Sofa, 28, woke up when he was sent a video of a bear in the garden of his former home in central Siberia. The threat they posed once seemed remote.
“We were never afraid to go outside, even at night,” she told CNN. For her, a bear coming into her garden was something she “could never have imagined.”
The unexpected sightings come at a time when bear attacks are on the rise, with at least 16 fatal incidents across Russia in September, according to a CNN tally of Russian media reports.
The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment told state news agency TASS that the country typically records 20 to 30 human assaults a year.
According to TASS, bears have invaded populated areas in more than 40 regions of Russia this year. However, the highest death toll was in the vast Krasnoyarsk region of central Siberia, where seven people died.
Last week, a 51-year-old woman was fatally attacked by a bear as she came out of her home there. Two days ago, a security guard was killed by a bear at a truck parking lot in a wooded area. In early September, two elderly women who went missing separately after going mushroom hunting have been found dead with injuries believed to have been caused by a bear attack.
Fatal accidents were also reported in other Siberian regions. In neighboring Tuva, the father of Russian NHL player Andrei Kuzmenko was killed by a bear during a fishing trip in late September. The man was taken to hospital with serious facial injuries, but died shortly after, TASS reported.
And in August, a bear killed a 29-year-old woman in Altai, a popular tourist destination in southern Siberia, after tearing through her tent and dragging her into the forest.
Sergei Kolchin, a zoologist at the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences who specializes in large carnivores, said attacks were becoming less frequent on average, but this year there had been a change in some regions of Siberia, particularly in Krasnoyarsk.
Konstantin Tironen, head of zoology at the Karelia Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, gave a slightly different assessment, saying that this year’s attacks were concentrated in certain regions but above the average for previous years.
Both link the situation to unusual fall pine nut and berry crop failures. Kolchin also cited massive wildfires that have destroyed some bears’ habitat as a compounding effect.
“Encounters are inevitable as bears increasingly enter areas used by humans to compensate for food shortages,” he told CNN.
Tyronen added that bears increase their search for food to store fat in preparation for hibernation. “When food is scarce in the wild, they look for it wherever they can,” he explained.
He also suggested that the availability of food waste and the expansion of extractive industries into previously remote wildlife habitats are factors that are bringing bears and humans into closer contact.
“We’re creating an attractive food source that attracts them,” Tyronen said. “The responsibility here lies with humans, not bears.”
Dmitry Sergeyev, a natural resources official in Khakassia, southern Siberia, called the rise “extraordinary.”
“The bear population is above normal levels. Strong animals are being replaced by weak ones. There is not enough space for bears to live, so they are moving closer to humans,” he told Russia’s pro-Kremlin broadcaster REN TV.
But two experts CNN spoke to cautioned against linking the increase in attacks to bear population growth, citing a lack of reliable population estimates. Bears are difficult to count because of their solitary nature and hibernation, Tyronen explained.
Over the past two months, authorities in at least 10 regions in Siberia and Russia’s Far East have warned residents about increased bear activity.
A curfew was also imposed in parts of Altai Oblast and Baikalsk, Irkutsk Oblast. Meanwhile, Krasnoyarsk authorities have closed the stairs of Krasnoyarsk Pillars National Park and the popular hiking route Tulgashinsky Ridge.
Local authorities have also sent out mobile hunting teams and offered bounties for those who kill the bear. In the Krasnoyarsk region, where most of the deadly attacks occurred, rewards of more than 35,000 rubles (about $420) were announced.
Altai’s Ministry of Natural Resources announced that more than 50 bears had been killed and permits had been issued to kill 157 more after the death of a tourist in August. Krasnoyarsk’s Ministry of Natural Resources announced earlier this month that more than 180 “potentially problematic animals” had been killed.
Kolchin said killing aggressive bears in populated areas is a necessary emergency measure. However, he argued that wider culling would not reduce incidents in the long run. This is because they fail to address the root cause of unsafe food waste.
“Other bears will replace the bears that were killed near the dump,” he says. “Wide and indiscriminate shooting of bears amid the current hysteria will leave animals with fatal injuries.”
Kolchin said injured bears struggle to survive in the wild and are likely to attack people in self-defense. Animals that associate their injuries with humans may also become more aggressive toward humans, he said.
Rather, he said the solution lies in keeping waste out of reach, teaching people how to behave around wild animals and using deterrents such as electric fences to avoid future encounters.
