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BEARS

Shepherds on French-Spanish border fear that bears will strike again

As day breaks over the Pyrenees mountains, hundreds of sheep scuttle up a valley, the clanging of their neck bells echoing around the hills that fringe the French-Spanish border.

Shepherds on French-Spanish border fear that bears will strike again
Shepherds in the French-Spanish border village of Larrau. All photos: AFP

For generations, shepherds in the region have steered sheep up the mountains in summer to graze on higher pastures, against breathtaking backdrops of sheer precipices and plunging valleys.

But the arrival last year of two more bears – brought over from Slovenia to boost the area's tiny bear population – has made the herdsmen jittery.

VIDEO French farmers v wolves and bears in battle for their livelihoods

Clouding the bucolic scenes of sheep grazing in mountain meadows is the fear that the bears, one of whom has already killed several sheep in the region, will strike again.

“Before we took the sheep up, there was an uneasy atmosphere in the valley,” Nicolas Bengoechea, part of a father-and-son shepherd team that keeps watch over a flock of 1,500 sheep, told AFP. 

France's growing bear population, like its burgeoning wolf population, is a source of tension in mountainous areas, pitting farmers against the authorities and animal rights activists.

The state began reintroducing brown bears from Slovenia about 20 years ago in a bid to increase numbers of the omnivorous mammals, which had been hunted to near extinction.

Last October, two female bears were helicoptered into the western Pyrenees, bringing the total bear population in the French Pyrenees to an estimated 40, up from just five in 1996. 

Since then, one of the bears has given birth to two cubs.

The new arrivals received a hostile reception, with farmers blocking roads and scattering bloody sheep remains in front of a local town hall in protest.

“When I saw the bear in that cage in October, I knew that eight months later, it would be on my farm,” said Nicolas.

The young shepherd's grim prediction came true when one of the bears, Claverina, killed one of his sheep and sent the rest bolting into the distance on the family's enclosed meadow in April in the border village of Larrau.

Local authorities later told Nicolas he had been a victim of “bear damage”, with Claverina's GPS collar revealing her to be the culprit.

With Claverina having already killed eight sheep on the Spanish side of the border in May, shepherds are sleeping fitfully.

From around 30 huts dotted across the Iraty border area, shepherds take turns watching over the 80,000 sheep and cattle that spend June September mowing the mountain pastures as part of the summer migration known as the “transhumance”.

Nicolas and father Jean-Marc's perch are grassy hills at the foot of the Pic d'Orhy mountain, 1,300 metres above sea level.

While the French government compensates farmers affected by bear attacks and subsidises the pay of extra shepherds, its recommendation to keep sheep locked up in pens overnight would spell the death of transhumance, said Jean-Marc.

“Putting 1,500 sheep in enclosures would mean bringing them down (from the mountain) every day. It would be hell,” Jean-Marc said.

The farmer also voices “strong doubts” about the ability of enclosures to prevent bear attacks. 

“It doesn't work in Ariege, so I can't see why it would work here”, he said in his sing-song southwestern French accent, referring to a region 280km east of Larrau which has been the scene of repeated bear attacks.

In June, more than 250 sheep plunged off a cliff to their deaths after apparently being chased by a bear.

A similar incident last month, in which 61 sheep fell off a cliff, prompted local authorities to declare a low-level bear alert, allowing farmers to use lights and whistles to scare away the creatures. 

Farmers can also shoot but not kill bears if local authorities declare a high-level alert.

But for Nicolas, protecting flocks from bears is the responsibility of the state rather than farmers.

“I'm not going to be the one going out shooting bears. Who knows how it would react!”

If the bear population continues to climb, he said he will stop taking sheep up the mountains. 

“And then I'll no longer be a shepherd,” he said.

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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.

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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