Russian Brown Bears

[brotherbear]

Quote: Being large and omnivorous, with a taste for flesh should the opportunity arise, bears have never been thick on the ground, except when a glut of food causes temporary gatherings. However, Brown Bears are nowhere near as widespread as they used to be. Once, bears roamed throughout the North American and Eurasian forests, and they even inhabited the British wildwood during the Dark Ages. But bears and people do not comfortably share the same living space, and so over the centuries these great creatures have been forced to retreat as their haunts were whittled away by the implacable advance of human civilization.

Today, healthy populations of Grizzlies exist only in Alaska, Canada, and Yellowstone National Park. As far as the Eurasian race is concerned, although there are a few bears in Spain, Italy, and Scandinavia, the largest population by far occurs in Russia, thanks to its vast tracts of virgin forest. Here the Brown Bear is found at low densities throughout the taiga and other forests.

In the eastern part of Siberia and in Kamchatka, the bears supplement their diet of fresh grass and berries with oil-rich salmon upon which they gorge themselves during the fishes' spawning runs. Accordingly, the bears prosper and some grow into magnificent specimens that rival the giant Grizzlies that live in Alaska.

Two separate and distinctive populations of Brown Bears are found in both the Caucasus Mountains and the mountains of the Central Asian republics. In the seclusion of the forests that clothe the slopes of the Caucasus, a few bears of the small Syrian race survive, and in the Pamir and Tien Shan mountains in Central Asia, the population consists of shaggy, fawn coated individuals. These 'Isabelline' bears also possess long, pale claws from which they derive their name - bielokogotny medved, 'the white-clawed bear'. Reply