BAD NEWS BEARS
Incidents of ursine unruliness on the increase from Tennessee to the Tatras Mountains
When ursine antics get out of hand
The year of 2021 is turning out to be a vintage one for bearrelated mayhem. Probably the most widely reported story in the UK was about two bears that broke out of their enclosure at Whipsnade Zoo, Bedfordshire, in May using a fallen tree. They then attacked a boar in a neighbouring paddock, leading to keepers having to shoot the bears before they were able to get into public areas. Tranquillisers were not used as they take too long to work and so could not be relied on to keep the public safe. Internationally, though, this was just the tip of the iceberg.
Also in May, in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, students from Jefferson County High School had to flee their pool party at the Chalet Village swimming pool when seven black bears decided to join in. In a video, shot by one of the students from a nearby building where they had taken refuge and posted to Facebook, the bears can be seen swimming in the pools, lounging at the poolside and wandering about the grounds.
In California another teen, 17-year-old Hayley Morinico, took a rather more confrontational approach to a bear invasion. Spotting a mother bear and two cubs on the garden wall in a stand-off with the family’s four barking dogs, Morinico rushed outside and shoved the bear back off the wall, causing it to flee. Bear experts said Morinico was lucky to be alive. “There is nothing more dangerous than a mother bear with her cubs,” said wildlife expert Ron Magill. Fortunately, Morinico ended up with just a sprained finger and a grazed knee as a result of the encounter, and said: “I didn’t know I had it in me to be honest… Who in their right mind pushes a bear?”
In June, in Arizona, bears caused disruption on two occasions by climbing electricity poles. In one incident, a bear caused the closure of Highway 191 after climbing a pole and lounging against electric cables while police and Arizona Fish and Game officials tried to coax it down. It eventually climbed down of its own accord and wandered back off into the wilderness. On the same day, in Willcox, another bear managed to close down the city’s electrical grid by climbing an electricity pole and getting tangled in the cables. The power was switched off and a linesman went up in a bucket lift and tried to poke the bear off the pole with an 8ft (2m) fibreglass rod. After grabbing and biting the rod, the bear freed itself and ran off into the desert.
In Coquitlam, Canada, the McQuillan family slept soundly as two juvenile black bears ransacked the family’s grey Chevy Tahoe at 3am, despite repeated efforts to contact them by neighbours and police. The bears had managed to open the driver’s and rear passenger door and systematically rummaged through the vehicle, which was parked on the McQuillan’s drive. Police believed the bears were attracted to food scattered around the child seat in the back of the vehicle by the McQuillan’s two-year-old son, Maverick. The animals were scared off by police without hurting anyone, leaving behind a wrecked child seat and a lingering smell of bear, described by Sean McQuillan, once he had finally woken up to survey the damage, as “like much thicker wet-dog smell”. “They absolutely used the handle,” he said, looking at how the bears had got into the unlocked car. “You can see a paw print on the corner of the driver’s side door.” Police said they had come across bears getting into cars before but had never seen two doing so at once.
Later in June, though, bears turned out to be far feistier. A brown bear found its way into Sapporo in northern Japan and roamed the streets for eight hours, attacking a woman in her 80s, a man in his 70s and another in his 40s who suffered serious injuries to his chest, back and limbs. The bear then found its way to the Ground Self-Defence Force’s Camp Okadama, where it attacked the soldier on gate duty, leaving him with cuts to his chest and stomach, after which it ran across the camp and into the neighbouring airport, causing flights to be grounded. It then fled into the surrounding forest, where it was shot by local hunters. Sapporo city environmental department said the bear’s presence in town was a surprise and officials were investigating how the animal got there.
In the same month, Slovakia recorded its first fatal bear attack in more than a century. The 57-yearold victim went missing after going for a walk in the forest near the village of Liptovska Luzna in the Low Tatras mountains. Matej Bodor, a friend of the unnamed victim, said: “We found him lying on his stomach beside a trail. He had been bitten in his throat... in his belly, in his ribs.” Bears are now common in the Slovak mountains, with numbers growing to an estimated 2,760 from a low of around 900 20 years ago. Slovakia’s environment ministry said there had been five bear attacks in the last year, none of them fatal, and that officials had taken DNA samples to identify the killer brown bear. June also saw the first bear attack in northern Spain for 30 years. A 75-year-old woman was mauled near Cagnas del Narcea while out walking with friends. The animal hit her in the face with a front claw then tried to drag her away before her companions managed to chase it off. The victim was taken to hospital with facial injuries and a broken pelvis. The mayor said that there hadn’t been an attack in the area for many years but that bears were “getting closer”.
However, it hasn’t all been going the bears’ way. In May, environmental groups accused Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein, a member of Liechtenstein’s royal family, of shooting and killing the largest bear in Romania. The prince, who lives in Austria, had been given permission to shoot a female bear that had been causing damage to farms, paying £6,000 for the privilege. Instead, he shot Arthur, a 17-year-old bear that lived deep in the forest and did not go near human habitations. Gabriel Paun of the Romanian environmental organisation said that Arthur was the largest bear in Romania and probably the largest living in the European Union, adding that it was “clear that the prince did not come to solve the problem of the locals but to kill the bear and take home the biggest trophy to hang it on the wall… ”
Finally, closer to home, police seeking a man in Derbyshire who was in breach of the conditions of his electronic tag ended up playing “a game of hide and seek” after the suspect ran away from them and locked himself in a house. Officers combed the premises, eventually finding their suspect hiding under a giant teddy bear. The man was arrested, and officers joked on Twitter that the bear remained in custody “for assisting an offender”. Guardian, 5 May; D.Express, 22 May; BoingBoing.net, 27 May; Sun 1 June; Eve. Standard, 2 June; dailymail.com, 2 June; Newsweek, 10 June; [AP] 10 June; BBC News, 11 June; cbc.ca/news, 11 Jun; Guardian, 16 June; Irish Examiner, 18 June 2021.