Andrea Kieser, a 55-year-old German, looks through binoculars at the rugged mountains of Somiedo. “We have already seen a wild cat, a chamois… But we would like to see a bear. I think we’ll be lucky,” he says. Is not wrong. “There’s one!” the guide emphasizes. A long “Ohhhh!” escapes the throats of the 10 German tourists, who aim their telescopes at the area where Clarita appears, a she-bear walking confidently among the cliffs, and they stare until she hides again. Tourism is the friendlier face of the recovery of the Cantabrian Mountains’ plantigrades, whose population has increased from around 60 or 70 specimens to over 370 in four decades. The risk now is that some animals will approach the cities and become accustomed to humans, causing incidents. To prevent this, Asturias has launched a bear control program, which it says is problematic. These include traps, GPS collars, armored cases and rubber bullets.
From left to right: Guillermo Palomero, Director of the Oso Pardo Foundation; Luis Fernando Alonso, Director of the Natural Park of Somiedo; Miguel Díez, Head of the Wildlife Service of the Principality of Asturias; Pedro García-Rovés, Head of the Natural Resources Department of Asturias; and José Vicente López-Bao, scientific director of the radioactive labeling project, in Pola de Somiedo square. DAVID EXPOSITO
“As the bear population increases, one of them is more likely to enter a place to look for food — a shipping container, a restaurant, a chicken coop — which can trigger an alarm. As soon as we see that a specimen is doing this more than once, we activate the protocol,” explains Miguel Díaz, head of the Wildlife Service of the Principality of Asturias. The place he says couldn’t be more appropriate: the Pola de Somiedo square, in the middle of the natural park of the same name, one of the few places in Europe where you can have a coffee on a terrace and watch – with binoculars – the bears walking through the nearby mountains, their natural environment. Díaz is here to meet with representatives of the other entities involved in the radiolabeling – the Oso Pardo Foundation, the Oso de Asturias Foundation, and scientists from the University of Oviedo and the CSIC – and other programs dedicated to plantigrade care.
What does this protocol consist of? “The first thing we have to do is bring a Culvert-type trap to the location, a kind of cylindrical trailer with a door that can be closed remotely. In the trap we put the food that the bear gets used to. And we set up shifts for the park rangers — and for the scientific staff and the foundations — to see when the sample arrives, which can take a day or months,” emphasizes Pedro García-Rovés, head of the natural resources department of
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Once the pesky bear gets into the cylinder, scientists and veterinarians go there to euthanize it — unbeknownst to the animal — blood and hair samples are taken to check its health and a collar is put on it. With GPS that helps to understand their movements – which is a valuable source of knowledge – and most importantly to predict their raids after release. The chain is programmed to detach after a year at the latest.
Here begins the second part, called “conditioned aversion”: “When we see via GPS that the specimen is approaching a food source in a city, we alert the rangers so they are prepared.” “The moment in When it starts eating, they shoot it with rubber bullets – which are not lethal – so that the animal connects both sensations and doesn’t do it again,” says José Vicente López-Bao of the Mixed Institute for Biodiversity Research (IMIB). ) of the CSIC, the University of Oviedo and the Principality of Asturias and scientific director of the radiotagging program, who also attended the Somiedo meeting. Other methods have been tried, such as trying to scare them away with loud noises, but what deters them the most are those bullets. For now, they’ve tagged four females that have more difficulty getting food during the breeding season: one that hurt the livestock, one that ate from a container, and two others that got used to the food.
A bear caught with infrared while fetching food in an Asturian town. Fundación Oso Pardo
Another measure of the program is to make it more difficult for them to access food in urban areas, as Luis Fernando Alonso, director of the Somiedo Natural Park, explains: “On the one hand, there is help to finance electric fences where there are beehives, which is one of his favorite foods . On the other hand, we’re piloting some anti-bear trash cans, a type of metal cover that slips over the bucket and allows people to open it – activating a mechanism – and throw their bag in, but that’s impossible for that one bear can do it with his claws.” Later they will be installed in bear centers in Asturias.
A scientist manipulates a Culvert-type trap used to lure bears with food, put them to sleep and equip them with a GPS. Brown Bear Foundation
Guillermo Palomero, director of the Oso Pardo Foundation and one of the main architects of the recovery of plantigrades on the Cantabrian coast, looks at the Somiedo Mountains and summarizes: “There is a lot of human activity in this mountain range. It took many years for the bear, once considered a danger, to become socially acceptable. For this reason, the aim of the program is that no bear becomes accustomed to the presence of people or light food in the cities, where conflict and social concern can arise.”
bear tourism
This societal acceptance has a lot to do with the species increasingly being viewed as a treasure for the territory, largely due to bear tourism: the Brown Bear Foundation (FOP) calculated five years ago that their presence was impacting the bears has about 20 million euros and 350 direct jobs in the bear communities – they will repeat it and believe that the number will be much higher now.
The Asturian Ministry of Tourism has no data, but points out that there are already 12 bear-watching companies in the municipality, a third of them in Somiedo. “We opened in 2015 and since then the number of people booking a day to see bears has quadrupled,” says Jorge Jáuregui of Somiedo Experience. This is confirmed by Noe Álvarez, owner of the Hotel Castillo del Alba in the same town: “Bear tourism has increased a lot, people from all over Europe come and ask us about the best places to see them”. In the restaurants of this small town of 1,100 inhabitants, spread over more than 30 districts, there are French, German, Italian, Irish…
José Antonio Ferreres and Maríza Ángeles Úbeda observe the Somiedo brown bears with binoculars and a telescope. DAVID EXPOSITO
A group of tourists observe brown bears from the Gúa viewpoint in Pola de Somiedo. DAVID EXPOSITO
“The best times to see these animals are April and May, when many animals are in heat and the females come out of the burrows with their young, and mid-August to mid-September, when they are feeding on berries and other things.” fleshy fruits to recharge your batteries for the winter,” explains Palomero from a vantage point next to Pola de Somiedo. There is an information board, shelter for shelter from rain, benches and ample space for waiting with binoculars. “People used to stand in the middle of the road looking for bears and that was a problem. That’s why we created a network of viewpoints and parking lots,” says Alonso from the nature park.
About 20 people are in one of them, the one in Gua, looking for the bear; Most have booked with a company – four hours, around 40 euros – including a tour guide and powerful telescopes so that they don’t miss a detail. Others go alone, like Ángel Trotter (53 years old) and Marta Mariscal (48), a couple of friends who have been here several times. “It’s very easy to get lucky in Somiedo, we just saw a bear with two cubs,” he says.
“There are more bears in the area and more tourists walking all the roads, so there are more encounters,” says Javier Naves, a researcher at the Biological Station Doñana-CSIC and an expert on these animals, over the phone. “I worry about images like the ones we’ve seen recently of a car chasing two cubs as bear cubs are considered adorable but they are the most vulnerable part of the species, they can be stressed and they can get used to people .” and generate undesirable behaviors,” he adds.
A woman points to the spot on the mountain where brown bears are found in Somiedo, Asturias. DAVID EXPOSITO
The bear “Clarita” wanders through the mountains of Somiedo. DAVID EXPOSITO
For the tourist manna to continue, it is imperative to continue to protect this animal, which remains in danger of extinction after the critical situation has passed. One of the tools is the “Life Bears with a Future” project, which is studying how climate change is affecting these animals: “There are already changes happening in the behavior of plantigrades, like the tendency to hibernate less, and that needs to be told to them.” the users of the mountain — hikers, hunters, mushroom pickers — so they know they can find a bear in winter, too,” says Palomero. For this reason, the FOP publishes videos explaining what to do if you encounter one of these animals in the bush.
The challenge is to combine this tourism with species protection. “38% of the Somiedo Natural Park are restricted use areas that are not accessible to visitors. The viewpoints are always far away so as not to disturb the animals and it is mandatory not to make noise or disturb them. And if a bear with cubs appears near a critical point, we temporarily close that area to visitors,” says Alonso, director of the park. The information obtained with the radioactive marking also helps to know why they are passing certain roads or infrastructure, after which action can be taken later. Palomero summarizes, “The bear has bounced back in the fight against poaching by preserving its habitat, but most importantly with the treasure that represents societal acceptance.” And we mustn’t lose that. So we need to keep working to prevent them from becoming accustomed to human presence.”
Two residents of Somiedo drink a beer on a terrace in the city. On the right a poster announcing an exhibition about bears. DAVID EXPOSITO
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