Conservationists are examining the initial results of an emergency programme to save central Italy’s last few bears from poachers and poisons.
The WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature) launched its project in the Apennine highland region after a senior forestry official told a conference last month that a fifth of the bear population had been wiped out in less than two years.
The official, Giovanni Potena, said: ”In the past 20 months, we have found eight [bears] killed by poachers.”
Earlier, the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise national park, where most of the bears live, had estimated the overall population at ”around 40”.
Augusto de Sanctis, the WWF official in charge of the urgent initiative, said: ”The bears often die atrociously.
”They are being captured with steel loops attached to bushes and trees along the paths they use. They die with deep wounds. Even worse is death by poisoning. The bears swallow bait laced with pesticides and strychnine. They die in dreadful pain from internal haemorrhaging.”
Ironically, one of the characteristics of the Apennine (or Marsican) brown bear — a distinct sub-species of the European brown bear — is its tolerance of human beings.
Until a few months ago, trapping and poisoning had been seen as a relatively limited threat to the survival of an animal often used as a symbol of Italy’s fast-dwindling, indigenous wildlife.
A drive in the 1990s succeeded in curbing the incursions of trophy hunters. But there have been clear signs recently of an upsurge in poisonings by aggrieved locals.
The national park is seen by many as a drag on development. Yet it is the effects of a gradual increase in prosperity — in particular, the abandonment of smallholdings — that has driven the bears out of their normal habitats into more lethal contact with urban man.
Flocks have been withdrawn from high pastures, prompting the bears to seek out prey elsewhere. Last year, the mainly elderly inhabitants of the village of Frattura petitioned the authorities to say that bears roaming the area in search of chickens were threatening their ”physical and emotional well-being”.
Meanwhile, the abandonment of fruit farms in the Abruzzo uplands has hit a key source of food, prompting the animals to range farther afield to look for sugar-rich vegetables such as carrots and beet.
Part of the WWF initiative, due to run for at least three years, involves winter care of abandoned apple and pear trees.
WWF volunteers have also organised protests against schemes in the area that are seen as endangering the bears’ survival. A ski resort is planned and the go-ahead has been given for the cutting down of a large swath of beech wood in the Tasseto valley, one of the animals’ main habitats.
The failure of the park’s authorities to block such schemes has been criticised by environmental lobbyists. But its officials have to work with scant resources that have dwindled since Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government took office in 2001.
Last year, officials say, the park received â,¬2,9-million, almost 40% less than in 2002. An official statement said it did not even have the money to provide its wardens with new boots. Another effect of the cuts has been to halt the subsidies the park offered local farmers to plant Indian corn — another important source of food for the bears.
Various operations to stamp out poisoning have been launched by the carabinieri, forestry guards and park wardens in recent months. But the long-term prospects for Italy’s emblematic large mammal still appear bleak.
Potena, who first alerted the country to the gravity of the situation, has given warning: ”Within 20 years, there may be no more Marsican brown bears left.” — Guardian Unlimited Â