HEBE: Bears, where are you?
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Where are you bears?
HEBE: Where are you bears?
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Bears, where are you?
HEBE: Bears, where are you?
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Deep in the forests of Transylvania in
Romania, Europe's largest population of brown bears still
roam freely. But what does that mean when a busy city like
Brașov sits right on their doorstep and when a family hike
in the Transylvanian forests becomes a search for bears? I'm
Rosie Holdsworth and you're listening to Wild Tales,
European Brown Bears.
HEBE: Goodness me, mummy
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Goodness me, Hebe.
So we're mixing things up today and doing things a little bit
differently because I'm interrupting my lovely holiday
in Transylvania in Romania to tell you a little bit about what
we're up to today. So I am with my lovely husband Rob and our
little girl Hebe. We are hiking in the Tampa Hills above Brașov
which is a really beautiful medieval town.
About three hours north of Bucharest, the capital, and we
are going to see if we can see some wildlife and hopefully spot
some signs of bears.
It's very beautiful November day, the sun's shining, the
leaves are crunching
HEBE: The bears of scared off by our bells.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And the bears are scared off by our bells.
That's my toddler on my back. So you can hear the bells that
we've brought with us and that's because bears don't like to be
surprised.
Nobody likes to be surprised but bears particularly dislike being
surprised. So we're staying safe by making lots of noise. Which
is easy when you've got a toddler and they like to sing as
you walk. But we'll keep looking. But when we were out
the other day we did see some bear tracks which were very
fresh from that morning. So we're hopeful that before we
have to go home we might see bears.
So what exactly are my family and I walking amongst? Csaba
Domokos is a biologist with a Romanian conservation charity
called Milvus Group and he spent more than 20 years working with
brown bears here in Transylvania. So he knows their
habits very well.
CSABA DOMOKOS: Brown bears in Europe are basically the largest
land predators. We call them large carnivores but they are in
fact omnivores.
It's a brown bear. But the name can be somewhat misleading
because brown bears' color can actually range from a bright
yellow to a shiny black. For example, here in Romania, among
the rural population, there are all kinds of myths about black
bears and all these other species.
And this is mainly because of this very wide range of colors
they can have. And also the very wide range of body sizes, just
as with people.
So we have like smaller bears and then we have... true
behemoths as well.
The more you go towards the north, their bodies get usually
bigger and bigger. But let's say a very big bear in Romania would
be something up to 400 kilograms or something like this. And that
animal is already very, very big.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: To give you some context, that's the
equivalent weight of five grown men.
CSABA DOMOKOS: They are incredibly strong animals, so
you cannot compare them really to anything else in nature, I
think.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: That includes their rather unusual shape.
CSABA DOMOKOS: They do have a shoulder hump and it's basically
made up mostly from muscle. They use these huge muscles, for
example, to turn over rocks to look for ants underneath them.
So bears have five fingers basically on each pole and each
of the fingers ends in a huge claw which then they use for
digging up stuff or they use them as precision tools for
example for opening clams and feeding on clams.
They are big, powerful animals. People see them usually and they
have this strange type of body and then they somehow assume
that it's a slow animal somehow, but they are incredibly fast.
They can easily reach up to 50 kilometers per hour. They can
basically outrun a racehorse. So it's really an unbelievable
animal.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: So with all of the incredible wildlife that
Transylvania has to offer, what is it about bears particularly
that has got me in bear fever and scuttling about in the
woods, desperate to see any signs of them? I mean, I've
always loved bears. They're one of my favourite animals.
It kind of goes back to childhood. We used to watch The
Jungle Book on repeat whenever we went to my granny and
grandpa's house. And I think Baloo the bear just was like the
character that kind of really chimed with me the most.
They're such big, charismatic, fascinating creatures. The fact
that they're still here and they're still doing their bear
thing minding their own business, bumbling about in the
woods.
It's just amazing when you think about the change that's happened
in some of these habitats and the pressures that those animals
are under, in what is quite a small area. Romania is not a
massive country but they're still here. They've carved out
their niche and they're being really really successful. So, I
would absolutely love to see them whilst we're here.
Which does make you wonder just how many bears are actually out
here.
CSABA DOMOKOS: The exact size of the Romanian bear population is
really a subject of hot debates for many years now. The official
numbers put this population around 10,000 individuals, but
actually a little bit above this. It's probably the biggest
national population of brown bears in Europe, actually.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: A massive population for a country of this
size. Romania was kind of Eastern Europe's last stronghold
for the brown bears. Due to conservation efforts and
protection, they've been able to spread back through the
Carpathians, out into other countries, and this is kind of
where the recovery of the European brown bear population
has started from.
But we're probably only about an hour out of the city centre of
Brașov, and there are bears here, so that's absolutely
incredible.
CSABA DOMOKOS: So in Romania, in reality, bears share their
habitats with people. People from Western Europe tend to
think of Romania as somehow like the land of wilderness, which in
a way it is.
Every single individual bear needs an area usually of several
hundred square kilometers. And if you think about it like that,
then there is actually not a lot of space left wild in Romania.
So, basically every bear here will eventually come into
contact with people and most of the individuals of the Romanian
bear population spend at least a few good months of their lives
each year close to cities and to villages.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: What are they for?
HEBE: Bears scared off by our bears, mommy.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: That's right, the bears are scared off by our
bears. We keep ourselves safe.
We're doing all the right things, making plenty of noise,
but it does raise another question. What are the bears
actually eating out here?
CSABA DOMOKOS: They are really carnivores that have adapted to
some degree to also eating plants.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Which is good news for me and my family.
CSABA DOMOKOS: They eat a lot of plants, but they also eat a lot
of insects, and then they also actively hunt, but they also
scavenge. Both animals that died of natural causes and the prey
of other carnivore species, because they share their
habitats with grey wolves and with Eurasian lynx. So whenever
they can, they will actually try and steal the prey of this other
species as well.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: When you're at the top of the food chain, you
can do that.
CSABA DOMOKOS: One of the most important diet items for brown
bears are ants, in a somewhat surprising way. And they eat
basically anthills with ants eggs and larvae and with dirt.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: But there's one thing that bears seem to
love more than anything else.
CSABA DOMOKOS: They actually do like honey a lot and they will
try to raid both wild bees and beekeeper's property as well and
they do raid them quite often.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: It's not just about having a sweet tooth.
CSABA DOMOKOS: Honey is extremely nutritious. It's
really high on calories and bears are basically machines
looking for a very high calorie intake, especially when they
start preparing for their winter sleep, they have to accumulate a
huge amount of fat to be able to live from it throughout the
winter.
There are some studies suggesting that they can consume
up to 20,000 calories every single day. And honey is really,
really high on calories, so whenever they can, they will
actually go for it.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: So right now, these bears are eating
constantly, preparing for what comes next.
So we're deep into autumn, it's November, and the bears are
definitely starting to think about hibernating. So far it's
been pretty mild, there's not been much frost here, a lot of
the bears are still active, and they've kind of, every year
they've got to do this balancing act really, between staying out
of hibernation long enough to put on enough fat stores to see
them through the winter, versus staying out too long and kind of
burning those fat stores whilst they search for more food.
CSABA DOMOKOS: This is a really neat adaptation actually to the
scarcity of food. It's simply a way of preserving energy of time
when food is really scarce. So what they have to do is that
they accumulate a huge amount of fat before that. In Romania,
usually they go into this winter sleep somewhere around December.
In this area where I work, in Romania's Eastern Carpathians,
they dig dens out for themselves. We don't have to
imagine it like a big cave or anything. It's basically the
size of the bear. So it normally has a small entrance, a really
small one. Sometimes it's surprising how a big animal can
squeeze through something like that. Then usually a small
corridor leading to a chamber. And the smaller it is, actually
the better it is because it can keep it partially warm
throughout the winter.
A bear will simply curl up inside one of these dens and
then spend several months there without eating or drinking or
moving actually. This is also a period when they are most
exposed to disturbance by people and this can be actually quite
dangerous for people and for bears alike.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: A bear suddenly woken from its winter
torpor is likely to feel threatened and defend itself.
Which is why stumbling across a hibernating bear is something
you really want to avoid.
But as the days begin to lengthen and the first signs of
spring appear...
CSABA DOMOKOS: The first to emerge are basically males and
then females that are single or females that are accompanied by
cubs of last year, so two-year-old cubs. And then the
last ones to come out, are the females with newborn cubs,
because this is one of the other very neat adaptations of bears,
that they actually give birth to their cubs during this winter
sleep time.
This is also why it's so important that they put on a lot
of fat before that, because then they will not feed or drink.
Pregnant females, they will give birth and they will nurture
their cubs entirely from the fat reserve they have accumulated
before that.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: As a mum myself, that completely blows my
mind. Breastfeeding humans need about 500 extra calories a day.
I ate an enormous amount of cake on maternity leave. But mother
bears survive the whole winter on stored fat reserves, and
often there's more than one newborn cub to feed.
CSABA DOMOKOS: So a brown bear would normally have somewhere
around two or three cubs actually. In exceptional cases
there have been also five. Usually less than 50% of those
cubs actually reach the age of one year.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Predators such as humans, wolves and even other
bears play a part in this.
CSABA DOMOKOS: Life is difficult in the forest.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: But today on our walk there are bears still
out there, eating, preparing and waiting for winter, which means
that there's still a chance my family and I might spot one or
two.
HEBE: Bears where are you?
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Where are you bears?
HEBE: Where are you bears?
CSABA DOMOKOS: Because the bear population in Romania is so
large and also because they're quite close to some fairly big
kind of urban centres, there is quite a big issue with human
wildlife conflict in Romania. So the Romanian government is kind
of looking at that and looking at measures that can be put in
place to kind of keep people and keep the bears safe. Because
where those conflicts happen, obviously not only are people in
danger, but the bears are as well. And it kind of you need
public trust and public opinion on your side for conservation to
be successful.
When living together with bears, on one hand they do cause
damages to human property, they occasionally kill livestock,
they actively hunt sheep and cattle sometimes, and then they
also cause damages in agricultural crops, for example
in fruit trees.
So they really like these apples and pears and plums. But they
don't simply just eat the fruits, then they will also
break the trees while getting the fruit. Nowadays we have a
lot of corn all over in Romania, so they can cause extensive
damages in corn fields as well.
Probably the most sensitive issue regarding bears is that
they can also cause injuries to people and occasionally, sadly.
They can also kill people. These kind of incidents are quite
rare, even in Romania, I would say.
And they absolutely pale compared to any other cause of
human mortality. So I think we have somewhere around
20-something people killed in the last 20 years by bears. In
most cases, these attacks are not by accident. They have been
somehow provoked by people. So, we cannot somehow separate bears
from people or people from bears.
And then we somehow have to find a way to coexist with them. This
is, I think, possible. And the best proof for it is the fact
that we still have bears. I think that maintaining some kind
of social tolerance... Or social acceptance towards these animals
is really crucial for their long-term survival.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And for Csaba, a biologist who works with large
carnivores, coexistence sometimes means getting
dangerously close.
CSABA DOMOKOS: I had a lot of very close encounters throughout
the years with bears and probably one of the most
dangerous thing that we occasionally have to do is to
free bears from this wire snare setup by poachers. Because these
are really uncontrolled situations, you cannot really
tell until it's too late how a bear is caught in those wire
snares. A lot of times they are physically hurting, and these
are really dangerous situations.
There have been a few cases when we approached these animals, you
know, they actually broke these wires that were holding them in
place.
We had cases when there was a mother caught in a snare and
there was its cub caught in another snare and I was in
between them and the mother broke the snare. And even in
this case you know she just ran away and even abandoned her cub.
This somehow for me this somehow conveys the message that in most
cases you are fine.
Brown bear attacks are not predatory attacks. They happen
out of self-defense. And this is actually why most of the people
will actually survive being attacked by a brown bear. Simply
because the bear is trying to eliminate the danger.
And when you are knocked down on the ground or something, after a
while, the bear will actually most of the time abandon the
person there and flee. So what it does from his perception is
that he's trying to eliminate that immediate threat.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And if you were to cross paths with a brown
bear, what should you do?
CSABA DOMOKOS: If a bear is approaching you and it has
noticed you, then basically you have to look as unthreatening as
possible. So the first thing should be probably to make the
bear realise that you're a person. And you can talk to him,
not necessarily shouting. You can raise your and move around
your hands so that they actually realize that it's a person. And
most of the time, this would be more than enough to scare it
away.
If an attack happens, generally, you will end up on the floor and
you should lie on your belly and try to protect your neck, you
know, and try to protect your soft side.
And the most important thing probably actually is that you
should walk around with pepper spray, bear specific pepper
spray. These are highly effective. I can really affirm
that that they work.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: So in terms of keeping ourselves safe from
bears that's obviously you know we've come out into the woods
with our toddler. So that's obviously at the forefront of
our mind. So we're being mindful to kind of make lots of noise.
We've got our bells.
Hebe's great at singing songs and chit-chattering so we're not
going to surprise any bears. But we've also got bear spray with
us as well, should we be charged by a bear. Which we can use just
to give ourselves a little bit of space and breathing room.
CSABA DOMOKOS: I think it really teaches us somehow to walk
around, let's say, in a forest with really all your senses
tuned to the max. And really looking out for movements from
the corner of your eyes or looking out for suspicious
sounds, for example.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Maybe we could all learn a little from this
about tuning in and really paying attention to the amazing
nature around us. Even if it's not a 400 kilo apex predator.
I'm getting a little bit excited because Rob stopped and he's got
the binoculars out so I'm hoping he's seen something. Maybe it's
a bear, I don't know. Let's have a look.
So, I might sound a little bit out of breath, because I got
very excited and ran, because Rob got his binoculars out and
started looking up to the top of a tree and I thought maybe it's
bear. Because they are really really nimble climbers despite
their size. They're very good at climbing. And they do spend some
time up in the tops of trees foraging food and sometimes
that's where the cubs go to kind of get out of the way of danger.
So, I very excitedly caught up but it wasn't a bear. But it was
quite an exciting thing nonetheless.
So he spotted a load of Crossbills, which are a really
cool species of finch. They do what they say on the tin,
they've got a crossed over bill. And they're a bird that's
specialized in kind of picking the seeds out of conifer cones,
pine cones, that kind of thing.
So they've evolved and adapted this funny crossed over bill.
And, it's quite exciting to see them.
It's not a species that I see very regularly. We do get them
in the UK, in Scotland, and in places where we've got lots of
conifer plantations, but I don't have much of that around where I
am, so it's quite an unusual species. And there's loads of
them. They're all chattering away up in the top of the tree.
So not a bear, but very exciting nonetheless.
So we've just been reflecting as we wandered through the sunshine
and next to this beautiful little stream that this habitat
here actually feels pretty similar to what we've got in
kind of the northern half of the UK.
It doesn't feel completely alien and completely different. These
rolling hills and steep-sided valleys feel really, really very
familiar. We were remarking that, you know, a thousand years
ago in the UK, we would have had this incredible biodiversity and
different array of species.
You know, we would have had Eurasian brown bears, we would
have had beavers, we would have had wolves. We would have had
all of these species which are now missing from our ecosystems
and you can really feel the difference.
So, here these woods, they're not being actively managed by
people, but because there's all of those different species here,
you know you've got the wild boar crunching up the
undergrowth and moving things around and giving opportunities
for tree seeds to sprout.
We've got big deer species but they're being moved through the
woodland by the wolves and by the bears. There's lynx who are
predating on the smaller deer, everything's kind of... much
more.
I'm not saying it's perfect here because people are everywhere
and people are tinkering with things, but it just feels like
much more wild. And it's kind of a little bit sad really
reflecting that at home, you know, one day it would have been
like this and it's not like that anymore because we've got the
population, the pressures, the numbers of people around and the
changes that we've made to our natural environment.
CSABA DOMOKOS: But still, whenever I see a bear, it
doesn't really matter if it's close or if it's further away,
it's still really a mixture of admiration and this kind of
feeling. And of, well, not necessarily fear, but you
somehow feel that there is something more than you there in
the forest.
You can experience this even without... seeing bears, just
simply knowing that you're in a habitat where there are things
that are stronger and bigger and faster than you.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: This was the exact feeling I had when we
found the bear print a few days earlier. It's an amazing primal
thrill that spikes your heart rate and fires your adrenaline
through the roof. It's Mother Nature giving you a nudge in the
ribs and saying, remember who's in charge here.
I'm ready for some hot chocolate. It's very hot. Slurp.
Oh Oh Isn't that nice?
HEBE: It's very hot.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: We'll let it cool down a bit. Why don't you
put your hands on it and they'll warm up. Oh, that's nice isn't
it?
So we haven't seen bears unfortunately but I have had a
fantastic time in the beautiful beautiful Carpathian Mountains.
Really, really recommend a visit to Transylvania to anyone who's
able to get here. It is an incredible place. The culture,
the people, the wildlife, the mountains, it's fantastic. So,
from me and from the beautiful Transylvanian countryside, see
you next time.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Wild Tales. If you've
enjoyed it, why not give us a follow or a review? And if you'd
like to find out more about the European brown bear in Romania,
then head to the episode show notes. I'm Rosie Holdsworth.
Bye-bye.