Brown Bears Missing in Alps

By VERONIKA OLEKSYN – Dec 4, 2007

VIENNA, Austria (AP) — First there was the fuss over a bear called Bruno, killed by German sharpshooters after he wandered across the border from Italy. Now, on the Austrian side of the same Alpine range, officials are investigating the disappearance of about 20 brown bears.

A joint investigation by Austrian authorities, environmentalists and hunters was launched this past summer after the local chapter of the World Wide Fund For Nature raised the alarm about the vanishing bears.

The organization, which keeps tabs on bears through genetic analyses of fur and droppings, began noticing a decline in the brown bear population in the Austrian Alps in 2000 but it was only this year that conservationists concluded that their numbers had fallen so sharply.

Christoph Walder, who heads WWF-Austria's brown bear project, said experts recently found that, of the approximately 30 bears born in the Northern Limestone Alps in roughly the past two decades, about 20 have disappeared without a trace.

He said there were three possible explanations.

"Either the bears died naturally, or they wandered off somewhere, or something abnormal happened — we can't exclude illegal action," he said, raising the possibility they were killed.

There are believed to be only three or four bears in the area, considered the core local habitat of the animals that can weigh up to 770 pounds.

The other bears that are accounted for died naturally or were legally shot because they were a threat to humans; one, an orphan, was taken to a zoo and later put down because of an illness.

Bears are rare in Austria. Besides those in the Northern Limestone Alps, about six to eight are believed to frequent the southern province of Carinthia, although most of those probably come from neighboring Slovenia and occasionally cross the border, Walder said.

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