Rewilding Europe

[brotherbear]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/ca...118565664/   
 
This is bear country—but just barely. The brown bear lived in the Pyrenees until 1991, when the last of the region’s bears is believed to have been killed. But a reintroduction program, launched in 1995, seeded the wild and remote Midi-Pyrenees with a handful of brown bears selected from Slovenia. Today 20-something of the animals—Ursus arctos, the same species as the North American grizzly bear—roam the mountain range. I pedaled deep into the mountains, up the lush Garrone River valley, almost all the way to Spain, to meet Jean-Michel Parde, a local biologist who worked on the reintroduction program in its early years and now lives in the village of Fos, just three miles from the site of the 1995 bear release. Parde believes 600 brown bears could inhabit the Pyrenees—if people would only let them.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/ca...rfFZVXV.99
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