| 1 | The first reintroduced Pyrenees bear |
The Pyrenees is perhaps the main bear battleground of Europe today. From the 1800s peak where hundreds of bear trainers left Pyrenees villages and crossed the Atlantic, the bears were hunted down to 4 survivors by 1995, far beyond hope of natural genetic survival. The only solution was introducing bears from elsewhere, and alongside the female bears Zika and Melba, Pyros was part of the original wave of reintroductions from Slovenia. Little did they know that Pyros would become the most famous and long-lived of the lot, and be dubbed the sexually dominant superdaddy by international media.
When Pyros was identified in the Slovenian woods, he was already an established, 550 pound 8 year old, born in 1989. France’s bear team feared that the Slovenian government wouldn’t let go of such an irresistible attraction to trophy hunters, but Pyros was captured in a tube trap on May 1st 1997. He was transported 1000s of miles by truck, through the long, winding mountain roads to the sleepy French Pyrenees village of Melles.
With 100 journalists watching on and flashing their cameras, the metal bars were opened (video), and Pyros took his first tentative steps onto the paved floor. He deduced within seconds that he was now a free bear, and broke the first rule of his 20 year Pyrenees career – he charged his way through a wooden fence instead of continuing down the peaceful leaf-littered path as instructed. Within 30 seconds, Pyros was gone. He was now the newly appointed king of the French Pyrenees.
| 2 | Early antics |
Pyros wasted no time in sampling the buffet that the Pyrenees farmlands had to offer. Within 8 days, he had slain a sheep and almost completely consumed it, but for a while, Pyros was overshadowed by the bloodthirsty female bear Melba, who stole cattle left, right and centre, and was shot dead in 1998 after charging a nervous pig hunter. On April 5th 1998, Pyros stumbled into a forest trap, lured by the smell of fresh blood. Bear biologists fitted him with a VHF radio collar to track his movements, but only days later, the crafty Pyros had shaken the collar free from his neck, possibly while scratching his back on a tree.
The next 3 months were peaceful, as Pyros spent April-June 1998 in the Aran valley on the Spanish side, eating only berries, shrubs and small insects. He crossed over the French border briefly to steal 3 beehives from the sleepy village of Fos, but in late July, Pyros returned to France with full force, eating a sheep near Luchon and leaving 15 sheep so badly injured that herdswoman Christine G had to put them down. Farmers were reimbursed and promised a free Patou dog to circle their homesteads, but 2000 saw another trail of mayhem, as Pyros attacked livestock near Betpouney in May, before savagely assaulting 7 sheep near Bordères-Louron in August. Pyros knew that he could operate with complete unpredictability, because his refitted radio collar had stopped transmitting in September 1999.
| 3 | Incident 2002 |
Pyros had already taken over Melba’s place as the most notorious Pyrenees bear, to such an extent that one particularly gruesome incident was automatically blamed on him. In the French village of Lançon, at 9pm, the local postman was following a path overlooking the meadow of farmer Jean Rodgers, when he noticed that the 200 sheep inside the meadow were standing in unusually tight formation. From the nearby forest, a large brown “dog” emerged, which was actually a bear.
The bear circled the herd for a while, deliberately keeping quiet to avoid spooking them. Then with zero effort, the bear shepherded a single sheep away from the flock and killed it with a kick of its paw, before jumping on the corpse to prevent it from moving. Witnesses swore that the bear walked upright on its hind legs like a man, as it scooped the carcass up in its left paw and walked 100 metres higher up the hillside.
When farmer Jean Rogers arrived, he and the postman approached to within 100 metres, and it was clear that the bear was watching them. Licking its lips, the bear approached the adrenaline-filled duo, but when a 4 x 4 drove up from the village and began flashing its lights, the bear turned around and headed for the forest. When they approached the sheep carcass, its heart, liver and brains had been removed with almost surgical precision. The authorities never proved anything, but based on his recent locations, Pyros was the number 1 suspect.
| 4 | Disappears |
Surprisingly, Pyros then became a significantly more elusive bear after 2002. He was so rarely sighted that farmers debated whether he was dead, which government bear trackers knew was false due to camera trap footage.
There was uproar in 2006 when the French authorities reintroduced 5 all new bears from Slovenia, 4 females and 1 male. Bloody carcasses were thrown at the local mayor by screaming farmers, and glass-laced honey was left by the highways, but this drama came and went with little involvement from the mysterious Pyros.
However, he wasn’t lazing around with a jar of honey, far from it. In the deep, wild back valleys, Pyros had fathered 15 all new Pyrenees bear cubs by 2010, and an estimated 10 had survived. One romantic event took place in June 2010 when Pyros appeared in two blurry camera trap pictures walking the local woods with Hvalata the female bear.
It was a lovely sight which increased the world’s love metre by 0.2%, but soon, the bear duo was blamed for a string of savage ewe attacks in the fields of Antras in Ariège province. This had been Pyros and his girlfriend’s main turf recently, and farmers had found many animals disembowelled and frightened, after long hikes up the mountain slopes to their wandering herds. June had been a rainy month, cloaking the fields in a thick, freezing fog which had reduced visibility to 2 metres and given the bears the perfect disguise. Some couples go to the gym together, others go jogging together – Pyros and Hvalata had better ideas.
| 5 | Rules as superdaddy |
Note: Pyros is the second bear in the video above.
From 2002 to 2010, Pyros made 10 cubs with Caramelles the female bear alone, including Caramellita born in 2002, and Plume born in 2010. There was only one downside, a harsh fact of the cruel bear world – Caramelles was his own daughter! She was born in 1997 as the daughter of deceased Slovenian bear Melba. Likewise, Pyros had no qualms with breeding with his granddaughter (and daughter) Caramellita starting in 2006.
It reached the point where the authorities declared a crisis in genetic diversity which could scupper the entire Pyrenees reintroduction project via a slew of birth defects. Pyros was dubbed a “superdaddy”, but was so sexually dominant that the other male bear, Balou, was forced to wander the central Pyrenees all alone. No cubs had been attributed to this rival male using genetic testing.
By now, Pyros was 26 years old. The authorities had expected his sexual energy to wane with age, but like with Otschi the Austrian bear back in 1992, he was still making babies when he would normally be entitled to claim his grizzly bear pension. The next year, the authorities revealed plans to castrate him, but this never happened, probably because they realised that they had to find him first. 2013 saw the first male bear other than Pyros to reproduce since 2004, but scuppering the hopes of a fresh injection of genes, it was Moondaddy, Pyros’ son.
| 6 | Pyros’ village stronghold |
The Pyrenees bear population is divided into two subpockets, with the vast majority being in the central Pyrenees and 6 bears roaming the western Pyrenees, bear islands which are separated by the Pic du Midi de Bigorre and Néouvielle ridges. Pyros was a central bear, and in keeping with his massive sexual appetite, Pyros was originally an extremely adventurous bear whose territory encompassed 1000 square kilometres.
By 2011 he started to stick to more familiar territories, and two French villages he was constantly spotted near are Fos and Melles, which are 3km from each other. These are villages of stone, pebbled buildings and constantly murmuring animal sounds which could easily be from the 18th century if it wasn’t for the cars and satellite dishes. Fos and Melles have 249 and 91 residents respectively and are surrounded by green valleys with lush fields and a small river, with an ancient church perched amidst the rocks.
This was classic bear country for Pyros to hang out in, including several wooden huts kept by farmers in the mountains for him to break into. Fos was where Pyros stole three beehives back in 1998. Unfortunately, it’s something of a ghost town nowadays, as its population was 1724 back in 1851. There was once a tramway, 2 hairdressers, 2 hotels and restaurants, and a grocery store, but many shops now lie empty. The rumours of a sexually aggressive bear in the woods probably didn’t help.
| 7 | Pyros the celebrity bear |
One of a bear tracker’s favourite tricks is not just to place a camera trap, but to lure a bear to that spot by spraying special scents on trees. A wire mesh is placed on the trees which captures the bears’ fur as they instinctively rub their backs on it, which allows genetic testing and makes the wild goose chase of picking up fur from the forest floor unnecessary. It was with these inventive new traps that several excellent videos of Pyros were captured in 2011 and 2012.
One was taken in April 2012 and showed a bored-looking Pyros approaching a twig-like tree which he could probably snap with his little finger. He half-heartedly rubs and licks the tree before deciding that he can’t eat it, and then the video cuts to a second, unidentified bear 8 days later, which is covered with snow like a Christmas mascot.
In the July 2011 edition, however, Pyros got much more animated, standing up and rubbing his back on the tree like he was the life of the party. The video has 4 different clips of Pyros arriving within 3 days, the scent was so attractive. An August 12th video shows Pyros in full dancing-bear mode, and on August 27th, Pyros and rival male Balou arrived at a scented tree within 20 minutes of each other. The biologists were an inch away from capturing footage of a full on bear brawl.
| 8 | Last sightings! Plus current offspring |
2014 dawned with the disturbing announcement that Balou the bear was dead, possibly due to a horrifically unlucky strike of lightning. Pyros had won the battle of the superdaddy bear once and for all, but with Moonboots and Pepite fathering 5 cubs between them from 2013-2015, there were signs that Pyros’ reign was coming to an end.
In winter 2015/2016, Pyros didn’t hibernate at all, and a frosty picture emerged of the bear with a coat sprinkled with snow. He was now 27, and had a definite tired and scraggly quality about him. Media speculation that Pyros was on his last legs reached boiling point on May 8th when a camera trap video showed him struggling to climb a forested hillside, as though his legs were painful. His manner was very lethargic, and later, a nighttime image flashed him dozing in the exact same location.
Was his body giving out? Not in every way, because in mid 2016, Pyros returned to form and fathered yet 2 more cubs with Caramelles. These were the couples’ 13th and 14th, but would they prove to be Pyros’ last? April 2017 saw a series of camera trap images of Pyros, again showing a thinner, snow-sprinkled bear standing near a thick tree trunk. After that, there was silence. Nothing was seen or heard of Pyros the bear for the rest of the year.
| 9 | Is Pyros dead? |
Pyros had enjoyed a long reign as the oldest bear of the Pyrenees mountains. He had enjoyed a rare bear luxury of moving to an entirely new country at age 9 and exploring its turf, but in early 2019, the grim announcement came: Pyros hadn’t been seen or photographed since April 2017. No pawprints or fur had been spotted in the wild forests and meadows which he once ruled. Pyros wasn’t collared with a GPS transmitter, so there was no inarguable final proof, but the Pyrenees bears are the most closely surveilled population in the world, with dozens of camera traps lined with special attractive scents. Because there was “almost two years without any trace” the authorities were “practically sure that he is dead“.
Instead of death by hunter or car collision, all signs suggested that Pyros had died in his hibernation den after failing to gather enough food. The corpses of wild bears are almost never discovered, and Pyros’ skeleton probably lies in a mysterious forest hollow which will lie undiscovered for 100 years. But the old grandad bear still had one last piece of his reign of terror to play out, as the authorities warned that his death was only “probable”.
Since 2019, the 230 year old Pyros hasn’t been seen again, and arguably the final nail came when Pyros disappeared from the “list of bears in the Pyrenees” page of the French wikipedia. The 2016 cubs proved to be his last after all.
| 10 | The nature of Pyros |
Video note: Pyros starts at 16 seconds.
While his weight yo-yoed like any constantly fattening and slimming down bear, Pyros’ average was about 550 pounds, which is nothing compared to a Kodiak bear, but large for a European brown bear or Yellowstone male.
Surprisingly, Pyros had no fondness for honey. He pinched three beehives in Fos back in 1998, but in 2014, only 1 beehive was destroyed by bears across the entire French Pyrenees. He never attacked any hikers, farmers, wandering villagers, crashlanded pilots, or any humans at all. The closest was probably the 2002 incident, and another happened in 1998, when a young shepherdess spent the whole night monitoring her flock at an altitude of 2000 metres. Suddenly, nearby bear watchers picked up the beep beep signal of his radio tracker. It was circling the shepherdess and her herd, in what seemed to be a predator formation. Nevertheless, the rumble of bear paws and massive swipe never came, although they found the rotting head of an attacked sheep the next day.
It’s said that Pyros killed 50 ewes per year until 2002, after which his mysterious disappearance took place. Pyros was known to skip hibernating sometimes, such as in winter 2001/02. His conquests were many, beginning with his fellow Slovenian bear Zika in 1997, a coupling which produced Kouki the male. The same year, he got together with Melles the Slovenian bear and produced Boutxy the male and Caramelles the female. While he often pinched livestock, Pyros was lucky to never get a taste for garbage and become a “problem bear”, which usually makes euthanisation inevitable.
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