Around ninety bears live in the Bieszczady mountains in the south east and in the Tatras, down south.  But their habitat is shrinking.

Krystyna Kolosowska reports

Last year three tourists went on trial after brutally killing an 18 month old bear cub in the Tatra Mountains. They claimed they had to act in this way because they feared for their life. Conservationists and Tatra park rangers doubted that their assessment of the danger was accurate. This shocking incident rose awareness, perhaps more than various information campaigns, about the condition of wildlife in confrontation with humans.

Piotr Krzan, a forest ranger in the Tatra wildlife management section, says a massive information campaign on how tourists should behave when they see the brown bear,  is especially important in early spring. That’s the time when bears come to the lower parts of the mountains in search of food.

The Tatra National Park is visited by two and a half to three million tourists annually. Most are actually not prepared for an encounter with the brown bear. Many don’t even follow the basic rule, which says: do not feed the bears. The Tatra National Park runs a program aimed at protecting the bear against tourists.

The park authorities place emphasis on the education of tourists. They also fit the brown bears with telemetric and as of late GPS transmitters, thanks to which their whereabouts are known at all times. Litter containers at mountain hostels are protected with electric fences to scare off lazy bears, who would rather feed on food from the bin than hunt for themselves.  
WWF Poland, too, is running a brown bear protection campaign. Stefan Jakimiuk has just returned from the Bieszczady Mountains, the biggest brown bear habitat in Poland, where the organization has been doing a lot to reduce conflict situations between brown bears and people.

Maciej Krupa, an experienced Tatra mountain guide has had some memorable encounters with the brown bear. He recalls with special fondness how he and a party of tourists saw a bear mum with three cubs, frolicking on a mountain slope in early spring.

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