DOLOMITES-UNESCO: WILD BEARS A GAUGE OF ECOSYSTEM BALANCE
TRENTO – The brown bear is making a comeback; a successful resettlement project in the Italian Alps is protecting the endangered species. Italy’s Dolomites were named a World Heritage Site in June and if it weren’t for the bears that have managed to survive here, the fauna in these mountains would be similar to any other alpine range. All but gone from the rest of the European Alps by the 1900s, the bears in the Brenta Dolomites in the Trentino region are the only ones to have escaped the extermination campaigns, sometimes officially sanctioned, sometimes merely tolerated.
The brown bear may have disappeared from its last Trentino refuge as well if it hadn’t been for the efforts of a group of naturalists and environmentalists led by the Italian politician Gian Giacomo Gallarati Scotti who founded the Movement for the Protection of Nature in 1939. By holding conferences and bringing the situation to the public’s attention the animal lovers were able to protect the last native colony of brown bears in the Brenta Dolomites. An important 1956 regional law established damage payments for the loss of livestock and beehives, giving farmers and woodsmen less reason to kill the bears.
In 1957 Gallarati Scotti founded the Order of San Romedio dedicated to the protection of the brown bear. San Romedio, a medieval hermit from the Val di Non, is said to have tamed and ridden the bear that attacked and killed his horse. To this day San Romedio is always depicted riding a bear. When Gallarati Scotti heard a famous circus wanted to get rid of its old bear he launched an appeal to find it a home, an appeal appropriately answered by the San Romedio monks. Ever since a large fenced area in the woods just outside the San Romedio Sanctuary in the Val di Non has housed a few abandoned bears.
By the 1990s naturalists noticed that the Brenta Dolomites colony of brown bears was getting smaller and realized new blood was needed to avoid extinction. The Life Ursus project - sponsored by the largest protected area in the Trentino, the Adamello-Brento Natural Park, in collaboration with the Province of Trento and the Italian wildlife conservation organisation, Istituto Nazionale per la Fauna Selvatica - was financed by the European Union. In 1999, after feasibility studies had been done and opinion polls were taken among the local population, two young bears, Masun and Kirka, were captured in the Slovenia hunting reserve and resettled in the park.
Another eight bears, all equipped with radio transmitters, were introduced between 2000 and 2002. The introduction of the new specimens was successful and today the bear population has increased to more than twenty, sometimes expanding beyond the Trentino region. Occasionally the bears range too far; in 2006 a male bear named Bruno was killed after wandering into Bavaria. Some bears have reached the Dolomites on their own, travelling from Slovenia through the Friuli region and getting as far as the Friuli, Belluno and Alto Adige Dolomites.
In 1998 representatives from Mountain Wilderness and the WWF walked from Slovenia to the Trentino Dolomites to study the routes used by bears travelling through the Alps in view of a possible linking up between the bears, lynx and wolves in the two areas. The University of Udine has set up a working group to study the return of these endangered primates.
The European brown bear, usually not aggressive and mostly feeding on plants, has historically inhabited some of the same places as man and earned a special place in mountain stories and legends. Environmentalists maintain that the presence of bears is an indication of a balanced natural environment. Diminished human use and disturbance in alpine pastures in the Dolomites over the last few decades has led to a gradual re-colonisation and return of animals like the bear and the lynx. Scientists say the decreasing use also encourages the spread of forest up and down the slopes, potentially enhancing the area’s ability to withstand climate change.
