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BEARS

Video: Family of Pyrenean bears emerges from hibernation in time for spring

A family of brown bears has been caught on camera in the Pyrenees in a video which shows them scratching their backs on a tree trunk and climbing in the mountains.

Published: 20 April 2018 16:07 CEST
Video: Family of Pyrenean bears emerges from hibernation in time for spring
Photo: Piros Life/Screenshot
Birds and lambs might be what comes to mind when you think of spring.
 
But in the Pyrenees mountains in southern France, a family of brown bears has been spotted apparently emerging from hibernation as the temperatures start to rise.
 
A video published by Catalan bear protection group Piros Life shows a mother bear and two cubs at the Alt Pirineau natural park, close to the border between France and Spain.
 
Captured both during the day and at night-time, the bears are seen scratching their backs on the tree trunk as well as climbing up it.  
 
 
In a blog post, Piros Life said: “With rising temperatures, usually around March, the first evidence of movements of those animals begin to be observed. The first to leave the cave are adult males, followed by adult females. Finally, the females leave with puppies.”
 
Pyrenean bears are a sensitive subject in France, as farmers complain they attack their livestock. Last July, around 200 sheep fell to their deaths in the Spanish Pyrenees, apparently frightened by a bear. 
 
Bears were reintroduced into the Pyrenees from Slovenia in the 1990s, after hunting forced them to the brink of extinction.
 
In March, a judge in Toulouse, southern France, ordered the French state to pay €8,750 to two bear protection charities for failing to do enough to protect bears in the Pyrenees.
 

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HUNTING

Spanish conservationists lament ‘dark day’ as two brown bears shot by hunters

Two of Spain’s protected brown bears have been shot dead by hunters in separate incidents during wild boar hunts on Sunday, striking a blow to a conservation programme that has seen the population grow from near extinction.

Published: 30 November 2020 17:10 CET
Spanish conservationists lament 'dark day' as two brown bears shot by hunters
The bear Sarousse pictured here was shot dead by a boar hunter.

One adult female bear was shot dead by accident after reportedly being mistaken for a wild boar by a hunter in a conservation zone in the Palentina mountains near the town of Ventanilla in Castilla y Leon on Sunday lunchtime.

Another female bear, known as Sarousse, was killed apparently in self-defence by a hunter who disturbed the animal while hunting for wild boar in the Bardaji valley in the Robagorza region of the Spanish Pyrenees.  

The hunter responsible told police that he had no choice but to shoot the bear as it approached him in an “aggressive manner” when it was disturbed by dogs flushing out boar during the hunt.

Sarousse was a 21-year-old bear that had been captured in Slovenia and re-released into the wild on the French side of the Pyrenees in 2006 in a conservation programme aimed at boosting a population that was facing extinction.

Since 2010 she had established a territory on the Spanish side of the mountain range but was described by one local newspaper in Aragon, El Heraldo, as “a lonely bear who unfortunately was of little use to the bear population as she bore no cubs and lived an isolated life in the Turbón massif, far from other concentrations of bear popultions in the region”.

She is thought to have been responsible for frequent raids on local farms where she killed at least four sheep this year and raided at least ten beehives, the newspaper reported. 

Investigations into both deaths have been opened by Se`rona, the wildlife unit of the Guardia Civil.

The deaths raised questions over the issuing of hunting licences within conservation habitats which are known to be home to the endangered species.

A tweet from the Oso Pardo Foundation lamented that it was “a dark day” for the conservation of the  Brown Bears which in 2019 were thought to numberaround 330 bears in the Cantabrian Mountains and more than 50 in the Pyrenees.

 

Two other brown bears have been killed this year. the cadavre of one male named Cachou was found at the bottom of a cliff in the Aran valley in Catalonia, and a man was arrested earlier in November after an investigation determined that the animal had in fact been poisoned.

While in France in June, the body of a bear that had been shot was discovered in Ariège. 

But on a happy note, six new litters were recorded this spring with a total of 12 bear cubs. 

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