau and Doyon made a full recovery, but Paranteau had a gash within a centimetre of his jugular vein.

Meanwhile, a wildlife squad searched Baffin Island, but the polar bear was never located. You never know, it could even still be alive today…

On July 22nd 2013, explorer Robert Dyer went to bed dreaming of bears. While camping in Canada’s Newfoundland region on an expedition, he had seen a mother and her cub strolling slowly down a beach. Later that day, another polar bear inspected the camp and lolled its tongue, like it had picked up the scene.

Likewise, gunman Rich Gross ran through attack scenarios in his head, like he religiously did every night in his 15 year guiding career. He considered questions like where to keep the flare gun, where could a helicopter land, etc.

At 2:30am, Dyer jumped awake. Outside his tent was what he feared most: a silhouette of a polar bear. He managed to yell “bear in the camp” before a paw ripped into the tent, seizing him and crushing his hand. Dyer’s body became wrapped up in the nylon tent, and as the polar tried to rip him free, the two suddenly flew backwards.

Dyer’s lung collapsed, and seconds later he was tumbling across the hard, icy ground, being dragged towards the beach, and probably his death. Meanwhile, Rich Gross awoke to terrified screaming, echoing all over the camp.

Sprinting through his tent door, he saw an unmistakable shadow dragging Dyer 75 feet away. The tent and electric fence lay in tatters. Gross did what he had to do: he fired the flare gun just above the polar bear’s head. The beast dropped Dyer and dashed off, but Gross assumed that Dyer was already dead.

Fortunately, he was wrong – Dyer was breathing. He was lying unconscious on the sand and tundra grass.

Gross stayed alert; he knew that the bear would be back. When the fluffy white head first reappeared, Gross didn’t hesitate before firing another fiery flare. Finally, the polar bear disappeared once and for all.

Meanwhile, Dyer’s eyes fluttered open. He was instantly hit with an overwhelmingly fishy smelling saliva. Doctors tended to his wounds before declaring him stable after 1 hour, while another person phoned a helicopter.

In the end, Dyer’s voice was altered, and he had many scars, but he almost completely recovered and was itching to embark on another expedition the very moment he woke up in hospital the next day. The polar bear’s fate is unknown.

The post 10 Deadly Polar Bear Encounters From 1596 To Present appeared first on Bear Informer.

Bulgaria counts itself among a lucky few European countries to be swarming with brown bears, but for approximately 1 year, they were under severe threat of being randomly shot if they strayed too close to settlements. The saga started in 2011, when the government announced plans to hand out 73 brown bear hunting permits per year. Shooting brown bears had been illegal ever since Bulgaria exited the crumbling Soviet Union back in 1991. The sole exception was extreme self defence, but in 2010, 1 man was killed and another severely injured by bears in the southern province of Smolyan. With 550 bears officially roaming Bulgaria (but possibly up to 800), this pushed the government into setting an official hunting quota of 3% of the brown bear population.

Unfortunately for the government, Bulgaria was now a member of the European Union, and in April 2012, bureaucrats from Brussels responded by launching legal action, pointing to their own 1992 Council Directive 92/43/EEC, which protected large wildlife fauna across all EU member states.

In November 2012, Bulgaria backed down, and hunting brown bears became illegal once more. Money talked, as the Bulgarian government was unwilling to pay the financial sanctions that the EU was about to impose. The system was failing anyway, as while 27 legal permits had been issued over the previous year, only 2 bears were killed legally, while poachers kept up their secret slaughter unabated. Some argued that the panic of local farmers had been exploited by MPs connected to the hunting lobby.

Sweden is normally portrayed as a civilised, orderly place, but the country’s great secret is that its vast wild interior is controlled by around 2800 brown bears.

This isn’t a story about a new law, but rather the effects of an old one. Sweden has always allowed limited numbers of brown bear hunts from mid-August to early October. From 2010 to 2014, a total of 300 bears were shot dead legally, but since 1992, shooting mother bears with cubs has been strictly illegal. This is a braindead simple way to protect the population, but little did politicians realise that they were pulling the levers of evolution in realtime.

Over the last 25 years, a clear trend has emerged in Sweden for brown bear mothers to care for their cubs for longer, simply because this gives them a “human shield ” which is advantageous for survival. From 2005 to 2015, single female bears were 4 times more likely to be shot by hunters, and the average mothering time has shot up from 1.5 years in 1992 to 2.5 years now. The percentage keeping their cubs beyond 1.5 years increased by 5.5%.

Mother bears are showing their craftiness – they’ve read the rulebook and are exploiting it to their advantage. With longer mothering periods, the reproduction rate of bears is also falling, but this has been compensated for by higher survival rates due to cubs receiving more motherly wisdom.

Aside from Russia, Romania has the highest number of brown bears in Europe, with 6000-8000 roaming the rugged mountain slopes and controlling access to hiking paths. Forget vampires – you’re far more likely to get your blood sucked by a bear in the deep, dark forests of Transylvania.

Starting in 2007, the Romanian government had given out annual hunting quotas. In 2016, 550 brown bears, 600 wolves and 500 lynx were allowed to be shot, via a loophole in the EU’s Habitats Directive which allowed large carnivores to be shot for damaging livestock. With the wink-wink nudge-nudge approval of the government, hunting companies across Romania would first submit their requested numbers of permits. This figure was for show only, a sky-high request which they knew would be ignored. The second figure was the real loophole-exploiter – it was the number of “problem bears”, whose killing the government had delegated to hunting companies as a compromise. With dozens of hunting companies in Romania, asking for 2 or 3 “problem bear” permits added up to hundreds per year, which were usually sold to rich foreigners for 10,000 euros.

By September 2016, cracks had finally appeared in this scheme, as the government decided to ban the trophy hunting of brown bears altogether. Revelations had just emerged that the brown bear population may have been overestimated, as in a shocking display of incompetence, individual paw prints had been registered multiple times in different regions, who each presented their own tally to conservationists.

By September 2017, things were changing again, as environment minister Gratiela Gavrilescu reversed course and allowed hunting to resume. Plans were announced for 140 brown bear shootings by the end of 2017, not to mention 97 grey wolf shootings. The government promised to create a Wildlife Emergency Service armed with tranquiliser guns to deter problem bears peacefully, but according to WWF Romania, this squad only existed on paper, which was why they lazily defaulted to shooting them.

Slamming bears soon became a popular tactic with national politicians for getting votes from angry farmers, such as the notoriously bear-hating Transylvanian MP Carlos Borboly. In September 2019, the Romanian senate announced plans for a bear hunting free-for-all. While hunting would still be restricted to the time periods of March 15th to May 15th and September 15th to December 31st, the annual bear quotas would be abolished for the next five years.

One section of the bill was particularly worrying – that in future, the annual hunting quota for a species should always equal or exceed its average annual growth rate. Because population data in Romania was scarce, this would be pure guesswork which could have led to accidental extinction by work of a civil servant’s pencil. Ultimately, people power saved the day, as WWF Romania launched a Save the Bears petition which was rapidly signed by 35,000 people. When the bill reached the Chamber of Deputies on December 11th, it was voted down.

Hunting bears is outlawed in the French Pyrenees. They wouldn’t survive long if it wasn’t, as the population numbers a fragile 60-70 across the wider Pyrenees mountain range, from a low of 3 in 1997. The police relentlessly pursue any farmers who dare to hunt bears, as illustrated by an incident in June 2020 when a 5 year old female was found dead and a $30,000 reward was offered for the killer’s capture.

Now things are tightening up further, as the French state council, the highest court in the land, ruled on February 8th 2021 that farmers were now banned from firing warning shots to scare bears away. Pyrenees authorities had dreamt up the scheme back in 2019 as a way for farmers to harmlessly protect their beehives and sheep. They gave it a trial run and reported decreased casualties, but the State Council now ruled that the loud piercing bangs were incompatible with the philosophy of maintaining bears in a natural environment.

The case was brought by angry animal rights groups who argued that bears could accidentally be shot. 2020 had been a bumper year for bears, as despite 3 being unlawfully killed, including a 6 year old male called Cacou who was mysteriously poisoned, 16 new cubs were born (although not all survived). The overall bear population jumped to an estimated 64 from 52 in 2019. This ruling was the latest chapter in the long-running “bear wars” between embattled farmers and the bear-loving, conservation-happy Paris government.

British Columbia is located in the west of Canada, although despite the name, King Charles has no control over it. The province is crawling with 15,000 grizzly bears and in December 2017, the government announced that the trophy hunting season for grizzly bears would be cancelled indefinitely. This followed an internet consultation where 78 of BC’s population voted in favour. First Nations peoples would still be allowed to hunt grizzly bears for spiritual and cultural reasons, but for other BC residents, grizzly hunting would be totally banned within the Great Bear Rainforest.

In the rest of BC, only hunting for meat would be allowed. It would be illegal to remove the trophy parts such as the head, claws and feet, which they knew was effectively the death knell given that few rich Americans would pay $10,000 simply to bring meat home. Tanners and taxidermists would now be required to notify the government of any bear body parts brought to them.

Joe Foy of the Wilderness Committee praised the end “to this barbaric, blood sport hunt”, while hunters warned that more moose would now fall victim to grizzlies. Bear protectors responded by arguing that bear viewing brought 12 times more tourism to the great Bear Rainforest than bear hunting. The opposition Liberal party had a different angle: they argued that the laws were a clever distraction from the government’s recent approval of the controversial Site C Hydroelectric Dam.

As of 2024, the BC hunting ban still stands.

The frigid interior of Russia is so vast and untamed that to Moscow’s parliament, it probably feels like any laws they make are a drop in the ocean which nobody even registers. Nevertheless, 2011 saw a positive step for bear protection when the Russian parliament banned the hunting of sleeping bear mothers in their winter dens.

The sacred hunters’ codebook, the “rules of the hunt”, was now updated to restrict the hunting season to two time periods: April 1st to May 31st, and August 1st to November 30th. Anyone disobeying these restrictions would be punished with fines, and a possible trip to a remote Siberian penal colony.

Many hunters supported the move, as they saw no pride in marching into a sleeping bears’ hideout and shooting a defenceless animal. This had previously left waves of orphaned cubs who had struggled to survive without their mother’s wise teachings. It marked a resounding victory for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), whose 16 year campaign to end the winter den hunt had attracted 400,000 signatures in support. This time, both the Duma and Federation Council passed the law, which also made it illegal to hunt cubs under 1 year old and mothers with cubs under 1 year old. Both brown bears and Asian black bears were protected by these new laws.

While the gruesome frontiers of bear cruelty have retreated slightly in recent years, with dancing bears outlawed in Ukraine and Chinese bear bile farms steadily shutting down, the barbaric practise of bear baiting remains rampant in Russia. In order to train dogs for hunting, bears or foxes are tied to a tree with chains so that dogs can circle and bite them, often while a laughing crowd of villagers watches on.

Most of the bears are visibly panicking and unable to fight back. 200 of these bear baiting stations exist across Russia, and the bears’ teeth and claws are commonly removed by force. In December 2017, the Russian state duma (the lower parliament) passed a bill to outlaw the practise, with 408 deputies voting in favour, 2 against, and 3 abstaining. The bill proposed “contactless bating” instead, where chained bears would be separated from dogs by a mesh fence or glass plane.

Siberian hunters reacted with fury, claiming that their traditional way of life was under threat. Protests swelled in Moscow and St Petersburg, and the higher chamber of parliament rode to the rescue, voting down the bill in January 2018, which was only the second time since September 2016 that senators had contradicted the lower chamber. Ugly accusations flew of highly placed, wealthy hunters who were pulling the puppet strings.

Environmentalists claimed that Vladimir Putin supported them and that the president would personally intervene to save the bears he claimed to care about, but this never happened. As of 2024, bear baiting remains legal in Russia.

April 2017 saw angry headlines that President Trump, who was 2 months into his term at the time, had signed a bill designed to “kill bears and wolves”. The furore had its roots in June 2016 when the Alaskan Board of Game authorised a list of new and inventive hunting tactics, which the Obama government deemed to be barbaric and outlawed across the entire US. By February 2017, the Republicans had taken Washington, and Rep. Don Young of Alaska proposed a bill to repeal these restrictions.

This was swiftly approved by the House (225-193) and Senate (52-47) and signed into law by President Trump on April 3rd 2017. What were those “barbaric” hunting practises? These included chasing brown bears down and shooting them from aircrafts, trapping them with steel-jawed leghold traps and wire snares, and luring them in with food to shoot them at point blank range.

Once again, this sparked a massive debate. Opponents argued that the Republicans in Washington DC were helping their gun buddies from the NRA, which had supported the bill alongside the large hunting organisation Safari Club International. Supporters argued that the 2016 restrictions were an unconstitutional power grab, and that the Alaska state government would always know what was happening in its own backyard more accurately. Congressman Young argued that shooting bears and wolves from aircrafts was extremely difficult anyway and that the media had overhyped the story.

The bear laws of Yellowstone have been a rollercoaster ride over the last 15 years, with never-ending twists and turns. The most recent saga started in June 2017 when the US federal government announced the official delisting of the Yellowstone grizzly as a threatened species. After swelling from 136 in 1977 to 700 in 2017, individual states were finally allowed to hand out hunting permits again.

Idaho handed out none, Montana gave out 1 permit, but Wyoming jumped right in and handed out 22 permits. Outraged conservationists tried to buy up the permits themselves, and the outcry reached a fever pitch when one hunter promised to shot sow 101, the famous roadside mother bear, calling her the ultimate trophy.  “The grizzly population has more than recovered,” said Tex Janecek of Safari Club International.

In September 2018, bears lovers’ fears were soothed as a district court in Montana put a halt to the hunt. 2 suspenseful years passed, before the 9th circuit court declared that Yellowstone’s grizzlies were officially protected again. The initial delisting had been rushed, they argued, with insufficient evidence put forward that the grizzly bear population had stabilised. They warned that the isolated pocket of Yellowstone would never truly be safe until it linked up with Canada’s bears.

Weirdly, this entire cycle had happened 10 years earlier, beginning in 2005 and ending in 2013 when the delisting was again ruled as unconstitutional by a lower court. Yellowstone’s bears remain protected as of 2021.

The post 10 Recent Developments In Brown Bear Hunting Laws appeared first on Bear Informer.

The most famous Grizzly Man of all time was undoubtedly Timothy Treadwell, who spent 13 summers in Katmai National Park before being eaten in October 2003 and magically reincarnated on cinema screens. But a second, less famous grizzly man was Charlie Russell. This Canadian also “lived among the bears” from 1996 to 2004, but was generally regarded as far more sensible, and chose Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula as his domain rather than Alaska.

Charlie Russell was born in Alberta in 1941, and spent his formative years working on a ranch. Bears were common in the area, and his views on mankind cooperating with nature were forged from an early age, when he discovered that leaving the ranch’s naturally deceased cows for the bears to eat reduced the amount of living ones that they hunted. To Russell, this was like two magic puzzle pieces fitting together, as it also tided the hungry bears over until summer berry season. Everyone benefitted.

In 1960, his father (a well known conservationist) took him to British Columbia to film a documentary on black bears. Young Charlie noticed how they behaved far less aggressively if they left their rifles at home, thus reducing the need for guns in the first place. “I came to see them as peace-loving animals who just wanted to get along“. Russell spent the next 35 years devoted to bear conservation, and in 1994, he was dispatched by the Great Bear Foundation to Russia’s remote Kamchatka peninsula.

Kamchatka is a true wildlife haven, with 52 active volcanoes, one quarter of the world’s salmon stocks, and an estimated 20,000 Kamchatkan brown bears (Eurasia’s largest subspecies). Charlie’s task was to report on poaching, but from 1994 to 2007, he was drawn into an epic, ever spiralling quest.

In 1997, Russell and his fellow bear enthusiast Maureen Enns decided to build a wooden log cabin on the shores of the remote Kambalnoye Lake. By this point, the friendlier reserve officials were calling them nashy Kanadtsy, or “our Canadians”, and in May 1997, when 3 orphaned bear cubs turned up in the squalid zoo of Yelizovo nearby, the zookeeper turned a blind eye and allowed Russell to “steal” them. He couldn’t afford to feed them anyway, so he loaded the three 15 pounds cubs into boxes for Russell, who then transported them to the cabin by helicopter and named them Chico, Rosie, and Biscuit. They were motherless bears, but Russell was determined to train them up and make them fit for the wild.

The only way to make this happen was to train them in the wild. Their training lasted for 6 years from 1997 to 2002. Russell started by taking the noisy cubs on walks around Kambalnoye Lake, where their keen sense of smell led to them to investigate everything. The cubs loved the sweet taste of the flowers growing on the tundra, and first “incident” was when they developed a taste for the rhododendrons outside Russell’s cabin and devoured them. The next lesson was fishing, which the inventive Russell achieved by placing a salmon carcass under a few inches of water. Before long, the young cubs’ natural instincts awakened, and they were diving right in, on the first step to true bear-dom.

By October, the three cubs weighed 150 pounds. They were becoming drowsier, but neither Charlie Russell nor Maureen Ens could stay the winter. This wasn’t a zoo. Russell was serious about preparing them for survival in the wild, like a strict and loving parent should. So instead, they dug out a makeshift hibernation shelter. This location would be a shield for them, but still give them training for the bear world.

This strict philosophy extended to playtime. The word “no” became paramount. Russell would allow no grabbings, knowing they’d be full sized bears soon. He sometimes wrestled them, but forbade this with Maureen. Sometimes, they’d use a light swat on the nose as a punishment, to mimic a mother bear’s action in the wild.

There was constant amusement with the cubs. One time, when Maureen blew her nose, the cubs fled for hundreds of metres, spooked by loud noises as most bears are. Russell said that “The cubs were so much fun to be around and the joy would just sort of seep into your own bones“. Their birch cabin had its risks, as there were bear temptations like a food box, a large compost heap, and an outhouse (which bears somehow love the scent of). Nevertheless, a flimsy electric perimeter fence with only a few wires was more than enough to keep curious adult males away. A short shop BZZZTT! sent them running. Russell discovered that the fence only needed to be knee high to work, as bears always tend to investigate objects with their nose.

Eventually, it was time to make the bears truly wild. The fencing was lifted, and they abruptly stopped feeding. “Neither of us got a wink of sleep that night,” said Russell later, but this was all part of the bear’s training program.

By 1999, their efforts were receiving international attention. Russell installed a satellite at his birch cabin, so that the whole world could receive updates using the newly formed internet. Russell’s goal was to raise money for antipoaching campaigns.

For decades, Russell had been convinced that bears were misunderstood creatures. He believed that they were more social than believed, that they wanted to get on with mankind, but were driven to aggression by incorrect management. His mission was to prove this principle first hand, and over in Kamchatka, one of his closest bear friends was a 5 year old female. Kambalnoye lake, which Russell’s cabin was very close to, was a fish hub where salmon went to spawn and die. There would commonly be carcasses of dead fish floating in the water, and in the years when salmon supplies were poorer, Russell would assist the female bear in her quest for fish.

Russell would spy the lake with his binoculars to locate a carcass, floating belly up, and throw a rock to indicate the location, or the general direction if it was hundreds of meters away. The female would swim towards the splash zone, and if she veered off course, she would look back and Russell would throw another rock to correct her. Then she’d return to Russell with a salmon hanging from her mouth, before the duo began their team effort anew. Russell said “it was like a dream it was so beautiful.“

Another good friend of Russell’s was Brandy the female bear. Their relationship started when she took to eating pine nuts outside their cabin and sleeping on the path leading to lake Kambalnoye. One day, she left her cubs in the care of Russell. She could sense that he was a peaceful guardian rather than a Uzi-wielding poacher, and trust was so high that over 7 years, he became the nanny to 3 of her litters.

In summer 1999, Russell landed his plane by Kambalnoye lake as normal, and prepared for the joyous reunion with his cubs. But he only found Biscuit and Chico – no Rosie. Where was she? The logical explanation was predation by a male bear, and on a bench by the shores of the lake which was once a hub for playing, they found the mauled body of Rosie.

Nevertheless, Russell had always expected this bear project to have bumps in the road. He was sad, but his spirit was still strong. In 2000, Chico wandered off towards the mountains, which Russell hoped was a male bear’s natural migration to new territory. He wondered whether they’d ever see him again. Now only Biscuit remained. Ens and Russell returned every summer until 2003, and even as an adult, Biscuit would rub noses with Russell and press hand and paw together like the good old days.

Based on the way she’d spent summer 2002, Russell knew for a fact that she’d be having cubs in early 2003. Russell and Ens were overjoyed to be “grandparents”. But when they arrived in 2003, a dark chill hung over the area. There was no sign of Biscuit or her cubs. There was no sign of Brandy the mother bear, or her cubs Lime and Lemon. Something terrible had happened, and the goal was clearly to send a message to Russell. Because when they entered their cabin, they saw a sight so horrific they didn’t want to believe it – a single bear gall bladder nailed to the wooden wall.

Ever since 1997, Russell’s Kamchatka quest had been wider than just raising orphans, and extolling man-bear cooperation. He wanted to stop Kamchatka’s epidemic of bear poaching, which started after the Soviet Union collapsed and restless soldiers returned to impoverished Kamchatka, desperate for a way to feed their families. Bears are poached for their paws and skins, but mainly the gall bladder and its bile, which Traditional Chinese Medicine recommends as a cure-all.

China has its own horrifically cruel bear farms, where a needle forcibly removes the bile, but “wild farmed” gall bladders have a higher prestige, meaning that illegal poachers can net a tidy sum. Russell was disgusted, and as he put it, “It was not fair to teach bears that people were nonthreatening if it meant that they could be killed because of their trust“.

So in 1997, Russell brought over a Kolb ultralight aircraft he had constructed himself in Canada, equipped with a 65HV engine. Flying over Kamchatka, he began to see poaching campsites and snowmobile tracks everywhere, leading towards known bear hotspots. One time, Russell saw a large male bear with its paw trapped in a metallic poaching trap. It howled and bellowed for days, and Russell wished that he had carried a gun to put the bear out of its misery.

Russell even contemplated shooting the poachers himself, but he had better ideas. His greatest anti-poaching coup came in August 1997, when Russell and his close ranger friend Igor Revenko were flying the Kolb, and noticed a Soviet Military ATV ploughing up a hillside. Russell had the guts to swoop the Kolb closer, and when Revenko whipped his camera out, the footage later showed 20 Russian poachers, one of whom was Valery Golovin, the director of South Kamchatka Wildlife Sanctuary!

Surprisingly, Golovin was prosecuted in winter 1997. His main argument was insanity, claiming that he’d experienced the longest blackout in human history: “I can’t imagine how all this happened“, he said. The judge wasn’t convinced, and Golovin was stripped of his posts and fined $9.3 million. Even his immediate boss Sergei Alekseev was fired.

To Russell, this was a beaming source of pride – a real, concrete victory against the dark forces of poaching. In 1999, he cobbled together grants from environmentalists and hired 4 of his own rangers to protect the miles surrounding Kurilskoye Lake, building them a special cabin. Unfortunately, they proved ineffective, and so Russell turned to two Russian special forces operatives returning from the blood-soaked invasion of Chechnya. Starting in 2000, they arrested a spree of caviar poachers (using their skills for good now). In Kamchatka, salmon poaching is an even worse problem then bear poaching. The peninsula is home to 25% of the world’s spawning salmon, but poachers make 10 times the salary of legal fishing employees. Most hunting is for caviar, which sells for $20 a kilo. The poachers gut the fish, rip out the eggs, and throw the carcasses back into the water, but Russell was dealing them a mighty blow.

It was another concrete success, but in the post Soviet era of oligarchs and elites, Russell’s persistence had angered someone, somewhere.

Russell’s troubles began when the tax police announced that he was flying an illegal aircraft in the country. The FSB, the secret police successor to the KGB, was also involved. They claimed that he was flying in a border zone of military importance, and before long, the tabloids were heckling Russell as a good-for-nothing American spy (he was actually Canadian). It ended with his plane’s confiscation in 2003, and that was the year when Russell and Ens returned to find a gall bladder nailed to the wall.

Later investigations confirmed their worst fears: 40 dead brown bears were found nearby, including old friends like Brandy. It was a massacre, but worse, it made no economic sense. By 2003, poaching was so common that the market was flooded with gall bladders. The price had fallen from roughly $1800 per bladder to just $60-$90, yet landing marks proved that the poachers had used a helicopter costing $1200 an hour to pilot. It was a message, pure and simple, a warning not to tamper with the shadowy economic interests of unnamed Russians. Poaching didn’t just benefit the poachers – it benefitted the middlemen of the supply chain. Two former rangers were overheard saying “The Canadians got what they deserved”.

As the freshest snow melted, Russell noticed footprints in the older layer of snow by his cabin. He also found garbage bags and shotgun shells – the poachers had used his cabin as a base. His worst fear was that the bears who he had taught to be friendly to humans had become overly trusting of the poachers who had shot them.

There was one consolation for Russell: after triggering a storm of media interest that couldn’t be ignored, the Russian authorities arrested a group of poachers responsible in December 2003.

In 2004, the heartbroken Russell faced a dilemma. His family was gone, but Kamchatka’s bears had been his mission for the last 10 years. While Maureen Enns decided to move on, and ended their relationship, Russell decided to return: “I will not give in, no matter what happens“. His new focus was on continuing the ranger program he had started, and developing the not-for-profit Kamchatka Bear Fund. And there was a nice bonus: he won his Kolb aircraft back!

In 2005, Russell returned to father 5 more orphaned cubs. In 2006, a BBC documentary called Bear Man Of Kamchatka was released, but by 2007, funding had finally dried up. It cost a lot to fly over Kamchatka constantly and operate the ranch. Plus, he was now 65, and his health wasn’t what it was. He retired to Alberta, Canada, but his quest wasn’t over. He was determined to change people’s views on bears. One time in 2017, he was kayaking in a river near his house, when he heard a cry of “bear”. 

A bear had ransacked a picnic table looking for food, sending people scampering to a car, but when Russell calmly told the bear “no”, in a tone of voice honed by years of bear experience, the bear left peacefully. Russell then spoke to a tearful female ranger who told him that they’d shot a bear the previous day in nearly identical circumstances. He told her to get used to it: “You’re going to have to kill a lot more bears if you keep managing them this way“. She admitted they’d have to listen to him.

Still, Russell was disappointed that he hadn’t changed people’s wider bear attitudes. Ultimately, he died at the age of 76, not from the jaws of a predator bear like Treadwell, but in hospital, from complications during surgery, in May 2018. 

The two shared many interests in common, so it’s not surprising that Charlie Russell got to know Timothy Treadwell, the original grizzly man. The two often had long conversations, but Charlie Russell was under no illusions, and warned his friend regularly to be more careful. Russell himself wasn’t a naïve idealist. An electric fence was installed around the birch cabin to keep out hungry predator bears, and Russell always carried bear spray, even firing it on aggressive adult males a handful of times. Treadwell refused to do so as a matter of principal, stating resolutely that he was in the bear’s domain, not man’s.

In 2003, a few months before Treadwell’s death, Russell’s temper finally boiled over on the phone. He warned that Treadwell’s carelessness could undermine the very cause he cared about, that should he be mauled or eaten one day, the resulting media frenzy would paint brown bears as marauding killers all over again. Hunters would see them as a fair game, like in the bad old days of regional extinctions.

When Treadwell was killed by Kaflia Bay in October 2003, Russell happened to be close enough to fly out there. He later said that “I’ve seen bears like the one that killed Timothy. But I was able to stay away from them“. He argued that adoring terms like “bear whisperer” had caused Treadwell to fall into naivety over the years. His predictions for the wider movement came true when Werner Herzog’s documentary portrayed the Treadwell as a psychologically unstable lunatic. Nevertheless, Russell sympathised with Treadwell, and understood his passion for bear-human cooperation.

The post Charlie Russell: The Less Famous “Grizzly Man” appeared first on Bear Informer.

Before Japan officially absorbed the northern island of Hokkaido, the only place in Japan where brown bears live, it was occupied by the Ainu people. This ethnicity worshipped the bear (and still do), to the extent that one Ainu clan called the Kimun Kamui sanikiri were believed to be descended from them.

The legend states that in very ancient times, a husband and wife lived together, until one day, the man succumbed to a sudden illness. It had previously been decreed by Ainu elders that this woman would bear a healthy baby boy.

Months later, she was on the verge of childbirth. Surely she had taken a new husband, inquired villagers. The widow explained that a man dressed in black clothing had appeared in her hut. “O, woman, I have a word to say to you, so please pay attention“, the mysterious figure said. The man announced that he was a god of the mountains, a bear who had taken human form. Her had taken pity on her, and decided to provide her earthly self with a son from his own godly bloodline. When he was born, she would no longer be lonely, and the son would provide her with great riches.

Immediately after this speech, the man left. The widow’s son went on to become a legendary hunter, who amassed great fame, wealth and respect in Hokkaido. Consequently, he had many children, and today, a particularly high proportion of the mountain-dwelling Ainu are believed to be bear people.

The Sami are the native people of northern Sweden, Norway and Finland, a distinct ethnic group who may have evolved in Lapland when encroaching glaciers separated them. Until the 17th century when Christianity forcibly took over, the Sami (formerly called Laplanders) had an intricate shamanic culture, and bears were at the forefront of it.

All animals were considered to have their own indecipherable languages and understand human actions clearly, but bears were viewed as the most powerful beasts of the animal world, whose knowledge men wished to share, while simultaneously staying in good relations. Bears were always asked for forgiveness after being slain, and it was essential that each stage of a hunting ceremony was carried out in order to enable the bear’s majestic rebirth.

Like the Finns, speaking the bear’s true name was taboo among the Finns. Archaeological evidence suggests that Sami bear hunters had their own special language. The Sami people were famous for their intricately carved ceremonial drums, and bears were commonly painted on them using alder sap. The drum’s rim would have a life-sized, normal bear in the Earth realm, while on the skin, a gigantic “heavenly bear” would be painted.

These shaman drums were vital for hunting – one beat would offer clairvoyance as to where a bear was hibernating in the winter snows, and another beat in spring would tell the gathering hunters the odds of success. The western sami meanwhile, believed that bears had sexual intentions towards women, and banned them from hunting ceremonies.

Artio is one of the most mysterious bear deities. What’s confirmed is that in 1832, during the excavation of a new garden for a clergy house in Bern, a mysterious chest was unearthed. It contained 6 figurines – a lar (a guardian deity), and the gods and goddesses Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and Naria. The sixth figurine was of a woman sitting on a throne facing a large, wise-looking bear with a twisting leafless tree behind it, and the inscription revealed that this was an ancient celtic bear god called Artio.

Soon, connections were made to bear figurines found in Celtic graves across Europe, including figures discovered during the restoration of Ireland’s Armagh Cathedral in 1840. Mentions of Artio have also been found in Daun and Stockstadt in Germany, and Weilerback in Luxembourg.

It’s believed that Artio was worshipped as the goddess of abundance and transformation. She was pictured as a human draped in bear skin, but could transform into a real bear at will. She hibernated during the winter, and awoke during spring to watch over the annual re-advancement of nature. Her name comes from the Gaulish word for bear, Artos.

According to markings on the Naria figurine’s pedestal, the collection was created in the second century AD. It was originally stored in a Roman temple on the river Aar, but locked up in a chest and moved to a secret building for safekeeping, probably to safeguard it from war. The figurines lay hidden and forgotten in its ruins for 1500 years.

In 2015, a collision of worlds took place, as the Ktunaxa First Nation peoples of Canada fought a plan by Glacier Resorts to build a colossal new ski resort. The plan had been simmering away since 1991, and aimed to build chairlifts and pistes in Jumbo Valley, a prime piece of grizzly bear habitat in British Columbia.

Chief Jason Louie pledged to blockade the resort and go to jail, and on October 5th 2015 the Ktuzana took their case to the Supreme court of Canada. Yet the religious freedom argument didn’t pass muster and in 2017, the ski resort was given the green light.

Why the controversy? Jumbo Valley is known to Ktunaxa as Qat-Muk, and is believed to be home to the Great Bear Spirit. Supposedly, Qatmuk is the place where this spirit is born, heals itself, and goes to die, in a neverending cycle

. Through ceremonial dancing, the Ktunaxa are able to contact the Great Bear Spirit for spiritual guidance and protection, as the Qatmak is the place where grizzly bears go to dance themselves. It is the sacred duty of the Ktunaxa to protect the Qat’Muk, and one ceremony involves singing songs and laying down tobacco as a tribute.

Glacier Resorts argued deception, that the Great Bear spirit had only been mentioned in 2010 after 20 years of legal wrangles. Ktunaxa representatives replied that this secrecy was deliberate, that the First Nations peoples have long kept their traditions close to their chest, due to colonialist efforts to stamp them out.

The Viking berserkers were some of the most brutal and insane warriors to ever walk the Earth. They were famed for running into battle with no regard for their own safety, screaming incoherently and foaming at the mouth. They would gnaw the iron rims of their shields, and for a few minutes at the peak of their frenzy, become seemingly immune to fire and steel. One popular theory is that berserkers were high on hallucinogenic fly agaric mushrooms, which they ate through urine after feeding them to reindeer to remove the toxins.

But according to archaeological evidence, there was a widespread belief in Norse culture that berserkers had shamanic powers, drawing their strength directly from the bear. The most hardened berserkers could apparently transform into a half-bear man during the heat of battle.

Berserkers that died in battle were commonly laid on bear skins for their funeral rites. One Viking legend speaks of the beserker Bödvar Bjarki, who transformed into a bear to do battle with the legendary Danish king Hrólfr Kraki, taking out legions of guards with his forepaws.

The very name berserker may originate from bears – Viking scholars have long debated whether it translates to “bare shirt” or “bear shirt”, hinting that they drew their berserker powers from coats made of bear fur. It’s said that the bear skin caps worn by the guards of Buckingham palace and Danish monarchs are remnants of this glorious warrior tradition – perhaps it’s time for a revival?

The ancient, pre-Christian Finnish tribes were banned from even speaking the names of bears, in case a jinx was placed on their head. Bears were believed to have psychic mind reading powers and would sense an approaching hunter’s presence. Instead, Finnish tribes called them honey-hand (mesikämmen), karhu (rough fir), or one of 100 other names Finnish archaeologists have discovered. Bears were the child of forest god Mielikki and her husband Tapio, who guided the bear into becoming the most feared and respected of forest animals, and had the ability to shapeshift into bears themselves.

Winter hibernation was said to be proof of a bear’s magical powers. Consequently, hunting rituals always took place immediately afterwards in spring, followed by an elaborate funeral feast to encourage the bear’s reincarnation in the forest.

Men would drink blood from the bear’s skull to gain its wisdom, and a chosen groom and bride would act out a ceremonial wedding, to ensure future marital success. The bear’s spirit would be reassured that it was an “honoured guest” rather than a victim.

The skull was then placed on a sacred tree called a kallohonka, always facing east, which would later be worshipped as a totem. To avoid angering the bear’s spirit, its bones were buried at the tree’s base, in a fully-fledged funeral ceremony. Its teeth were removed to access their supposed magical properties, and in the iron age, pendants of bear teeth were a common sight around women’s waists; these were believed to improve fertility.

According to Korean legend, bears were involved in the very foundation of the Korean empire. In ancient times, there was a sky-god called Hwanin who had a dissatisfied son called Hwanung. He had grown restless and bored with playing divine ruler in the clouds, and after many heated arguments with his father, Hwanin permitted him to depart for the valleys and mountains of Earth, with 3000 followers in tow.

Hwanung landed on a sandalwood tree on Baekdu Mountain near the border with China, and soon met a tiger and bear who lived in a nearby cave, who began worshipping him. However, these animals strongly desired to be human, and Hwanung promised to fulfil their wishes, on one condition – if they mediated in a cave for 100 days, and ate nothing but divine mugwort and garlic.

On the 20th day, the tiger lost patience, gave up the challenge, and left the cave. But the bear stayed the course, and on day 21, it was transformed into a beautiful woman called Ungnyeo.

Her name translated to “bear-woman”, and she showed her appreciation to her creator Hwanung with gifts and prayers. Soon, however, she was afflicted with loneliness, desperate for a child. Hwanung took pity on his creation and took her hand in marriage, and in the decades to come, their son went on to found ancient Chosun, the first kingdom of Korea, which lasted from 2333 BC- 676 AD.

By the 20th century, Russia had so many bear worshipping ceremonies that the Soviet Union vowed to eradicate them, so that all Russians could worship the bushy beard of Lenin instead. The Nivkh are an ethnic group in far-east Siberia, and their bear ceremony was similar to the Ainu, similar enough that a secret connection may exist.

A bear cub was taken from its mother and raised for 3 years as one of the tribe. In January and February, delegations of allied tribes from all over the Siberian expanses would visit, and the first stage involved mat’ narkh, ritual meals in the forest which would last for 18 days.

Then the bear would be walked around the village by its keeper, while everyone watched on in ceremonial costumes. Under the guidance of a shaman called a ch’am, the bear would be slaughtered by a volley of arrows and sent back to the spirit world. Celebrational games would last for days, each followed by ritual meals involving distinct bear body parts prepared according to traditional recipes. Only adults were permitted to eat the bear’s heart, head and fat from the belly.

The skull was lain in a temple in the bear keeper’s house, alongside previously sacrificed bears. In one last act of the ritual, carefully selected dogs were beheaded, and their skulls placed around the keeper’s house. Bears were considered to be earthly embodiments of the Nivkh’s ancestors, and despite the Soviet pressure, the ceremonies survived until the 1960s.

Even before the ancient Celts, it’s believed that endless generations of cavemen worshipped bears as deities, both cave bears and brown bears. In caves across Europe, the arrangement of bears bones seems far too precise and artistic to be solely from casually deposited hunting remains.

One example is Veternica Cave near Zagreb, where 6 bear skulls were found placed side by side. They were facing the cave’s entrance, and several other skulls had markings and a strange smoothness as though cavemen had polished them ritualistically.

Caverne de Furtins in France also has skulls with deliberate positioning, and the famous Chauvet Cave is on a whole other level. This archaeological cave contains 200 bear skulls. Its walls are covered with bear paintings (alongside bison and wolves) and while many bear bones lie separated in jumbled bone piles, some have clearly been moved. One near complete skeleton sits on a flat, table-like boulder which protrudes 70cm above the cave floor, not far from the now collapsed cave entrance. Perhaps cavemen kneeled in front of this platform?

The debate over the bear cult is fierce. Sceptics argue that water erosion could have created the unusual looking skeleton placements, and that Neanderthal and homo sapiens remains found outside of caves have very few bear-related trinkets. However, given how widespread bear cults were until 1900, the chances that superstitious cavemen never worshipped them must be low. Anything is possible – perhaps they believed that removing a bear from its natural cave habitat was a violation of the divine.

The Tunguz are an ethnic group spread around the mid-east of Siberia, united by speaking Tungusic languages. In 1989, they numbered around 65,000, most of whom are fascinated by the divine nature of bears. The Great Bear is believed to have been the creator of the world, and the one who blessed mankind with fire.

One tale speaks of how the Great Bear hunted down his enemy, a reindeer or moose who had stolen the sun from Earth, and in doing so gave light back to the people. Another Tungusic belief was to never eat a bear’s eyes. Instead, the head would be cut off and the eyes removed carefully, touching them with neither a knife nor fingernails. Then they would be wrapped in grass or birch bark and be placed high up in a forest tree, hoping that the bear’s eyes would be illuminated by the first rays of the rising sun. These eyes were called “ōsīkta”, or stars.

Every year, a Bear Festival would be held with a secret dish called the seven, a mixture of rendered bear fat with finely chopped bear meat. Participants were forced to swallow this seven without making contact with their teeth, otherwise they would go blind.

According to the Tunguz, the moose originated from bears, growing out of its fur. Like with the Nvikh, the Soviets tried and mostly succeeded in crushing these ancient beliefs.

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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!

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