Bears on the increase in France
I have just spent 3 days in the Asturias region of Spain, part of the Cantabrian mountain chain that runs a little inland from the northern Atlantic coast. Based in the Parque Natural de Somiedo our guide Marcos has a dual role of working with the www.fundacionOsoPardo.org (Brown Bear Foundation) and also with a reputable tour organisation www.wildwatchingspain.com with whom I have made a wolf tour in the past. You can sign up for a day trip, but this is risky, the weather in a high mountainous area can be misty, wet and cool, as was our last day, and can easily pass with no new sightings for us, despite many hours of scanning with binoculars and telescopes.
However on the first two days we were lucky. The first morning we sat on a hillside searching across the valley near the central town of Somiedo, and were rewarded with a brief sighting, so brief that I saw nothing more than a glimpse of brown disappearing into a wood. Bears, like bear watchers, take siestas in the middle of the day, and so we joined up again after 18.00 and were driving up a windy road to another potential site when we came across 2 cars already stopped watching a young male browsing on grass (which is a large part of their diet when the emerge from hibernation in Spring), but merely 40 metres away from where we stopped.
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In truth this was a disturbing sighting, this foolish young bear should not have been so close to the road and should have rapidly run away from the human beings photographing and watching. Marcos allowed us a few minutes, and having asked the other people to leave – which wasn’t really going to happen on public road – called the park ranger on his phone who arrived and took over the situation as we left. There is obvious danger in this situation both to the bear and to people. If the bear is allowed to become habituated to human presence in this way it will lose its fear of traffic on roads and, being mainly nocturnal, accidents can happen. Also, in their understandable excitement, people may be tempted to get too near to a dangerous animal, a large male upright measures up to 2.20 metres and can run faster than a human being if provoked, weighs 300 kilograms - and can climb trees. As with many animals it is the females guarding their cubs that are the most dangerous, and recently a hunter in the Ariège in France came between a mother and cub, was mauled, and shot dead the bear. The hunting federation had been warned in advance of the bear’s presence (some of the bears in France are located by GPS collars) and the hunt was illegal, and so there is a court case against the Federation de Chasse concerned.
Nevertheless it was wonderful to see such a beautiful animal. Next day we visited another valley, and were alerted by a friend of our guide to a female with its two yearling cubs (born about 16 months before) on the opposite hillside. We watched from about 500 metres as they climbed the rocks and eventually disappeared over the crest; soon she will leave them and mate again, in fact the males may try to kill the young cubs if it believes they are not his and some fearsome battles take place between protective mothers and males. If he succeeds in separating the cubs from their mother she is likely to come into oestrus (en chaleur). The hope being that the separated adolescents are mature enough to lead an independent life, keep out of trouble, until they too are ready to find a mate. The life expectancy is 25-30 years.
You would be very lucky to see a bear in France at the moment, 2023. There is an association, paysdelours.com that has worked very hard for the last 30 years to re-establish the historic population in the Pyrenees which was hunted to quasi-extinction in the latter half on the 20th century. The population in 2022 was at least 76 brown bears, some on the Spanish side of the border, and this number has been increasing every year by just over 11% since 2006, which is what is to be expected for a small population in a very large area, there being plenty of room for young bears to find and keep a territory. They are mainly herbivores, unlike similar species that exist in harsher climates.
Amongst other actions the association takes legal action if this protected species is endangered, proposes measures of protection to minimize any threat to the domestic livestock in the mountains, and educate children and adults so that people can coexist with these magnificent animals.
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