Thanks to greater legal protection, bears restore and recolonize landscapes such as the Alps and Pyrenees. The challenge now is to cope with the coexistence of humans and predators, as brown bears prey on livestock, raid hives, and sometimes pose a threat to humans.
In Romania, where about 6, 000 bears live, they sometimes penetrate villages, small and large cities. And they can maim or kill people, with brown bears causing a large number of human deaths in 2019.
Humans are also a problem for bears. "We observe large predators that often return to landscapes dominated by humans, and see that this is a problem for many of the predators themselves, " said Professor Thomas Muller, an expert on animal movement at the Senkenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt, Germany.
Teenage bears can usually suffer high mortality, for example, due to traffic accidents.
Professor Muller said understanding the behavior of predators is one way to help resolve the conflict between humans and animals.
Movement
According to Dr. Ann Hertel, who studies the behavior of the bear in Professor Mueller’s group, this needs to be done on an individual level. As part of her doctoral dissertation at the Norwegian University of Natural Sciences, she tracked the movements of bears in Swedish forests, studying how they get food, avoid people and choose places to live.
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By tracking 46 adult brown bears, she identified six factors that determine the behavior of the bears: the distance they cover during the day, the distance between where they started and where they ended every day, their preferences for moving at night or day, and also whether they like or avoid open areas, including roads, swamps and forest glades.
"We found that the behavior of the bears is stable, some of them are more active during the daytime, and some choose a habitat closer to the road or a more open habitat, such as swamps and deforestation, " said Dr. Hertel. "Bears are very different from "Nocturnal bears tend to be fairly sedentary, while others that are more active in the daytime move a lot."
Predators
Swedish bears feed mainly on wild berries, but some of them consume more meat while hunting young moose. Dr. Hertel determines which bears eat more meat by studying the chemical signature in the collected hair. “Our next step is to find out if carnivores are a trait that can be learned from their mother, ” she said.
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Hunting
Romania has traditionally allowed bear hunting, but when it joined the EU in 2007, bears became a protected species. Hunting was completely banned in 2016, but it is difficult to say what impact this had on the bear population, since there is no data available.
Forest activity has increased since the country joined the EU, and some believe that unrest forces bears to seek food in the villages. But Dr. Salvatori first saw bears that were eaten from city dumps almost two decades ago, when she conducted doctoral studies in the Carpathians.
While proponents of hunting emphasize conflicts between bears and humans, Dr. Salvatori says that in rural areas, attitudes toward bears are not negative.
