The Orphan Bear Rehabilitation Center in the Eastern Carpathians (Harghita County) in the Hasmas Mountains of Romania is a project which aims to reintroduce orphaned brown bear cubs into their natural habitats, after a professionally developed rehabilitation process. The causes why bear cubs became orphaned are diverse and many of them unknown. The known cases usually are poaching of mother bears, forest exploitation, road or railway accidents and winter den disturbance. The project has been developed by Leonardo Bereczky since 2004 and has received support from Bears in Mind since 2008.
With financial help from Bears in Mind, between 2008 and 2013, a total of 19 bears were equipped with GPS/GSM collars in order to assess the suitability of rehabilitated bears for reintroduction in their natural habitat. Ten of these bears were reared in the Romanian Rehabilitation Center (developed by Bear Again) and nine were wild caught individuals of two behavior categories: (1) wild behaving juveniles and (2) individuals with different degrees of habituation to anthropogenic food sources. In short, the project revealed that reintroduction of the rehabilitated bears into the wild is highly successful and without any negative impact to the wild population. The survival rate of the rehabilitated monitored bears was around 50%. This is similar to the survival rate of juvenile wild bears, based on literature. One of the most important regulating factors can be considered the infanticide killing by adult male bears. Another important threat to cub/ juvenile survival is poaching.
Post-monitoring of released bears and analysis of collar results is still ongoing and part of Bear Agains activities.
2020 onwards
One of the basics of the rehabilitation technique is keeping the cubs in a system of several enclosures that offer 100% natural habitat. In this environment, the bears can develop their inborn instincts during a 1 – 1,5 year rehab period. The facilities are surrounded by electrical fences and fences with sheet metal overhang. The electrical fence on one hand keeps the young bears inside the facilities and keeps intruder wild adult male bears or other predators out. The main aim of the support offered by Bears in Mind to the project in 2020-2021 has been directed towards improvement of the total electrical system of the Rehab Centre in order to keep the cubs safe, improve data communication and decrease the risk of depredation by wild males from outside. Additionally, a small dry bunker was built to store batteries, the generator and inverter and some of the food for the bears.
One of the most important aspects of the rehab method in the project is to avoid generating a connection between the anthropogenic food source and human presence during the rehab period, in the mind of the bears, in order to avoid habituation. So, the development of several remote cableway feeding systems have been sponsored over recent years. This allows the team from Bear Again to get the food to the bear cubs without being noticed. This way, these bears won’t associate food with people, an important lession for their future!
