Spanish bears rebound from brink of extinction as locals adapt to their presence once again

The lure of Spanish gastronomy has proven irresistible to Serafina, a young female brown bear in the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain with a taste for dining from the bins of a renowned local restaurant.

Her days of fine living may be numbered, however, as park rangers are lying in wait with a plan to force her to give up her epicurean ways.

“She is a gourmet bear,” says Guillermo Palomero, president of the Brown Bear Foundation (Fundación Oso Pardo), which is working to monitor Serafina along with researchers from the local University of Oviedo.

“She only goes for those bins; it seems she has a very discerning palate. We are trying to capture her to try to get her to abandon her passion for the bins of this particular restaurant.”

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Under the plan, Serafina will be fitted with a GPS tracking collar so that whenever she approaches the town, rangers will be waiting to drive her away from the bins with firecrackers and rubber bullets.

The aim is to train the bear out of habituated behaviours that increase the risk she will come into conflict with humans. If this fails, detention beckons.

“It hasn’t yet been necessary, but if a bear even then continues with the problem behaviour, it would be removed from the population and be put into captivity,” Palomero says. “There should be no habituated bears in the Cantabrian Mountains.”

This protocol for dealing with problem bears is part of how communities in northern Spain are adapting to live alongside the animals once again, as the bear population undergoes a remarkable revival three decades since it was nearly driven to extinction.

In the 1990s, there were years when fewer than five bear cub litters were born in Spain. Less than 60 bears in all were clinging on in the Cantabrian Mountains, divided between isolated pockets, their numbers dwindling due to poisoning, poaching, wire traps, habitat destruction and being hit by cars.

Three decades on, so many litters are now born that researchers can no longer easily keep count. In a historic reversal of a long decline, there are now estimated to be 370 Cantabrian brown bears and the territory in which they are present has increased by 70 per cent. Individual bears have roamed as far as Portugal, where the sighting of a bear in 2019 was the first in nearly 200 years.

Due to arduous conservation efforts, the species has moved out of Spain’s “critically endangered” category to be considered “endangered”, and there are hopes that in time it will be deemed merely “vulnerable”.

Crucial to the turnaround was a change in local perceptions. Work began in the 1990s to bring environmental education into rural schools, while bear advocates persuaded local leaders that the creature was an asset rather than a menace.

Helped by funding from the European Union biodiversity Life and Natura 2000 programmes, locals created wildlife corridors that bears could pass along out of the way of humans, helping isolated populations to connect and improve genetic diversity.

Tree-planting programmes provided employment and bulked up stocks of the chestnut, fruit and nut trees that constitute the bears’ main diet. The bears, in turn, have helped to regenerate the forests as they contribute to the ecosystem by spreading seeds.

A change in local attitudes was fundamental to the turnaround. Though hunting bears was outlawed in Spain in 1973, poaching, traps and poisoning continued with near impunity long afterwards. Enforcement was increased with the training of rangers and police specialised in wildlife crime. Though killings have not been completely stamped out, people who kill bears face serious investigations, steep fines and even potential prison time.

Nowadays, anyone who kills a bear also risks the ire of the local community. The species has been adopted as a local mascot in the Cantabrian Mountains and is the foundation of a thriving tourism industry. Local producers sell “bear honey”, a dozen different companies offer bear-watching tours, and in 2017 the species was estimated to be generating €20 million in income for the area and supporting 350 jobs.

The shift has not been without friction. Under a compensation scheme for bear damage, between 2009 and 2018 there were 585 claims paid out each year on average across the regions of Asturias, Cantabria, Castile and León, and Galicia, amounting to an annual cost of €250,000. Bears hit apiaries the hardest: beehives amounted to 60 per cent of the damage claims, followed by 23 per cent for fruit trees and 13 per cent for livestock.

Sometimes described as a “repentant carnivore”, European brown bears are more timid than their American cousins. They do swipe the occasional calf, goat or sheep, but this tends to be a last resort if they cannot get enough protein from nuts or carrion, research suggests.

Bears can be dangerous to humans, however. There have been eight attacks in the Pyrenees and Cantabrian Mountains between 1988 and 2020, according to a survey of such incidents, usually as a result of the accidental disturbance of a bear in the wild. In most cases, the humans were left with only minor injuries. However, the death of a jogger in Italy in April, the first human to be killed by a bear in the country in modern times, has underscored the risks.

Electric fences and guard dogs are provided to farmers to protect their stock. The bear’s revival has also renewed appreciation for older methods of protection, including traditional breeds of livestock dogs and the “cortín”, a local kind of stone fort to protect beehives that fell into disuse in modern times.

In contrast to other parts of Europe where relations with wildlife are more acrimonious, calls for culls are rarely heard.

Last month, a group of residents in the mountain hamlet of Villarino del Sil made an appeal for intervention after they grew tired of the incursions of a bear they had nicknamed Lechugina – “little lettuce” – due to her taste for stealing the vegetable.

“We are not against bears, and what’s more, our ancestors always took care of them. But we cannot continue in this situation,” Alipio García, the spokesman for the neighbourhood council, told local media.

“We are extremely proud of our bears, but things are not going well,” he continued. “The solution is to move her to another place.”

His issue was that the problem bear protocol had not been applied, he said, and what’s more, compensation had not kept pace with inflation.

“For [the] 40 onions and 36 lettuces that she ate, the council of Castile and León paid me only €13,” García said. “They need to update their prices.”