Over the past thousand years, the bear population in Europe has experienced a catastrophic decline followed by partial recovery—a process that serves as a mirror image of human relations with the wild nature on the continent.

Medieval abundance and the beginning of extermination

In the early second millennium, the brown bear was a common inhabitant of almost all of Europe. These animals inhabited the territory from the Iberian Peninsula to the Ural Mountains and from Scandinavia to the Balkans. At that time, bears were an integral part of European forests, and their population was determined primarily by natural factors: the availability of food bases and suitable living areas.

A turning point came with the active settlement of the land by humans. By the 17th-18th centuries, a systematic extermination of large predators began, which intensified in the 19th century. Bears were killed for several reasons: they were considered dangerous to livestock, they hindered hunting of more valuable animals, and also competed with humans for forest lands. For example, in Belovezhskaya Pushcha in the 19th century, bears were exterminated as competitors of the bison—favored game of the Russian nobility—as well as for destroying honey beehives.

Catastrophic decline in population

By the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the situation had become critical. In Scandinavia, bears were almost completely exterminated: by 1930, there were only about 130 individuals left in a few isolated mountainous areas in Sweden. In Norway, the bear had been almost completely destroyed by that time.

In Estonia, the bear population reached its minimum in the 1920s, reducing to just dozens of individuals hiding in the forests of Alutagузе and in the southern part of central Estonia. In Latvia, bears had also almost disappeared by the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. The last bear in Belovezhskaya Pushcha was killed in 1879, and the species disappeared from there for more than half a century. Overall, by the middle of the 20th century, the bear had disappeared from most regions of Western and Central Europe, surviving only in inaccessible mountainous areas and in Eastern Europe, where anthropogenic pressure was lower.

The beginning of recovery and modern trends

The turning point was the introduction of conservation measures in the mid-20th century. In Sweden, where monetary rewards for bear killing were abolished in 1893, the population began to grow from the 1930s. By 1942, there were already 294 bears in Sweden, and by 2008, their population had reached a peak of 3298 individuals.

In Estonia, after the introduction of protection in the 1930s, the bear population gradually increased and reached 800 individuals by the early 1990s. In Romania, where one of the largest populations remained, there were more than 8000 bears in 1988, although then the population decreased to 4500, and now it has stabilized at around 6000 individuals.

Current state of populations

Today, the European brown bear population is estimated to range from 17,000 to 30,000 individuals. However, the distribution is extremely uneven: for example, Romania (about 6000 bears) and the Balkan Peninsula countries account for a significant portion of the European population, while in the Pyrenees Mountains, on the contrary, only about 80 individuals inhabit the area. In Ukraine, the bear population is estimated at about 300 individuals.

At the same time, many populations do not exceed several hundred individuals and face serious challenges: habitat fragmentation, genetic isolation, and the consequences of narrow \"bottleneck\" periods—periods of critical population decline, resulting in extremely low genetic diversity.

Throughout the millennia, the main factor determining the bear population in Europe has been humans. The peak of extermination occurred in the 19th-early 20th century, and only thanks to targeted conservation measures did these animals not disappear from the continent entirely. The current stage is characterized by a slow recovery of populations while maintaining contradictory approaches to management in different countries: from strict protection to licensed hunting.

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