Bear 71

[wolfnowl]

An interactive video and a documentary on the National Film Board about a sow grizzly bear who lived in and around Banff National Park.  Very powerful.

Bear 71

Reminds me of this: 744

Mike.

[AWeil]

Thanks, Mike.
This is quite an engaging way to produce a semi-documentary.  But such a sad story.

Angela

[wolfnowl]

Thanks, Angela.  I did research work on black bears back in '83 and again a decade later but the reality of life for grizzlies in and around Banff and pretty much everywhere else is that there are balances between too little space, too few resources and matching the desires of humans and other species.  In my experience, it's almost always the humans that need to be 're-educated'.  But that has its own challenges and fear is a big one.  BC has a great 'Bear Aware' program, which is all about solving people problems in bear habitat.  It wasn't that many decades ago that places like Yellowstone designed garbage dumps with benches for viewing platforms, but fortunately we've learned from those mistakes.  Anyway...

Mike.

[AWeil]

Well, I live in Germany where bears (the European brown bear to be exact) are extinct. Except for one project to re-introduce bears in northern Italy and parts of  southern Austria. The last bear of that project to venture into Germany a few years ago (2006) was named Bruno (official name JJ1), got quite a bit of press coverage, was shot and is now stuffed and on display in a museum in Munich.  His mistake was to take a good number of unprotected sheep, a few chickens and a bee hive or two - even though German farmers get reimbursed for such losses way above market price.
We certainly could use a 'bear aware' program. 
Closer to home and more recent, a neighbor noticed a young red fox in her garden. So what, you might say. But even this got a lot of local press coverage full of citizen concerns about the potential danger of a fox. The city will deploy hunters to get the fox (possibly using a live trap, but who knows) and remove it.

Angela

[francois]

Well, I live in Germany where bears (the European brown bear to be exact) are extinct. Except for one project to re-introduce bears in northern Italy and parts of  southern Austria. The last bear of that project to venture into Germany a few years ago (2006) was named Bruno (official name JJ1), got quite a bit of press coverage, was shot and is now stuffed and on display in a museum in Munich.  His mistake was to take a good number of unprotected sheep, a few chickens and a bee hive or two - even though German farmers get reimbursed for such losses way above market price.
We certainly could use a 'bear aware' program. 
Closer to home and more recent, a neighbor noticed a young red fox in her garden. So what, you might say. But even this got a lot of local press coverage full of citizen concerns about the potential danger of a fox. The city will deploy hunters to get the fox (possibly using a live trap, but who knows) and remove it.

Angela

I could tell a lot of similar stories about wild animals (bears, wolves, lynxes) in Switzerland. They don't live very long in our organized and well ordered nature. On the other hand, foxes are very common, even in populated areas.
The issue is that people feed them and those foxes are city-dwellers, not foxes from the nearby forests and they are affected by Echinococcus multilocularis. They even dug tunnels under the local cemetary!