| 1 | Scottish laird plans bear revival |
What do you do when you’re loaded with millions of pounds and have plenty of time on your hands? Concoct a grand plan to bring bears back to British soil, of course. Paul Lister is the laird of Alladale estate, 60 miles north-west of the Scottish city of Inverness. He’s the heir for the successful MFI company, which sells flatpacks, and in October 2013, he announced his intention to create a 20,000 hectare wilderness area in the Highlands. His goal was to introduce 2 packs of 10 wolves and a dozen bears within 3 years. It would “change the landscape for the benefit of nature”, he announced.
Politicians and Ramblers Scotland reacted angrily. They argued that innocent hillwalkers would have to watch their step, and that bears and wolves were wiped out for a good reason in the first place. But Lister announced plans for a feasibility study in 2014.
At the time, Scottish Wildlife Trust was busy reintroducing beavers to Scotland in Argyll, and Lister hoped to ride the rewilding momentum. “If you don’t have an ideal to die for you have nothing to live for,” he said.
His model was the game reserves of South Africa, and he hoped that the reserve would attract 20,000 visitors a year with accommodation for 80 visitors to sleep overnight in. As of 2021, there are no bears roaming the Scottish countryside yet. Given the success of Papillon in escaping from bear sanctuaries in Italy, that might be for the best.
| 2 | Russian drug bears |
Many animals have been observed getting high on drugs in the animal kingdom, from dolphins seeking out puffer fish, to sheep running wild after gobbling up magic mushrooms in a field in Scotland. With bears, the substance of choice is apparently aviation fuel.
Over in the Kronotsky nature reserve of Russia’s far east, Igor Shpilenok photographed several bears sniffing loose cans that had been lying around, taking deep breaths for minutes at a time. They carved out shallow holes in the snow, and laid back in a state of Nirvana before passing out. The bears were getting so addicted that some of them stalked helicopters and waited for takeoff, hoping to lick up the fuel traces that fell onto the hard soil. The cans contained kerosine and gasoline and according to Shpilenok, this went on for 7 months.
The reserve is Unesco World Heritage site, but the fuel cans weren’t pollution – they were necessary to keep the ranger huts up and running. Occasionally though, the workers wouldn’t take them in fast enough. Other bears spent minutes sniffing at and manhandling the empty discarded cans. A female bear called Suzemka was one of the most heavily addicted, turning up regularly.
The Kronotsky Nature Reserve is home to the Kamchatkan brown bear, the largest subspecies after Kodiak bears. Like Kodiak Island, the Kamchatka peninsula is particularly rich in salmon, the bear’s favourite food.
| 3 | Soup-snatching Russian bears |
This bear incident is bone-chilling for all lovers of soup out there. It took place in the village of Ust-Ilimsk, in the Russian region of Irkutsk, to the north of China and 5 time zones east of Moscow. A Siberian couple were sleeping in a makeshift bedroom in their sauna hut, while repairs were carried out to the main house. Earlier, they had cooked some borscht, a traditional Siberian soup which mixed beetroot with meat, and left it to cool in a pan on their verandah cooker.
At midnight, they were startled awake by loud noises. Peering through the window, they noticed a bear on the verandah gobbling down their soup, their pride and joy. They phoned the manager of their residence, who himself phoned the police, who turned up quickly and fired loud shots into the air. But it was too late – the soup was all gone. With its work done, the bear fled into the woods. Except for the soup, nobody was hurt, including the bear, but the couple noticed a smashed window which bore all the signs of bear paw handiwork.
The bear was a messy eater as well, with bright red soup spilled all over the rings of their verandah cooker. In response, the police implored local citizens to store their homemade food safely. On an ominous note for the neighbourhood, many Olympic athletes have been swearing lately that beetroot gives them superstrength.
| 4 | Bear throws man off cliff |
Yusuf Alchagirov thought it would be a normal day farming raspberries. The 80 year old Russian was tending to his farm in the small region of Kabardino-Balkaria in Russia’s south, when he noticed a brown mass of fur shift from its hiding place behind a tree. The bear’s head was “a great watermelon”, and at first, Alchagirov ran way, but the bear caught up at blinding speed.
Relying on pure instinct, Alchagirov tossed his jacket over the bear’s face to act as a muzzle and drew a knife, but the bear’s aggression was too much to handle. Summoning all his Siberian strength, Alchagirov clasped down on the bear’s jaws. Soon, he was pinned to the floor, and Alchagirov remembered his teachings and delivered a hard punch to the bear’s nose. ‘The bear’s nose is very sensitive”, he later explained.
At this point, a glimmer of hope must have entered his mind, and he pressed home the advantage with a headbutt. But seconds later, Yusuf Alchagirov was flying off a cliff. The bear had grown tired of the fight and tossed him away like a rag doll.
Advantage bear, but whether he won the fight depends on your definition of a win. Because three days later, Alchagirov was sitting in a hospital bed with a smile on his face. He had four broken ribs, deep teeth marks, and bruises, but he was alive and well. “It would have killed me if I’d chickened out,” the farmer said. Friends had found him at the bottom of the cliff seven hours later, after he failed to return from the farm. No update on the bear was given.
| 5 | 1 week of bear horror |
This headline was a mixture of black bear and grizzly antics. It concerned a rising fear in America that bearmageddon was imminent, after 6 terrifying bear attacks occurred in quick succession in August 2013. The first happened in north Michigan when 12 year old Abby Wetherell was jogging on a local trail, before a black bear chased after her for no good reason. She tried to play dead, but the demented bear slashed her on the thigh, and only fled when her father and neighbour arrived.
On the same day, August 15th, two Yellowstone hikers felt a sinking feeling as two small grizzly cubs came strolling towards them. Sure enough, a mother grizzly burst out of the bushes and slashed one man on the backside. His two companions whipped out their bear spray cans and saved his bacon, but the next Saturday, two habitat researchers were assaulted after accidentally waking up a sleeping grizzly in Idaho. On August 17th, a hunter survived for 36 hours in the Alaskan wilderness with severe blood loss, after a savage grizzly mauling.
All 6 victims survived, but bear panic swelled to insane proportions, with fears that they’d been playing dumb for a thousand long years and were now revealing their true colours. But there was no “story”, said the authorities: bear attacks always tend to rise during fall. The angry mother grizzly wasn’t executed, as she was deemed to have been defending her cubs. Ultimately, Washington DC was still controlled by humans as of 2014.
| 6 | Marsican bear clone |
The Marsican brown bear might be the most endangered subspecies in the world. It’s an Italian bear, but unlike the majority, who reside in the Trentino region of Italy’s alpine north, Marsican bears live in the Abruzzo National Park of Italy’s centre. There’s only 40 left in the wild, which is why in 2013, genetic scientist Pasqualino Loi announced a grand plan to save the species through cloning. He proposed similar methods to the famous Dolly the Sheep from 1994: a somatic cell nucleus implanted into an enucleated ovary, in a similar surrogate mother. Pasqualino Loi’s ingenious idea was to use a large species of dog like a Saint Bernard or Schnauer. This dog would give birth to a whole litter of Marsican bears, preferably six to eight.
Opponents called the plan madness, arguing that low genetic diversity was a problem for Marsican brown bears going forward and that cloning would just create thousands of identical ones. Loi argued that this was better than no bears at all.
Loi was previously involved with the cloning of a wild Mouflon sheep in 2001, which died within six months of birth. He had been campaigning for a decade to collect DNA samples from endangered wild animals, to make cloning projects possible once technology had advanced far enough.
Loi promised to apply to the Italian Minister of Environment for permission, but as of 2021, there are no Saint Bernards pregnant with grizzly bears yet.
| 7 | Yeti mystery twists and turns |
In years gone by, the supposed hairs of yeti have been confirmed in a lab to come from Tibetan blue bears and Himalayan goats alike. However, nobody has proven that yetis don’t exist, and in 2013, a British scientist working for Oxford University dropped a bombshell. Bryan Sykes had issued a global call for yeti or sasquatch hairs in 2012, and now, he revealed his findings: an extraordinary genetic similarity between two “yeti” hairs and the jaws of an ancient polar bear which dated back to 100,000 years ago.
This jawbone came from the earliest stages of polar bear evolution, when they diverged from brown bears, a period of volatility where the subspecies were being mixed around like a salt shaker. His analysis centred on two hairs, with the first coming from Ladakh in northern India, from the mummified remains of a creature shot by a hunter in the early 1970s. The second was from 800 miles further east in Bhutan, a single hair found by yeti enthusiasts in a forest in the early 00s.
Other scientists called for more detailed genetic analysis, but other scientists were optimistic, speculating that an ancient polar-brown bear hybrid could survive, unnoticed, in the Himalayan mountains today. It could be similar to 100,000 years ago, or it could have evolved into a towering, shaggy, yeti-like form. “The next thing is go there and find one,” Sykes told the media.
| 8 | Grizzlies bounce back in southwest Alberta |
Alberta, Canada has only a fraction of the grizzly bears of British Columbia or Yukon, but as of 2020, they still number a healthy 200. The Banff area has famous bear characters such as The Boss and Split Lip, complete with mugs and T-shirts for sale in gift shops. Tourists go hiking near Banff jut to witness these celebrity bears, but in May 2013, it was revealed that grizzly numbers were steadily rising in the far southwest of Alberta as well. They had been gone from the area for 70 years, but it was previously a grizzly hotspot, and over the last decade, sightings in the prairies had grown more and more frequent.
Approximately 122 grizzlies now lived to the south of highway 3 near Pincher Creek, a kind of symbolic staging point for grizzlies. Locals had been insisting for years that a grizzly mob was taking over. Conservationists believed that the bears were heading north across the US border from Montana, perhaps fleeing the scene of a crime, but most likely migrating naturally. The town of Cardston had become a particular bear haven. 122 wasn’t a hard estimate, but the minimum number, based on DNA samples from hairs in the undergrowth.
That said, the rangers struck a note of caution. They pointed out that Alberta was still a risky bear habitat of heavy industry and jam-packed highways, dubbing it a “mortality sink” for grizzly bears.
| 9 | Swiss bear shot dead |
As the first bear on Swiss soil for 70 years, M13 was probably the most famous bear in Europe from 2011 onwards, but February 2013 saw the chilling news that M13 had been shot dead. He was a member of Italy’s 80-strong Trentino population who had strayed across the border, and announced his arrival when several sheep were found dead near the mountain region of Graubünden.
In October 2011, he was fitted with a radio collar, only to lose it in a collision with a train in Spring 2012, before being refitted in June 2012. He stuck to the Graubünden area, and the real problems started when M13 broke into a holiday home at the end of 2012 and robbed the food inside. He followed villagers in broad daylight, and seemed to have an unusually low fear of humans. Raiding villages had become ingrained in his behaviour, and even rubber bullets wouldn’t work.
M13 was awarded the official tag of “problem bear”. Biologists hoped that his spirit would dampen in hibernation, but it wasn’t to be. Mid-February 2013 saw M13 following two hikers into the village of Val Poschiavo, and then walking down the street as though he owned the place. A driver almost ran M13 over, at which point he bared his teeth and growled. After he was shot, the reaction was 90% hostile, and the WWF issued a statement saying it was “deeply disappointed”. It was rumoured that M13’s final crime was stealing potatoes.
| 10 | New Syrian brown bear cub |
Syrian brown bears are one of the rarer subspecies in the world, found mostly in Iran, Turkey and Iraq, with the occasional pawprint sighted in the winter snows of Syrian mountains. However, there’s plenty living in captivity, and one example is the Hollywild animal sanctuary of South Carolina.
From her massive weight gain, and the extra effort she’d spent digging a den that year, animal curator Jennifer DeCarranza was convinced that Giza the sow was pregnant. In early January, she spent every day kneeling by her den and listening intently. Her heart finally soared on January 16th when she heard the tell-tale noise of a bear cub asking for food.
On March 27th, the park announced the results of a competition to name her: Nygeff. Nearly 100 people submitted names, and so many voted for “Syri” that this was made her nickname. The park prepared for its first day of public viewing that weekend, with the aim that viewers could watch Nygeff at every stage of her development. Gerald Abraham, the man who invented the name, was given a free pass into the park. Nygeff also had a father called Ramses, and with Giza, he had also produced three offspring in early 2012, named Amalia, Malika, and Samra. Previously, Ramses and Giza were members of a travelling bear show.
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