ONE MAN’S RUBBISH IS ANOTHER BEAR’S BONANZA AS STEPHEN STARR FOUND OUT IN SARIKAMIS, TURKEY.
Most of eastern Turkey is a beautiful mix of stunning mountains and empty, open steppe. But where I am right now it stinks. In the pitch black of night, our creaking SUV has barely made it across the railway track and now faces combat with mounds of wet rubbish. This is the Sarikamis dump in Kars province, Turkey, where I’ve come, not for a spot of recycling but to see brown bears before they hibernate for the winter.
Two tiny lights appear in the headlights, then two more, moving. It’s the glowing eyes of a female and her cub and, 20m to our left, a pair of wild boar is rummaging through plastic bags. In my mind I recall my childhood and a scene from The Jungle
Book – animals of all kinds just hanging out and not eating each other – before a chilly breeze blows the scent of foulsmelling rubbish through the jeep again. For a moment I had half expected the bears and boars to strike up a conversation.
Beyond this scene, on the other side of a hill, feral dogs bark furiously, but the wild animals aren’t unduly worried. And nothing takes any much notice of us, or our headlamps.
There are few brown bears in Turkey, but these are surely the laziest. Recently, at least 10 have been recorded staying close to the dump all year round. Another six occupying the same area are now known to migrate between breeding and feeding territories – a first for the species.
The new findings by academics and a local conservation group called KuzeyDoga show that bears have been migrating between forests close to the dump outside Sarikamis where they hibernate, and the eastern Kaçkar mountains along the Georgian border, 249km to the north.
In the spring the bears head away from the town to look for food and to link up with potential mates, some of whom travel from Georgia; in late summer they return south to Sarikamis, where they know they can pig out on a ready supply of discarded vegetables and bones at the landfill site. This will prepare them for winter when temperatures can reach minus 35 degrees Celsius.
While there’s nothing new about bears hanging out around rubbish dumps, the research shows the bears’ behaviour is increasingly being shaped by human activity.
The upside is that conservationists, together with the Turkish authorities, are planning to establish a wildlife corridor that will see the bears’ migration route fall inside a protected area.
What will this mean for the bears who’ve decided to take up permanent residence at the dump? With local authorities planning to close the site, they may have little choice but to join in the migration north.
The alternative is that the bears may head for the nearest homes in search of food – a troubling prospect for all concerned.
THERE ARE FEW BROWN BEARS IN TURKEY BUT THESE ARE SURELY THE LAZIEST. AT LEAST 10 HAVE BEEN RECORDED CLOSE TO THE DUMP.