Weekly newsletter

Brown Bear Sightings Are Becoming More Frequent

Hungary Today 2023.05.15.

A brown bear was spotted on Saturday in the area of the Aggtelek National Park in northern Hungary, between the villages of Kánó and Felsőtelekes, the park’s management announced on its website.

The animal was photographed by a wildlife camera mounted on a spreader, they wrote. They added that stray bears, which occasionally enter Hungarian territory, are regular visitors to hunting facilities.

No further information on the direction of the animal’s movements was available at the moment, they said.

A picture of the bear that was spotted in the national park in northern Hungary. (Photo: Facebook/Aggteleki Nemzeti Park)

Recently, brown bears have been seen more and more often in the area, for example, in 2019, when a bear was recorded by the national park’s camera. A year later, another one was seen walking in the street on a surveillance camera in the city of Miskolc.

But it was IWO who attracted the most attention back in 2015, the bear who came to Hungary from Poland with a beacon on his neck.

Moreover, reports also came in March when a brown bear was spotted in the area of the national park.

In addition, the presence of another bear has been recorded on several occasions recently by wildlife cameras installed in the Bükk Mountains, and the company that manages the state forests of the area has asked everyone to be extra careful when walking in the forest blocks of the Bükk for their own safety.

Public television channel M1 reports that

the chances of encountering a bear while hiking are relatively low, but experts are still asking hikers to stick to marked hiking trails and avoid hunting facilities if possible, as the bear in the Aggtelek National Park was spotted near one of them.

Brown bears are a highly protected species. According to experts, the reason why individual bears regularly wander over to northern Hungary is that their habitat in Slovakia is becoming more and more populated. Before the current sightings, in early May, a wildlife camera on the outskirts of Lucfalva, a village in northern Hungary, captured a mother bear with a two-year-old bear cub.

Featured photo via Pixabay


Array
(
    [1536x1536] => Array
        (
            [width] => 1536
            [height] => 1536
            [crop] => 
        )

    [2048x2048] => Array
        (
            [width] => 2048
            [height] => 2048
            [crop] => 
        )

)