Parco d’Abruzzo, feeding the bears: there are those who say yes

The president of the Italian Society for the History of Fauna, Corradino Guacci, intervenes on the issue raised by the Abruzzo Park on feeding the young bears, children of Amarena, the subject of investigation by the forestry carabinieri. In a note sent to the Minister of the Environment and other bodies, Guacci does not say he is against it and retraces the various stages on “supplementary feeding” activities. At the same time, he underlines that dissuasion must be applied mainly towards man and his wrong behaviour. Just as he reiterates the need to establish a “gene bank” of the Marsican brown bear, which would allow, in the event of dramatic events that endanger the remaining population, the reconstruction of vital nuclei of the subspecies.

The president highlights that since 1999, with a five-year tender, various initiatives have been launched, aimed at providing the bears with additional food resources. A monitoring plan for fruit plants has also been undertaken and the cultivation of small agricultural fields has been restarted, in order to guarantee an adequate nutritional intake for the plantigrades. Over the following years, projects such as “A bear as a friend” were developed in collaboration with the “Montagna Grande Onlus” association, which involved the sowing of palatable essences for the specimens and the creation of experimental fields. These initiatives would have received funding from bodies such as Federparchi and Enel, highlighting the importance attributed to the conservation of this threatened species. However, the panorama would change radically when researchers from the Sapienza University of Rome proposed a new paradigm: Marsican bears should feed exclusively on natural resources, abandoning the supplementary food provided by man. Meanwhile, in 2007, the Forestry Corps had carried out a study on the fruiting of the main trophic resources for the bear, beechnut and acorn. «The same Patom, National Action Plan for the protection of the Marsican brown bear – writes Guacci – hoped for multi-year monitoring of the production and therefore of the fluctuation of the production of acorn and beechnut, in parallel with the monitoring of females with young, could therefore also allow to evaluate how much the productivity of the bear population is related to the abundance of these resources.”

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