Within the last thousand years, the bear population in Europe has experienced a catastrophic decline, followed by a partial recovery — a process that mirrors the relationship between humans and the wild nature on the continent.

Abundance in the Middle Ages and the beginning of extermination

At the beginning of the second millennium, the brown bear was a common inhabitant of almost all of Europe. These animals inhabited the territory from the Iberian Peninsula to the Urals and from Scandinavia to the Balkans. At that time, bears were an integral part of European forests, and their population was primarily determined by natural factors: the presence of a food base and suitable living areas.

The turning point came with the active settlement of the land by humans. By the 17th-18th centuries, a planned extermination of large predators began, which intensified in the 19th century. Bears were killed for several reasons: they were considered dangerous to livestock, they hindered hunting for more valuable animals, and also competed with humans for forest land. For example, in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha in the 19th century, bears were exterminated as competitors of the bison — the favorite game of the Russian nobility, as well as for the destruction of beehives with wild bees' honey.

Catastrophic decline in population

By the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the situation had become critical. In Scandinavia, bears were almost completely exterminated: by 1930, there were only about 130 individuals left in several isolated mountainous areas in Sweden. In Norway, the bear was almost destroyed by this time.

In Estonia, the bear population reached a minimum in the 1920s, reducing to just a few dozen individuals hiding in the forests of Alutaguse and in the southern part of central Estonia. In Latvia, bears also almost disappeared at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. The last bear in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha was killed in 1879, and the species disappeared from there for more than half a century. Overall, by the mid-20th century, the bear had disappeared from most regions of Western and Central Europe, surviving only in inaccessible mountainous areas and in Eastern Europe, where anthropogenic pressure was lower.

Beginning of recovery and current trends

The turning point was the introduction of nature conservation measures in the mid-20th century. In Sweden, where monetary rewards for bear killing were abolished in 1893, the population began to grow from the 1930s. By 1942, there were already 294 bears in Sweden, and by 2008, their population had reached a peak of 3298 individuals.

In Estonia, after the introduction of protection in the 1930s, the bear population gradually increased and reached 800 individuals by the early 1990s. In Romania, where one of the largest populations remained, there were more than 8000 bears in 1988, although the population then decreased to 4500 and is now stable at around 6000 individuals.

Current state of populations

Today, the European brown bear population is estimated to range from 17,000 to 30,000 individuals. However, the distribution is extremely uneven: for example, Romania (about 6000 bears) and the Balkan Peninsula countries account for a significant share of the European population, while in the Pyrenees Mountains, on the contrary, only about 80 individuals inhabit the area. In Ukraine, the bear population is estimated at about 300 individuals.

At the same time, many populations do not exceed several hundred individuals and face serious challenges: habitat fragmentation, genetic isolation, and the consequences of narrow \"bottleneck\" periods — periods of critical population decline, resulting in extremely low genetic diversity.

Throughout the millennia, the main factor determining the bear population in Europe has been human activity. The peak of extermination occurred in the 19th-early 20th centuries, and it was only due to targeted conservation measures that these animals did not disappear from the continent entirely. The current stage is characterized by a slow recovery of populations while maintaining conflicting approaches to management in different countries: from strict protection to licensed hunting.

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