Brown bear M49 on the run again
Brown bear M49 has once again managed to escape from the Casteller Wildlife Centre in Trentino. Animal welfare organisations are calling for his release.
With what appears to be some reluctance, the Trentino provincial government has announced that brown bear M49 has once again escaped from an enclosure at the Casteller Wildlife Centre south of Trento.
M49 made headlines almost exactly a year ago when he broke out after being captured. After a lengthy search, the animal was recaptured in April of this year using a tube trap.
M49 is now apparently becoming the ultimate escape artist. This time he did not climb over the fence. Instead — according to initial reconstructions — he managed to overcome the electrically secured barrier during the night. From there he reached a further fence secured with twelve-millimetre-thick iron bars. Using sheer muscle strength, the bear bent the bars aside and disappeared into the darkness.
On the night of 29 July 2020, another female bear had been captured and fitted with a tracking device in the area, but it was not the animal being sought, reported the news agency «Ansa» from Trentino.
His reputation as an escape artist has earned him the nickname Papillon — after the hero of the eponymous prison novel by French author Henri Charrière (1906–1973). More than nine months after his first escape, during which «M49» is said to have killed dozens of livestock, he fell into a trap set by rangers in April.
Papillon not to be shot despite escape
Italy's Environment Minister Sergio Costa appealed, according to media reports, for Papillon not to be shot. “He has never attacked anyone», said Costa. Provincial President Maurizio Fugatti had previously stated that there were already far too many bears in Trentino. «M49» wears a signal collar and was last located, according to the province, on Monte Marzola above Trento. Environmentalists demonstrated on Wednesday in favor of releasing the bear into the wild.
In Trentino, the wild animals had been specifically reintroduced through a conservation program. They reproduced so successfully that around 90 brown bears are now thought to live there.
Update 22.8.2020
Bear M49 has gone off the grid. He has shed his radio collar and can therefore no longer be tracked. Experts are now reliant on the bear's tracks.
Since his escape from the Casteller enclosure, the bear had been continuously monitored via a collar equipped with a geolocation system. On August 16, the bear had moved into the Passo 5 Croci – Val Cion area, where GSM transmissions from the collar were severely disrupted due to poor mobile coverage. On August 19 at 2:00 p.m., the collar sent several positions, including from the previous day, and confirmed the position upstream of Malga Val Ciotto. As no further signals were received from the radio collar, a search was carried out on-site on the morning of Friday, August 21, 2020: the collar was found intact on the ground in the forest of the Vanoi Valley east of Trento. M49 can therefore no longer be tracked in the wild.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In our dossiers on recreational hunting gather fact-checks, analyses and background reports. The scientific evidence is presented in the overview Studies on the Effects of Recreational Hunting.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
