| 1 | M13, the early days |
For 100 years since the last one died in 1904, Switzerland had been almost completely free of bears. Like Austria, it was once a notorious bear heartland, with medieval farmers looking over their shoulders constantly, until the population was completely eradicated by government sponsored hunting.
Occasionally though, a bear would stray in from neighbouring Italy, such as the notorious JJ1 of 2005, who was eventually shot dead in Germany for stealing honey. Starting in 2011, M13 continued this noble tradition. He was born in Trentino, Italy in early 2010, but soon strayed into Switzerland, making the border region his home.
The real mischief began in spring 2012, when he was spotted in Schnalstal, Italy, by a farmer’s wife. This was March 31st, and close to the border triangle of Switzerland, Austria and Italy. Because his GPS collar had stopped working over the winter, the appearance took the authorities by surprise. By April 14th, M13 had crossed into east Switzerland proper, and slain a goat. The Swiss authorities captured him almost immediately and fitted a new GPS collar, but it didn’t stop him from ransacking the beehives of two Graubünden beekeepers on April 16th. He greedily stuck his snout in, leaving shattered honeycomb and a trail of dead bees on the ground. It was official – Switzerland was bear country once again.
By April 18th, he had rummaged through a pile of compost, and by the 21st, GPS tracking showed that he was back in South Tyrol. People took to scaring him with firecrackers, and the Italian government promised free cash handouts to help beekeepers build fences.
| 2 | Gathers evidence of a crime |
Panic was building, and on April 25th, a school in Tyrol hosted a hastily organised “bear information event” for farmers and beekeepers. Experts reassured everyone that M13 could cross the German border soon and become their problem instead, but conceded that “We don’t know what’s going on in the animals’ minds“.
In the meantime though, M13 was helping to solve crimes. On April 22nd, M13 had an itchy back, and doing what bears do, he found a tree to scratch it on, in the Austrian municipality of Spiss (home to just 104 people). The tree fell over, smashed into a telephone line and started a small forest fire, attracting the attention of the police, who knew that M13 was nearby. When they arrived, M13 was gone, but they had a better a prize: nearby, they found the corpse of an overweight blond haired man aged 40, who had been dead a few days. He was clad only in his underpants and lying on a steep slope below the Spisser Landesstraße.
Had M13 developed a taste for human flesh? The police discovered that not only was the man murdered by human hands, he was a criminal who had multiple fraud convictions in the Italian region of south Tyrol. While they wouldn’t give details, he was being hunted in connection to another, unsolved crime. They released a mocked up image of a man who had been seen with the dead man, but the 10 sightings they received led nowhere. From that moment, M13 was dubbed “Inspektor Bär” by the German-speaking media.
| 3 | M13 duels a train |
On April 30th 2012, M13 was still a free bear, but now faced his biggest challenge yet – a 100mph train. Whether a bear can survive a train collision is as old a question as the constantly debated gorilla-bear faceoff, but M13 provided an answer. It happened in Switzerland, in the far eastern province of Graubünden, an area which M13 had really taken to.
At 9:40pm, the driver of a Rhaetian Railway train was approaching Ftan station, when a massive collision caused the whole train to judder. He later told wildlife experts that he thought it was a bear, but wasn’t 100% certain. Experts arrived, and found no bear corpse (or train corpse). There were no traces of blood or fur either, but soon, sightings came in of M13 roaming the Graubünden area with a limp. “The bear is likely to have bruises and possibly pain,” said ranger Hannes Jenny. M13 rose to a whole new level of celebrity overnight, as UK media outlets like Metro covered his exploits. Most importantly, his GPS signal wasn’t flashing anymore.
After pushing the train to a draw on April 30th, M13 wisely changed careers to mountaineering. He was seen climbing towards Fuorcla d’Agnel, a snowy mountain pass almost 3000 metres above sea level, before reaching Julia pass and moving onto the Swiss village of Bivio. Then, after a spring of chaos, M13 inexplicably vanished for a while.
| 4 | The M family tree |
M13 came into the world in early 2010 in the northern Italian alps. Like all bears, he was born in his mother’s winter hibernation den, weighing just 1 pound. And like most bears, he had siblings, which the mother had given strangely similar names of M12 and M14. M12 burst onto the scene with a rampage in the Austrian ski resort of Nauders on April 9th (Easter Monday). At 11:00pm, a piste-basher driver spotted massive bear pawprints (pictures here) on a snowy slope at 1900 metres. Moving ahead, he saw M12 moving on a forest trail as though eating. He flashed his light, causing M12 to flee, but the nearby snowmobile was completely torn apart, particularly the seat. The man followed the pawprints into a snowy meadow to find that M12 had already disappeared, and fur samples proved his identity.
By April 24th, M12 had crossed over to Graubünden in Switzerland, where he finally did the inevitable and joined forces with his brother M13. The two were spotted wandering in the forest together in a heartwarming reunion, but three days earlier, the noose started to tighten. Their fellow sibling M14 was crossing the Brenner motorway north of Bolzano, minding his own business, when a silver Mercedes struck him, having thought he was a calf. M14 dragged himself onto the shoulder, and then collapsed, dead.
By early June, M13 was the last surviving sibling, as M12 was run over by a car on the same cursed Bolzano highway. The bear’s identity was mysterious at first, before being confirmed as M14 in early July.
| 5 | Collar chaos |
By the age of 1.5, M13 was already a fearless cub, and the authorities decided to collar him in October 2011. He received a high-powered GPS collar which recorded his location every hour, and sent the data to a policeman’s phone by text message every 7 hours. The GPS remained in place for months, and showed M13 spending the bitter winter months in Trentino, just over the Italian border.
By January 2012, however, M13 had lost his collar, for reasons never revealed. April 2012 saw M13’s first taste of fame, as he destroyed beehives and rummaged through compost heaps, and on Thursday April 12th, he was captured by a police team from Graubünden and fitted with an all new GPS collar. Now they could monitor M13 round the clock and warn farmers in advance.
But this time, the collar only lasted 2 weeks. On April 30th, M13 had his famous train battle, and the signal died immediately. At first, the authorities hoped that M13 had retreated to a cave which was blocking the satellite signal, but it soon became clear that the train had shattered the machinery beyond repair. The bear crew prayed that the VHF tracker was still working, the radio-operated backup which most GPS trackers are equipped with, but luck wasn’t on their side.
Finally, the same Graubünden police squad managed to recapture M13 using a tube trap on June 30th 2012. This time, the collar would remain on the bear’s neck until his untimely death on February 19th 2013.
| 6 | King of the mountain pass |
A month and a half of silence passed. M13 hadn’t been sighted since May 12th. He was high in the mountains, away from contact, on epic bear quests which we’ll never know.
Then on June 23rd, multiple drivers high on the snowy Julia Pass saw M13 running side by side with the road. M13 was officially back! At first, M13 was 400 metres away galloping through a snowfield, and suddenly, he was only 80 metres away. There was pandemonium among the children as shouts of “a bear, a bear” rang out. Nobody could believe their eyes in this tranquil mountain scene – it might have been the highlight of M13’s career.
The bear ate some grass, before lying near a rock and dozing for half an hour. He looked healthy and seemed to be 40 pounds heavier than in late April. “It was huge!” said one driver. “I saw the transmitter clearly on the bear’s neck”. Little did she know that the GPS was still smashed by the train – it was now a mere decorative collar. When the authorities captured him for his new collaring on June 30th, M13 was healthy and had recovered from his train collision 2 months earlier.
July was mostly quiet for M13, with one sheep mauling. By August 16th, he was photographed in Italy, with the hump on his back looking seriously huge. Before long, he had mauled two sheep on high alpine pastures, killing one. The storm clouds were drawing in, and September saw the real mayhem begin.
| 7 | School invasion |
September 12th started like any other day in Graubünden. The weather was turning slightly cooler and farmers were watching the berries and cows for hints about the upcoming winter. But this calm scene changed when M13 descended from the hills and mauled a pregnant donkey, which was in an enclosure alongside 11 other animals. The bear had dodged an electric fence, which was positioned too high above a stream bed – the crafty bear sneaked under it.
The authorities announced that because goats were on a bear’s natural menu, they weren’t concerned, but on October 11th, M13 turned his attention to a school. From between 4:30am and 6:00am, he stole some beehives which were being used for lessons, forcing the school to erect an electric fence, in case he decided that scaring schoolchildren was a fun hobby. Two days earlier, he had massacred two sheep. He was in the full throes of hyperphagia, a brown bear’s mad autumnal feeding season where they pack on the pounds for hibernation.
The ominous facts were that in Switzerland, the law is tilted more heavily towards shooting problem bears, whereas in Austria, capture is always prioritised first. Environmentalists were growing concerned, and in mid-October, 6 rangers pelted M13 with rubber bullets and commanded their dogs to bark loudly, to ingrain a fear of human settlements in the bear’s mind.
| 8 | The debate |
But it didn’t work, as on November 15th, the most notorious incident of all happened when M13 broke into a Graubünden holiday home on a 1700 metre high mountainside. The bear smashed down the glass door, before gobbling up their stash of potatoes. Worse, he came back later for more! This was the first time M13 had broken into a building, and the owners found the house completely destroyed. This was the final straw – M13 was officially a nuisance bear who associated human buildings with food. He’d be back soon.
An online petition appeared on facebook opposing the shooting of M13, while the authorities mulled capturing the bear and shipping him back to Italy.
M13 supporters argued that as a young male bear, he would probably spread his wings soon and travel 100s of miles in search of new territory to dominate. His detractors argued that because of the abundance of human-related food, M13 was now unusually tied to the Graubünden area in Switzerland’s far east, and that the same rules as inner Alaska couldn’t be applied. But just as the walls were closing in, M13 entered hibernation on November 19th.
| 9 | Stalks schoolgirl |
January was a quiet month for M13 the bear – ominously quiet, perhaps. There was heavy speculation that he was in an alpine cave, but the Graubünden authorities refused to admit it, despite knowing the truth due to the GPS tracker. The first news for M13’s fans came on February 9th, when his GPS tracker sparked back to life. The bear had awoken from his hibernation early, and went for a brief stroll in Italy’s southern Poschiavo valley before returning to his winter den. M13 was now a 3 year old bear weighing 330 pounds.
On Saturday February 16th, M13 was spotted again on the shores of Lake Poschiavo, but his next move would prove to be his death sentence. 14 year old Emina Piana was walking through a hamlet in the Val Poschiavo valley on February 19th, when she spotted a confident looking bear walking through the streets. The next minute, he was only 10 metres in front of her, on the opposite side of a bridge. She left when she felt ready, but the bear followed. When she arrived home, Piana fainted from shock, and was driven to hospital. “I was super scared” she later said. Apparently, spring was M13’s favourite time of the year, the perfect opportunity for mischief.
| 10 | Bitter end for M13 |
M13’s fear of humans was now all but gone, and on February 19th, he was shot dead once and for all, in the Graubünden region where he had spent so much time. The last of the winter 2010 siblings had fallen, and outcry erupted in Switzerland and across the world. The authorities called it necessary, but others called the slaying of M13 a cheap, lazy and easy way out.
The WWF said that the shooting was extremely disappointing and that “His death is the result of a lack of acceptance of bears in Poschiavo”. They said that taking precautions like garbage-proof bear cans would have prevented the problem. Across his 3 year existence, M13 had never once harmed a human.
There was one last positive development to remember M19 by, as February finally saw the truth about the “Inspektor Bär” corpse come to light. His name was Peter W, and his 36 year old wife Tanja B had reported him missing, but she and her secret lover were arrested in May. It transpired that they had drugged Peter, kicked him, and strangled him, dumping the body in the woods. Rather than a connection to Peter’s criminal past and heavy debts, it was a simple lover’s tiff.
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