Brown bear listed in Red Book of Azerbaijan was killed
By Narmina Mammadova
In the Shahdag National Park, unidentified people killed a bear, the species of which are included in the Red Book of Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources reported on November 23.
It is noted that the department appealed to the Ismayilli district police in connection with the case of the murder of a brown bear in the Basgal forest range.
It is not yet known who shot the animal included in the Red Book of Azerbaijan.
The fact of the shooting of a brown bear is under investigation.
The brown bear is a usual inhabitant of highland forests and rarely appears in lowland forest. It can be found in the upper part of the forest belt, where it eats rich grass stems on glades and meadows, looks for worms, insects and other invertebrates under stones and deadfall. By the end of summer, when bilberry, cherry plum and others ripe, bars come down to forests and stay there till late autumn. They switch to high-caloric food such as acorns, beech nuts and especially chestnut. At this time, bears can go through tens of kilometers.
Continent bears eat fish when there is spawning in internal rivers. Other food is not so abundant in the late summer and early autumn, and it is the time when bears can be easily discovered by a hunter because they are more active and spend more time above the forest border to find food necessary for hibernation fat.
The first strong snowing of late autumn or early winter pushes them into dens. Healthy and well-fed bears lie in dens in late December which they arrange in caves, hollows and deadfall piles and fall asleep till spring. About 2-3 cubs may be born in a den. In warm and little-snow winters males often ramble and don't fully hibernate because their body temperature doesn't decline. In early spring, bears wake up, full-grown males first. Waking up in spring, bears again have thick and shiny fur.
After the 1970s, bear numbers declined in Azerbaijan. Their population increased between 1993 and 2000. According to annual counts carried out by the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Azerbaijan, there were approximately 1,600 individuals in the country at the time.
Habitat destruction and especially illegal hunting have been suggested as major limiting factors for the bear population in Caucasus.
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