Aggressiveness is not a typical trait of bears. Nevertheless, one should avoid females with cubs at foot. They could mistake human curiosity for an attack.
Beehives: Everyone knows that bears have a fondness for honey. Electric fencing around beehives can spoil their appetite.
Baiting places are basically snack bars for bears. In Eastern Europe such sites are stocked with offal, horse and cattle cadavers, and maize. They fulfill two functions: They attract bears away from livestock and crops, and they are a proven method to keep bears virtually 'on call' for hunters.
Cave bear: This was the name given to a bear the size of the Grizzly, and almost a vegetarian, the bones of which were found in a cave in Austria. This large bear species may have fallen victim to inbreeding (see below). The small populations were so limited genetically that they could not adapt to the changed climate in the following ice age, resulting in their extinction.
Circus: Bears are smart and learn fast. But if it comes to the crunch they also know they are stronger. The trained dancing bear of yesteryear was brutally forced into submission with muzzles, nose-rings and glowing hot irons; modern animal trainers do not use force but knowledge - they have to know their 'partners' inside out as the bears' indecipherable facial expression does not reveal its temper.
Corridor: If bears' home ranges begin to overlap too much they start to migrate on ancient routes. Nowadays these routes are often devoid of forests and severed by roads. If it was possible to designate and protect corridors along these invisible migration routes the bears' return to the Alps would be less of an idealistic idea. Some of the 'wanderers' have already settled in Austria; skillful planning could possibly also guide them to Friaul and Southern Tyrol.
Cover is as important to bears as it is to other shy wild species. A good 'bear forest' should contain much undergrowth to protect the animals from unwanted attention. For bears the humans have always been trouble-makers.
Distribution: Brown bears once inhabited the entire northern hemisphere from the extremely dry mountain ranges in Iran to the Arctic tundras. Even North Africa once had bears. Today this huge range has shrunken considerably and in the densely settled Europe it is limited to small isolated pockets.
Food selection is a bit of a misnomer since bears can not afford to be picky. They eat what they can find: roots, berries, fruit, resin, juicy plant stems, honeycombs, insect larvae, nests of mice or carrion. Once they make a good find they like to indulge themselves, sticking to the same item, such as salmon or berries.
Grizzly: The bear is often regarded as a bloodthirsty beast. It seems that this bad reputation has come from the North American Brown bear, the Grizzly. The latter is less shy and much more aggressive than the European subspecies. Biologists suspect that the Grizzly acquired its aggressiveness in the treeless cold steppes of the ice age in order to be able to defend its young from Smilodon and Cave lion attacks.
Hunting for bears has had positive and negative impacts on populations. On the one hand royalties who were fond of hunting, such as the Emperor Maximilian of Austria, protected wild bears from angry farmers, and even today the future for Eastern European bears is relatively bright since they attract foreign hunters who pay in hard western currencies. On the other hand the direct persecution has marginalised bears all over Europe.
Inbreeding: If closely related organisms constantly mate amongst each other, uniform races with limited adaptability result. While this is a general practice employed in the breeding of plants and animals, it is a grave danger to wild populations. Genetic defects can quickly spread as a result of inbreeding, and populations with a narrow genetic base are not sufficiently resilient to be able to adapt to changing environmental conditions.
Loners: Under most circumstances, brown bears live as lone individuals. However, young siblings often keep together long after they have separated from their mothers. Despite their propensity for a solitary existence, brown bears may come from far away to congregate where food is abundant, such as at salmon streams or sites with plentiful fruit.
Myths and legends: Bears have never been ordinary prey. Ancient hunters must have suffered considerable torment when eating an animal that moved like a human and appeared to possess demonic powers. Elaborate rituals were devised to appease the spirits. The North American Sioux Indians cloaked themselves in the bear's hide after a successful kill and danced for days in order to make peace with the bear's spirit. The Scandinavian Laplanders pieced all the bones of their prey back together to a full skeleton which was then buried. The Asian Gilyak people held funeral services in honour of the killed bears, just as if a beloved relative had died. And in our society babies are often placed on polar bear hides when it comes to a photo shoot.
Orchards are hard for bears to resist, provided the protective forest cover is not too far away. However, humans are not too fond of an intruder literarily harvesting the fruit of their labour. This is why for the longest time bears were regarded as pests.
Only in recent times has it been possible to defuse this conflict through compensatory payments in regions where bears occur. Bear lovers in the Trentino province have even rented an orchard for only one purpose - to feed hungry bears.
Parasites torture bears just like any other wild animal. But once a year the bears use a very effective remedy: since they don't eat anything at all during their months of winter rest the intestinal parasites starve to death and are passed by their hosts in early winter.
Red Data Book: The Red Data Book is a list of endangered species, which is neither final nor complete. Every country has its own Red Data Book and by rights they should be brought up to date every single year. The Brown bear as a species is not in immediate danger but in the Red Data Books of Germany and Switzerland it has long been included as "extinct" while in Italy and Austria it ranks as "threatened with extinction". This situation is both undesirable and unnecessary.
Reproduction: For the longest time the bears' gestation period remained a mystery since any length from six to nine month was being recorded. The reason is that the fertilised eggs are subject to a developmental pause of varying length. This embryo dormancy synchronizes the births which despite the long mating season always occur in the December/January period when the females are in their winter resting places. At birth, the cubs are blind, completely helpless and smaller than guinea pigs.
Senses: Bears would appear to be walking receptacles for all kinds of sensory perceptions: They can smell carrion from a distance of 19 kilometers, they can hear human voices from 270 meters away and see the smallest movement from the corners of their eyes. On that topic: if one was to look a bear right into the eyes this would be understood as an invitation to do battle.
Tameness: There is no denial - it is simply fascinating if a wild animal, especially one as large and strong as a bear, overcomes its shy nature and seeks out people. However, it is easy to overlook that at best the bear regards us as a source of food, and at worst as weaklings who can not even defend their own food. And if the one of lower rank does not willingly give up his food a self-confident bear might well use force to take if off him. This is why bears must remain wild animals!
Tourism in a region inhabited by bears requires a lot of tact. It would be very wrong to get bears used to human presence by feeding them for show, such as was done in the United States and in Czechoslovakia for a while. Bears must remain shy. And they must be able to 'count' on hikers to generally stay on the trails. Once the bears learn that humans are neither food providers nor a threat, there is no danger of clashes. This has been shown in the Trentino province and the Abruzzi mountains for times immemorial.
Ursus arctos is the Latin name for the Brown bear, but in reality there is no such thing as THE Brown bear. A number of different subspecies occur in Europe, Asia, and North America. The largest Alaskan bears are three meters in length and weigh three quarters of a metric tonne, whilst the smallest Alpine bears hardly reach the 100 kg mark. By the way, the name "Ursula" is Latin for 'little bear'.
Winter rest period: In the autumn the bears feed so much that they can put down a layer of fat which can comprise as much as one third of their entire bodyweight. They live on this fat depot while they doze in their winter resting places. Their metabolism slows down and their body temperatures drops in order to save energy and to ensure that the fat reserves will last for four to five months until the Spring.
Yellowstone: The Yellowstone National Park is home to an isolated population of the North American Brown bear or Grizzly. The national park is almost 9000 square kilometers in size but still it is too small to sustain the population in the long term. In order to ensure their continued existence a large area around the park has to be integrated into the protection efforts. The nature reserves in the Alps are much smaller than the Yellowstone National Park; their role in protecting the Brown bear is subordinate.
