VIENNA, Austria, 7 March 2012 (ENS) – There are no more brown bears to be found in Austria, say European wildlife conservationists, despite the fact that neighboring Slovenia has a stable population of about 400 bears. “Unfortunately there is no bear left in the Northern Limestone Alps,” said Christian Pichler with WWF Austria. “The last bear, Moritz, which was born in Austria could not be found in 2011. The sub-population is deemed to be extinct.” The bears in the Northern Limestone Alps originate from a WWF Austria augmentation project that released three bears in the Northern Limestone Alps between 1989 and 1993. The location was chosen because one single male bear named Ötscherbär had naturally come to the area in 1972. Between 1989 and 2010 at least 35 bears have lived in this region. “WWF Austria was working more than 20 years on this project to bring back bears to Austria and to the Alps. One reason why we failed was poaching, more than 20 bears are missing. But another reason was the small founder population,” said Pichler. […] Nearly 14,000 brown bears now live in Europe in 10 separate populations from western Spain to the Russian Far East and from the north of Scandinavia to southern Romania and Bulgaria. In France, bears are critically endangered. There are few wild bears in Central Europe and none on the British Isles. WWF Austria, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and France are working on a Brown Bear Conservation Strategy to be published within the next three months. “We all believe this is not the end of the whole story of bears in Austrian Alps, but only of one sad chapter,” said Dalibor Dostal, director of European Wildlife, a conservation organization based in the Czech Republic. “We hope that next chapters will be more positive and bears will be back to this area again.” […] Dostal called Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic “the worst countries in Europe” for wildlife conservation. “In these regions, biodiversity, and mainly large carnivores, are getting lost like the ships in the notorious Bermuda Triangle,” he said. Such a dramatic decrease of biodiversity cannot be explained by economic differences among the three countries, he said. The living standard of Slovenians is higher than the living standard of Czechs, but Slovenia has more bears. In wealthy Germany, Europe’s most advanced economy, the population of wolves has doubled over the past two years. Nor are climatic conditions the reason for the decrease in population of key species, Dostal says. Although Austria is more mountainous than Slovakia, the bears in the Austrian Alps have become extinct. Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic keep failing in their fight against poachers of bears, wolves and lynxes, says Dostal, who blames police for the fact that a majority of poachers flee without being apprehended and punished. […]
Brown Bears Extinct in Austria, European Wildlife Under Pressure
