RUSSIA24 — Spetsialnii reportazh
20260920 003200 UTC
323 transcript segments
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[00:00:39] The village of Artybash, Republic of Altai, the main gate to
[00:00:42] Lake Teletskoye, a small Baikal of Western Siberia, as it
[00:00:46] is often called in guidebooks. The Biya River, one of
[00:00:49] the largest rivers in the region, originates here.
[00:00:52] All around, wherever you look, there are taiga
[00:00:54] forests.
[00:01:06] It's quiet and peaceful here early in the morning, but in the evenings
[00:01:10] it's not safe to be outside. As
[00:01:13] dusk falls, locals try not to leave their
[00:01:16] homes.
[00:01:20] We had such an incident, my wife
[00:01:22] and I were sitting at home, approximately around
[00:01:26] 9:30 PM. That evening, Vitaly and his
[00:01:30] family were already getting ready for bed, when suddenly there was
[00:01:33] a strange noise in the yard.
[00:01:36] I heard my fence breaking,
[00:01:39] the cracking of boards, you can
[00:01:42] see them right there, and the heavy
[00:01:45] breathing of this bear, like this
[00:01:47] tricol. Vitaly decided
[00:01:50] to act, the plan was short, he wanted to run out
[00:01:54] and scream, thinking the animal would get scared
[00:01:56] and leave. I open the door and see him...
[00:02:30] over the fence, he knocked down several wooden
[00:02:33] sections with his paws to get through. Vitaly called the emergency
[00:02:37] services. Hunters and rangers
[00:02:40] arrived, inspected the area, but the predator was no longer
[00:02:44] nearby. They walk all around here and
[00:02:48] come out every day, they come out in the village one by one, two by two, so to speak,
[00:02:51] well, it's a difficult situation with bears.
[00:02:55] Not far from their house, a game trail. Here's characteristic flattened
[00:02:59] grass. Fresh tracks are visible, and if you
[00:03:02] see such a trail, it's better to get off it, because
[00:03:06] well, you could meet
[00:03:08] a bear.
[00:03:10] Vitaly is not a hunter, he doesn't have a rifle. To protect himself somehow,
[00:03:14] after that incident, he installed sensors on the forest
[00:03:17] side. They detect the approach of wild
[00:03:20] animals.
[00:03:25] The most important thing
[00:03:29] is these means.
[00:03:32] This is a siren with a motion sensor. So I set it up so if
[00:03:36] someone approaches, it will be heard.
[00:03:40] This is an audible horn, it's around
[00:03:43] 120-130 decibels, much stronger than
[00:03:47] a car horn. And pepper spray, so
[00:03:49] it has a range of about
[00:03:53] 5 meters, it hits, well, accordingly, it deters, like
[00:03:56] pepper spray but for animals.
[00:04:05] That same night, when the animal was breaking into his house, nearby, on
[00:04:09] the bank of the Biya River, a tragedy occurred. At one in the morning, it
[00:04:12] came to the tent, accordingly, it probably sensed
[00:04:16] food, most likely.
[00:04:19] This is the very spot where, as locals say, the tent stood,
[00:04:23] beyond it is a cliff and the river. Twenty-nine-year-old Snezhanna
[00:04:26] came to relax in Altai from Novosibirsk region. Together
[00:04:30] with her boyfriend, he proposed to her
[00:04:33] the day before. The tourists were presumably warned that
[00:04:36] bears had become more frequent in the Turachaksky district, but the young people
[00:04:39] probably underestimated
[00:04:43] the danger; the girl could not be
[00:04:44] saved.
[00:04:49] The village of Artybash, Lake Teletskoye, and the surrounding areas are all
[00:04:52] tourist spots. Nature lovers enjoy coming here. Part
[00:04:55] of the Altai Biosphere Reserve is also located here.
[00:05:02] All eco-routes of the reserve are currently closed for
[00:05:05] visits, for the same reason, increased activity of brown
[00:05:08] bears. But there is a small settlement on the territory.
[00:05:19] animals, monitors their movements, marks
[00:05:22] their locations.
[00:05:24] Now we are walking along one of the paths
[00:05:28] of penetration, along one of the paths that bears use to go towards
[00:05:32] the village, well, here is the forest, here is
[00:05:35] an electric fence, they pass through here absolutely calmly, but, of course,
[00:05:39] at night.
[00:05:42] for the movement of animals camera traps that
[00:05:45] record every pass by them. Now we have
[00:05:48] a large bear population, about 30-25
[00:05:52] individuals, so they pass often, the memory cards fill up quickly,
[00:05:56] so now we are going to change the memory card on the camera trap,
[00:06:00] check, see who passed by. Now
[00:06:03] let's probably go further, there will be more there. Along the way we meet
[00:06:07] numerous tracks, on the wet ground a paw print of an
[00:06:11] adult animal was imprinted. Here we can see very well the track
[00:06:14] of a fairly large
[00:06:16] bear, it was
[00:06:19] imprinted here quite well here, that is, here
[00:06:22] there are more, there are tracks of wild boars,
[00:06:26] horses and cows, of course, but
[00:06:28] this is very difficult to confuse with anything.
[00:06:32] Here's the camera trap itself, Roman reviews what was
[00:06:36] recorded this time, well, the very first
[00:06:39] shot,
[00:08:12] food for bears. Yuri Nikolaevich recalls similar
[00:08:15] situations. The problem is that if a bear once
[00:08:18] tasted something somewhere, it remembers the way to that
[00:08:22] place for a long time.
[00:08:25] He can live up to 40 years, he has a good memory, that
[00:08:29] is, in 2008 he came here, he
[00:08:32] ate. Then there was 2014,
[00:08:35] 2018. Then the years were milder,
[00:08:39] but there were cedar nuts, but very few. And
[00:08:43] he didn't get enough and he still came here to
[00:08:47] the settlements,
[00:08:47] he came.
[00:08:54] If there is food in the taiga, the bear prefers to avoid people, says
[00:08:58] Kolinkin, and the fact that in hungry years the animal goes to feed in populated
[00:09:01] areas is often the fault of humans themselves.
[00:09:03] Many people go into
[00:09:07] the taiga to collect cedar nuts, they
[00:09:10] leave behind them
[00:09:12] a lot of food scraps, uncleaned
[00:09:16] camps, all this accustoms the bear
[00:09:19] to human food, that is, at
[00:09:22] tourist bases they even feed them, sometimes at some, specially,
[00:09:26] to take selfies there, something similar, this is, of course,
[00:09:30] unacceptable, but unfortunately not everyone
[00:09:32] knows this, these kinds of individuals, they have
[00:09:36] a low threshold of fear of humans, they can
[00:09:40] easily overcome it.
[00:09:56] The reserve is a specially protected area, where
[00:09:59] hunting and shooting of animals, including bears, is prohibited,
[00:10:02] so all that employees and residents of the village Yayely can do to protect themselves
[00:10:06] is to monitor the approaches of predators to houses,
[00:10:10] so that they can take shelter themselves in time.
[00:10:25] but one bear was found after all - a bear cub, it
[00:10:28] sits in a tree, as bear cubs generally
[00:10:32] do, but if a meeting with a bear does
[00:10:35] happen, then improvised special means are used,
[00:10:39] as practice has shown, the most
[00:10:41] effective is a flare.
[00:10:43] It is, of course, for a short distance,
[00:10:47] but the bear will definitely not come closer.
[00:10:50] A
[00:10:53] curfew is in effect on the territory of the reserve. With the onset of
[00:10:56] darkness, residents of the village of Yayely do not go out onto the streets, and they also
[00:11:00] carefully collect all garbage, dispose of food scraps
[00:11:04] in special containers inaccessible to bears.
[00:11:07] This is what they look like. No one
[00:11:10] bothers us. First, there must be a proper
[00:11:13] fence, not one that a person,
[00:11:16] bear, anyone, a horse, a cow, can push
[00:11:19] and it falls. If it's normal, a bear won't climb over it.
[00:11:23] A high fence is good. An electric fence is
[00:11:26] good. No fence, there are apples, unharvested
[00:11:30] crops on the plot, there will be a bear, where will it
[00:11:33] go, of course, it
[00:11:34] will come.
[00:11:38] How many bears are exactly in the taiga now, what is their population,
[00:11:41] no one can say for sure, they are counted by various non-contact
[00:11:45] methods, which do not give a hundred percent
[00:11:47] assessment.
[00:11:50] Well, we are moving, for example, along dirt forest
[00:11:53] roads, and we...
[00:12:25] deep into the taiga, and my parents, uncles, father
[00:12:28] were talking, there was a whole story, who got a bear, they went
[00:12:32] 30 km away, that's where they found it.
[00:12:36] Now there are many more predators, no need to search, they
[00:12:39] come to the villages themselves. Here, I'll give you a cookie.
[00:12:43] Want a cookie? The bear
[00:12:45] broke fences and ran from one plot to another, where it ate
[00:12:49] pears. Hunters believe that this bear behavior is associated
[00:12:52] not only with poor cedar harvest, but also with a strong...
[00:13:25] he eats carrion, he likes to kill an animal,
[00:13:28] bury it, for example, right, when it's rotten, every
[00:13:31] third bear is practically sick, well,
[00:13:35] that's why no one has any value
[00:13:38] for it now, it's hunted.
[00:13:42] Now he is part of the emergency hunter team. Together with colleagues, they
[00:13:45] patrol the surroundings. Bears also regularly visit their
[00:13:49] village of Dmitriyevka, sometimes in the daytime. Lyubov
[00:13:52] Afanasieva saw a predator near...
[00:14:55] with cubs, but she's quite old, she doesn't
[00:14:58] come here, but there are a lot
[00:15:00] of young ones. Dmitriyevka is not a remote
[00:15:04] village, it has about 800 residents, a school, a kindergarten,
[00:15:08] a library, a club. People keep livestock, grow vegetables,
[00:15:11] fruits, work. Normal life, the order
[00:15:14] of which is disturbed by bears this season. If before
[00:15:18] the bear only walked near the village, it didn't go into the village itself, but this
[00:15:21] year it's already directly in
[00:15:24] Dmitriyevka. It raided two private
[00:15:27] households, and also went into gardens in the neighboring
[00:15:30] village of Vudalovka. The authorities took measures. A curfew
[00:15:34] was introduced, raids were organized, and the school
[00:15:37] schedule was changed. At the
[00:15:40] municipal district level, the commission on
[00:15:44] emergency situations decided that in the evening,
[00:15:47] from 8 PM,
[00:15:50] our children should not be on the streets. To understand
[00:15:54] the scale of the problem, we turned to one of the leading bear specialists in
[00:15:58] Russia, Mikhail Arsenyevich Krechmar, zoologist,
[00:16:01] hunter, candidate of biological sciences, writer and
[00:16:05] journalist of the Far East.
[00:16:08] For years, editor-in-chief of the Russian hunting magazine, he has been studying
[00:16:12] brown bears since eighty- sixth year.
[00:16:14] Statistics regarding the number of bears
[00:16:18] are very relative,
[00:16:22] and I personally don't believe them at all,
[00:16:25] but there are some indirect indicators by
[00:16:29] which we can judge that the number
[00:16:32] of bears since the end of the 1980s
[00:16:35] in our country has
[00:16:38] increased by approximately three times. According to official data from the Ministry of Natural Resources, as of
[00:16:41] 2026, there are almost 308,000 brown
[00:16:44] bears living in Russia. In
[00:16:47] 1990, there were about
[00:16:49] 133,000.
[00:16:51] The main population is concentrated in Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk
[00:16:55] territories, with 26,000 in each. In Kamchatka,
[00:16:58] 24,000. In Irkutsk region,
[00:17:01] 22. In Altai, just under 5,000. In
[00:17:04] Buryatia, a little over six thousand.
[00:17:38] Usually there are 20-30 incidents per
[00:17:42] year. In 2025, there were 34 cases, in
[00:17:45] 2024 - 19.
[00:17:48] Mikhail Krechmar cites his data. We have
[00:17:51] between 30 and 80 people die from
[00:17:55] bears. Well, now, of course,
[00:17:58] it feels like a big
[00:18:02] problem has occurred. Many bears are numerous and so on.
[00:18:06] Well, now we... seem to be on
[00:18:09] the verge of major problems. Irkutsk
[00:18:13] region - a horticultural association. In summer, families live
[00:18:16] here, come for berries, mushrooms and silence, but this
[00:18:20] year a full rest did not happen. Bears
[00:18:23] came out to people and one of them walked right into
[00:18:26] the plot.
[00:18:33] That day, Olga stayed at her parents' dacha with two small
[00:18:36] children.
[00:19:12] When the bear was caught, I managed to close the door, I was
[00:19:14] standing like this, pushing with my
[00:19:17] feet, I was standing like this, holding
[00:19:20] the door, she called her brother and he started yelling
[00:19:24] at the animal remotely through the video surveillance camera.
[00:20:07] let them out to play,
[00:20:10] that they are afraid to go to the dacha, they are afraid.
[00:20:25] The situation in Buryatia is serious now, here bear
[00:20:28] sightings are recorded daily, the authorities call
[00:20:31] this a mass phenomenon, almost fifty calls in
[00:20:34] just one day, and these are not just
[00:20:38] sightings, this year in the republic bears attacked people, and he bites my legs,
[00:20:42] just like this, he takes them and bites, just
[00:20:46] like this, he grabs them and...
[00:20:50] and I only have one thought in
[00:20:53] my head, how to get rid of him, it's just
[00:20:56] that, and I try to hit him in the eye with my right hand,
[00:21:00] well, my reaction, his reaction, it's like heaven
[00:21:04] and earth, in short, he shakes his head and apparently he
[00:21:07] hit with the stake, that's the only thing
[00:21:10] noted, but here everything is fine, everything is normal.
[00:21:14] That's it, and I start to scream wildly, and my voice
[00:21:17] is powerful. Good voice. Sergey
[00:21:20] Georgievich was admitted to the surgery department in early September with
[00:21:24] deep lacerations after a bear attack, but he was
[00:21:27] lucky to escape. The other two cases of residents encountering
[00:21:31] predators ended fatally. The reasons for such bear behavior are the
[00:21:34] same as throughout Siberia. Yes, of course, the bear coming out to populated
[00:21:38] areas is primarily due to unauthorized dumps, people
[00:21:42] feed them, leave food waste, animal
[00:21:45] carcasses are thrown, well, in the forest, accordingly, all this
[00:21:49] attracts bears. In the republic, special hunter brigades
[00:21:53] have been formed. 24 in 12 districts.
[00:21:56] They patrol at night and in the morning, they are paid
[00:21:59] 15,000 for shooting. In recent times, 135
[00:22:03] bears have been regulated. Alexander
[00:22:06] Grebenshchikov is a hunter with many years of experience, director of a hunting
[00:22:09] farm. At home, he has a collection of trophies obtained over decades.
[00:22:13] This is a simple goat,
[00:22:15] a local, a local goat was here,
[00:22:19] and... it was shot during
[00:22:22] the rut, but a bear is not just a trophy for him, it's
[00:22:26] an adversary he knows well, and he explains,
[00:22:30] the reason isn't so much hunger, the bear has unlearned to fear
[00:22:33] humans. In the nineties, in the eighties, there were commercial
[00:22:37] hunters who were штатные, they were in the forests, they sat in
[00:22:41] the forest, and hunted squirrels, there were many
[00:22:44] squirrel hunters, many sable hunters, they hunted sables
[00:22:48] and the bear... encountered humans in
[00:22:51] the forest. Now, however, there are few
[00:22:54] sable hunters, so it turns out that there isn't much
[00:22:58] human presence in the forest. This bear came down, it hadn't seen
[00:23:02] a human, and a human for a bear is, well,
[00:23:05] like another food source in the biological
[00:23:08] chain. And advice from an experienced hunter in case
[00:23:12] you do encounter a bear: don't
[00:23:14] panic, the most important thing.
[00:23:18] If possible, slowly, slowly back away, do
[00:23:21] not make any sudden movements.
[00:23:23] This bear will
[00:23:27] react to any
[00:23:30] sudden movement, to
[00:23:33] running. If a person runs, that's it, it's
[00:23:37] for its prey, it will catch up, the bear will catch up
[00:23:40] immediately.
[00:23:47] management for those.
[00:24:30] with shots, he hid somewhere nearby, saw
[00:24:33] us,
[00:24:37] ran away. Now near Agafya Lykova's hut,
[00:24:41] volunteers are on duty around the clock, helping her with
[00:24:43] household chores and making sure the bear doesn't come too close to the
[00:24:47] hermit's dwelling.
[00:24:51] The main thing now, experts say, is that the peak
[00:24:53] of confrontations and unexpected encounters with bears is yet to come. I
[00:24:57] certainly wouldn't want to be a prophet of bad things,
[00:25:01] but it's absolutely certain that the peak of conflicts
[00:25:05] will fall
[00:25:08] on the last weeks before they go into their dens and on
[00:25:12] the first two weeks after
[00:25:15] the snow cover falls.
[00:25:18] Well, it's always been this simple. If there are still tracks a week
[00:25:22] after the snow, it makes sense to be vigilant. The Ministry of
[00:25:25] Natural Resources has already announced a call for proposals from regions on how to
[00:25:28] change hunting laws. Hunters demand the removal of
[00:25:32] quotas and an extension of license validity for the entire season. We
[00:25:35] don't have a common understanding of a wildlife
[00:25:38] management plan, and we must manage it,
[00:25:42] throughout the entire territory of our country.
[00:25:45] Cold weather is coming soon, then it will become clear whether the bears have gone into
[00:25:49] their dens, or remained as stragglers. Mikhail Krechmar
[00:25:52] notes that if after a week or two after the first
[00:25:55] snow, bear tracks are seen, one should be
[00:25:58] wary. The peak has not yet passed.