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Before Europeans arrived, Grizzly bears were relatively common in California, with an estimated population of 10,000, around 20% of the USA population at the time.
Continue reading “Hyper-carnivorous extinct California Grizzly bears were actually mostly vegetarian – before Europeans arrived”This is a video of one of the clashes that I am talking about. The Grizzley bear population in 1975 ( in the lower 48 states) was just 700-800 (this excludes Alaska, where the current figure is 30,000) . The lower 48 states population has grown to around 1000 or an almost 50% increase.
There is a problem with this. Both in and out of Alaska (as well as Canada) these bears need space, and so are colonizing land that they previously roamed. Unfortunately, people rapidly forget how to live with animals like grizzly bears, so it is taking some significant work to live alongside these large animals once again.
The problem is, that when those encounters spike, generally authorities panic, and this generally leads to them looking to allow hunting once again. THIS IS DESPITE THE FACT THAT THE POPULATION IS NO-WHERE NEAR RECOVERED AT THE CURRENT TIME.
Continue reading “America is following in Europe’s footsteps, with their recovering brown bears – now they are moving into human areas”
I wrote, yesterday about the fears for the future of the polar bear species, and the problems that global warming are causing. Today, I am writing about another news subject from a few months ago – that of hybrids between brown bears and the polar bears.
Polar bears as a species, are only though to be between 150,000 and 1.7million years old, with most putting their estimate at around 600,000 years. This is very young for a species, and they descend from brown bears, with a 2011 study finding that female polar bear DNA seems to originate from a group of brown bears living in Ireland during the last ice age when vast ice sheets stretched from there to the north pole, and allowed polar bears to truly wander far and wide.
Pizzly’s and Growler bears, while found in nature on rare occasions, would have naturally been so rare as to be insignificant. It is only human caused global warming which has forced these animals together – and regular meetings in the natural world, of closely related species, usually ends up with offspring.
These hybrids (male polar bear and female grizzly ends with a Pizzly bear, while a female polar bear and a male grizzly ends with a Growler bear) are likely to become more common. Polar bears will increasingly have to head south, to be able to survive, and Grizzly bears will increasingly head north for cooler environments, bringing them into contact more and more often.
Polar bears are distant cousins of the Grizzly bear, and as the weather warms, polar bears are moving south and Grizzlies north. This has on at least one occasion created a so called “Pizzly”. We only know about this, because a hunter who paid to kill a polar bear accidentally shot the Pizzly. I have made it clear my lack of appreciation for the so called hunter – while I am ready to admit that in places the money is useful for conservation, I hope that with your help and this website, we might make it an irrelevance.
Found throughout the arctic, they can be seen inÂ
Over time we hope to list many places where you can visit bears and see them in their wild home, these will appear here, and a list of posts we have published on bears will appear below these links
Back in 1975, the American Grizzly bear was declared endangered. With only minor differences, the American Grizzly bear is the same species as the European bear, that lives from Western Spain, through Europe to the Kamchatka bear of far Eastern Russia.
In 1975 the USA lower 48 states grizzly bear population numbered somewhere between 136 animals and 312, so it was essential that it was protected. Nowerdays the same 48 states have a population of around 1500, but given that this number would have been as high as 50,000 when people started migrating to the USA in large number, this recovery is only just getting going.
Continue reading “Grizzly bears are rebounding in the USA, how can this success story continue?”
The Nunavut government has put together a report looking into polar bear Inuit interactions. The report suggests that population growth has pushed the polar bears into close proximity with the Inuits and the result of this is likely to be more and more clashes and potentially deaths of humans.
Trump’s determination to ignore all Science on all things to do with the environment continues. In recent times, his administration has decided many species should lose their protection. The conservationists must now prove that a proposed development, for example, will harm wildlife, instead of the developer having to prove that it won’t. Continue reading “Start of the grizzly hunt in the US has been suspended, and now permanently halted”
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