A young female bear caused a stir after wandering out of the forest and into the leafy suburbs of the Lithuanian capital. For two days, the brown bear ambled through the neighborhoods of Vilnius, trotted across highways, and explored backyards—all while being chased by onlookers with smartphones and, eventually, drones. The government then issued a permit for the bear to be shot and killed. That did not go down well with Lithuania's hunters who refused, aware that there is only a tiny number of the protected species in the entire country, the AP reports.
The Lithuanian Association of Hunters and Fishermen said it was shocked by the government order. The association's administrator, Ramute Juknyte, told the AP that the bear was a beautiful young female who was about 2 years old and did not deserve to be shot. "She was scared but not aggressive. She just didn't know how to escape the city but she didn't do anything bad," he said. The organization tracks the movements of bears. It believes there is only five to 10 bears in the Baltic nation, but does not have a precise number.
- Since causing a stir with their permit to kill the bear, Lithuanian authorities have been on the defensive. Deputy Environment Minister Ramunas Krugelis said that a kill permit was issued purely as a precaution in case the bear posed a threat.
- The hunters proposed a more humane approach: sedation, tracking, and relocation. As the debate over the bear's fate unfolded, she took matters into her own paws and wandered out of the city. Juknyte said that the bear was recorded by a camera on Wednesday, peacefully wandering through a forest some 40 miles from Vilnius while munching on corn.
- Brown bears were once common in the area but they were wiped out in the Lithuania in the 19th century. Linas Balciauskas, head of the Mammal Ecology Laboratory at the Nature Research Center, tells LRT that there now appears to be a permanent bear population in the country for the first time in many years. He believes they moved south from Latvia. "From Belarus, they can hardly get through the fenced border," he says. "But in Latvia, the population has grown to between 50 and 80. They roam widely, come into our territory, find a place to settle and stay."
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