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| Ursus arctos arctos |
This is a story of a failed conservation effort to preserve bears in Austria's Limestone Alps. In 1972 a brown bear came to Austria's Northern Limestone Alps to live. WWF decided to augment the population with releases of bears between 1989 and 1993. As many as 35 bears lived in the region, but the last one, known as "Moritz" could not be found in 2011. A WWF representative said one reason for the reintroduction failure was poaching. More than twenty bears have gone missing during the project. An estimated 400 brown bears live in Slovenia, the core area for brown bears in Central Europe. Migrating bears, mostly young males, disperse from there towards the Alps. The number of bears that reach the Alps depends on hunting pressures in Slovenia where quotas have rising in response to human-bear conflicts. Nearly 14,000 bears remain in the densely populated European continent in ten separate populations. In some parts of the continent, such as the British Isles and Hungary, bears have been exterminated. In France they are critically endangered. Conservationists are drawing plans for the brown bear's survival, but say that three states Austria, Hungary and Czech Republic, are holding back the return of large carnivores to Europe with the worse records in Europe for wildlife conservation. The director of European Wildlife says larger carnivores are getting lost in this region like ships in the Bermuda Triangle. Economic differences or climate conditions do not explain the loss of biodiversity. Slovenians enjoy a higher standard of living than Czechs, but has more bears. Industrialized Germany has doubled the size of its wolf population. Austria is more mountainous than Slovakia, but has lost all of its brown bears. The explanation must lie in differences in human culture.
