Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking. Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:00:39The village of Artybash, Republic of Altai, the main gate to
00:00:42Lake Teletskoye, a small Baikal of Western Siberia, as it
00:00:46is often called in guidebooks. The Biya River, one of
00:00:49the largest rivers in the region, originates here.
00:00:52All around, wherever you look, there are taiga
00:00:54forests.
00:01:06It's quiet and peaceful here early in the morning, but in the evenings
00:01:10it's not safe to be outside. As
00:01:13dusk falls, locals try not to leave their
00:01:16homes.
00:01:20We had such an incident, my wife
00:01:22and I were sitting at home, approximately around
00:01:269:30 PM. That evening, Vitaly and his
00:01:30family were already getting ready for bed, when suddenly there was
00:01:33a strange noise in the yard.
00:01:36I heard my fence breaking,
00:01:39the cracking of boards, you can
00:01:42see them right there, and the heavy
00:01:45breathing of this bear, like this
00:01:47tricol. Vitaly decided
00:01:50to act, the plan was short, he wanted to run out
00:01:54and scream, thinking the animal would get scared
00:01:56and leave. I open the door and see him...
00:02:30over the fence, he knocked down several wooden
00:02:33sections with his paws to get through. Vitaly called the emergency
00:02:37services. Hunters and rangers
00:02:40arrived, inspected the area, but the predator was no longer
00:02:44nearby. They walk all around here and
00:02:48come out every day, they come out in the village one by one, two by two, so to speak,
00:02:51well, it's a difficult situation with bears.
00:02:55Not far from their house, a game trail. Here's characteristic flattened
00:02:59grass. Fresh tracks are visible, and if you
00:03:02see such a trail, it's better to get off it, because
00:03:06well, you could meet
00:03:08a bear.
00:03:10Vitaly is not a hunter, he doesn't have a rifle. To protect himself somehow,
00:03:14after that incident, he installed sensors on the forest
00:03:17side. They detect the approach of wild
00:03:20animals.
00:03:25The most important thing
00:03:29is these means.
00:03:32This is a siren with a motion sensor. So I set it up so if
00:03:36someone approaches, it will be heard.
00:03:40This is an audible horn, it's around
00:03:43120-130 decibels, much stronger than
00:03:47a car horn. And pepper spray, so
00:03:49it has a range of about
00:03:535 meters, it hits, well, accordingly, it deters, like
00:03:56pepper spray but for animals.
00:04:05That same night, when the animal was breaking into his house, nearby, on
00:04:09the bank of the Biya River, a tragedy occurred. At one in the morning, it
00:04:12came to the tent, accordingly, it probably sensed
00:04:16food, most likely.
00:04:19This is the very spot where, as locals say, the tent stood,
00:04:23beyond it is a cliff and the river. Twenty-nine-year-old Snezhanna
00:04:26came to relax in Altai from Novosibirsk region. Together
00:04:30with her boyfriend, he proposed to her
00:04:33the day before. The tourists were presumably warned that
00:04:36bears had become more frequent in the Turachaksky district, but the young people
00:04:39probably underestimated
00:04:43the danger; the girl could not be
00:04:44saved.
00:04:49The village of Artybash, Lake Teletskoye, and the surrounding areas are all
00:04:52tourist spots. Nature lovers enjoy coming here. Part
00:04:55of the Altai Biosphere Reserve is also located here.
00:05:02All eco-routes of the reserve are currently closed for
00:05:05visits, for the same reason, increased activity of brown
00:05:08bears. But there is a small settlement on the territory.
00:05:19animals, monitors their movements, marks
00:05:22their locations.
00:05:24Now we are walking along one of the paths
00:05:28of penetration, along one of the paths that bears use to go towards
00:05:32the village, well, here is the forest, here is
00:05:35an electric fence, they pass through here absolutely calmly, but, of course,
00:05:39at night.
00:05:42for the movement of animals camera traps that
00:05:45record every pass by them. Now we have
00:05:48a large bear population, about 30-25
00:05:52individuals, so they pass often, the memory cards fill up quickly,
00:05:56so now we are going to change the memory card on the camera trap,
00:06:00check, see who passed by. Now
00:06:03let's probably go further, there will be more there. Along the way we meet
00:06:07numerous tracks, on the wet ground a paw print of an
00:06:11adult animal was imprinted. Here we can see very well the track
00:06:14of a fairly large
00:06:16bear, it was
00:06:19imprinted here quite well here, that is, here
00:06:22there are more, there are tracks of wild boars,
00:06:26horses and cows, of course, but
00:06:28this is very difficult to confuse with anything.
00:06:32Here's the camera trap itself, Roman reviews what was
00:06:36recorded this time, well, the very first
00:06:39shot,
00:08:12food for bears. Yuri Nikolaevich recalls similar
00:08:15situations. The problem is that if a bear once
00:08:18tasted something somewhere, it remembers the way to that
00:08:22place for a long time.
00:08:25He can live up to 40 years, he has a good memory, that
00:08:29is, in 2008 he came here, he
00:08:32ate. Then there was 2014,
00:08:352018. Then the years were milder,
00:08:39but there were cedar nuts, but very few. And
00:08:43he didn't get enough and he still came here to
00:08:47the settlements,
00:08:47he came.
00:08:54If there is food in the taiga, the bear prefers to avoid people, says
00:08:58Kolinkin, and the fact that in hungry years the animal goes to feed in populated
00:09:01areas is often the fault of humans themselves.
00:09:03Many people go into
00:09:07the taiga to collect cedar nuts, they
00:09:10leave behind them
00:09:12a lot of food scraps, uncleaned
00:09:16camps, all this accustoms the bear
00:09:19to human food, that is, at
00:09:22tourist bases they even feed them, sometimes at some, specially,
00:09:26to take selfies there, something similar, this is, of course,
00:09:30unacceptable, but unfortunately not everyone
00:09:32knows this, these kinds of individuals, they have
00:09:36a low threshold of fear of humans, they can
00:09:40easily overcome it.
00:09:56The reserve is a specially protected area, where
00:09:59hunting and shooting of animals, including bears, is prohibited,
00:10:02so all that employees and residents of the village Yayely can do to protect themselves
00:10:06is to monitor the approaches of predators to houses,
00:10:10so that they can take shelter themselves in time.
00:10:25but one bear was found after all - a bear cub, it
00:10:28sits in a tree, as bear cubs generally
00:10:32do, but if a meeting with a bear does
00:10:35happen, then improvised special means are used,
00:10:39as practice has shown, the most
00:10:41effective is a flare.
00:10:43It is, of course, for a short distance,
00:10:47but the bear will definitely not come closer.
00:10:50A
00:10:53curfew is in effect on the territory of the reserve. With the onset of
00:10:56darkness, residents of the village of Yayely do not go out onto the streets, and they also
00:11:00carefully collect all garbage, dispose of food scraps
00:11:04in special containers inaccessible to bears.
00:11:07This is what they look like. No one
00:11:10bothers us. First, there must be a proper
00:11:13fence, not one that a person,
00:11:16bear, anyone, a horse, a cow, can push
00:11:19and it falls. If it's normal, a bear won't climb over it.
00:11:23A high fence is good. An electric fence is
00:11:26good. No fence, there are apples, unharvested
00:11:30crops on the plot, there will be a bear, where will it
00:11:33go, of course, it
00:11:34will come.
00:11:38How many bears are exactly in the taiga now, what is their population,
00:11:41no one can say for sure, they are counted by various non-contact
00:11:45methods, which do not give a hundred percent
00:11:47assessment.
00:11:50Well, we are moving, for example, along dirt forest
00:11:53roads, and we...
00:12:25deep into the taiga, and my parents, uncles, father
00:12:28were talking, there was a whole story, who got a bear, they went
00:12:3230 km away, that's where they found it.
00:12:36Now there are many more predators, no need to search, they
00:12:39come to the villages themselves. Here, I'll give you a cookie.
00:12:43Want a cookie? The bear
00:12:45broke fences and ran from one plot to another, where it ate
00:12:49pears. Hunters believe that this bear behavior is associated
00:12:52not only with poor cedar harvest, but also with a strong...
00:13:25he eats carrion, he likes to kill an animal,
00:13:28bury it, for example, right, when it's rotten, every
00:13:31third bear is practically sick, well,
00:13:35that's why no one has any value
00:13:38for it now, it's hunted.
00:13:42Now he is part of the emergency hunter team. Together with colleagues, they
00:13:45patrol the surroundings. Bears also regularly visit their
00:13:49village of Dmitriyevka, sometimes in the daytime. Lyubov
00:13:52Afanasieva saw a predator near...
00:14:55with cubs, but she's quite old, she doesn't
00:14:58come here, but there are a lot
00:15:00of young ones. Dmitriyevka is not a remote
00:15:04village, it has about 800 residents, a school, a kindergarten,
00:15:08a library, a club. People keep livestock, grow vegetables,
00:15:11fruits, work. Normal life, the order
00:15:14of which is disturbed by bears this season. If before
00:15:18the bear only walked near the village, it didn't go into the village itself, but this
00:15:21year it's already directly in
00:15:24Dmitriyevka. It raided two private
00:15:27households, and also went into gardens in the neighboring
00:15:30village of Vudalovka. The authorities took measures. A curfew
00:15:34was introduced, raids were organized, and the school
00:15:37schedule was changed. At the
00:15:40municipal district level, the commission on
00:15:44emergency situations decided that in the evening,
00:15:47from 8 PM,
00:15:50our children should not be on the streets. To understand
00:15:54the scale of the problem, we turned to one of the leading bear specialists in
00:15:58Russia, Mikhail Arsenyevich Krechmar, zoologist,
00:16:01hunter, candidate of biological sciences, writer and
00:16:05journalist of the Far East.
00:16:08For years, editor-in-chief of the Russian hunting magazine, he has been studying
00:16:12brown bears since eighty- sixth year.
00:16:14Statistics regarding the number of bears
00:16:18are very relative,
00:16:22and I personally don't believe them at all,
00:16:25but there are some indirect indicators by
00:16:29which we can judge that the number
00:16:32of bears since the end of the 1980s
00:16:35in our country has
00:16:38increased by approximately three times. According to official data from the Ministry of Natural Resources, as of
00:16:412026, there are almost 308,000 brown
00:16:44bears living in Russia. In
00:16:471990, there were about
00:16:49133,000.
00:16:51The main population is concentrated in Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk
00:16:55territories, with 26,000 in each. In Kamchatka,
00:16:5824,000. In Irkutsk region,
00:17:0122. In Altai, just under 5,000. In
00:17:04Buryatia, a little over six thousand.
00:17:38Usually there are 20-30 incidents per
00:17:42year. In 2025, there were 34 cases, in
00:17:452024 - 19.
00:17:48Mikhail Krechmar cites his data. We have
00:17:51between 30 and 80 people die from
00:17:55bears. Well, now, of course,
00:17:58it feels like a big
00:18:02problem has occurred. Many bears are numerous and so on.
00:18:06Well, now we... seem to be on
00:18:09the verge of major problems. Irkutsk
00:18:13region - a horticultural association. In summer, families live
00:18:16here, come for berries, mushrooms and silence, but this
00:18:20year a full rest did not happen. Bears
00:18:23came out to people and one of them walked right into
00:18:26the plot.
00:18:33That day, Olga stayed at her parents' dacha with two small
00:18:36children.
00:19:12When the bear was caught, I managed to close the door, I was
00:19:14standing like this, pushing with my
00:19:17feet, I was standing like this, holding
00:19:20the door, she called her brother and he started yelling
00:19:24at the animal remotely through the video surveillance camera.
00:20:07let them out to play,
00:20:10that they are afraid to go to the dacha, they are afraid.
00:20:25The situation in Buryatia is serious now, here bear
00:20:28sightings are recorded daily, the authorities call
00:20:31this a mass phenomenon, almost fifty calls in
00:20:34just one day, and these are not just
00:20:38sightings, this year in the republic bears attacked people, and he bites my legs,
00:20:42just like this, he takes them and bites, just
00:20:46like this, he grabs them and...
00:20:50and I only have one thought in
00:20:53my head, how to get rid of him, it's just
00:20:56that, and I try to hit him in the eye with my right hand,
00:21:00well, my reaction, his reaction, it's like heaven
00:21:04and earth, in short, he shakes his head and apparently he
00:21:07hit with the stake, that's the only thing
00:21:10noted, but here everything is fine, everything is normal.
00:21:14That's it, and I start to scream wildly, and my voice
00:21:17is powerful. Good voice. Sergey
00:21:20Georgievich was admitted to the surgery department in early September with
00:21:24deep lacerations after a bear attack, but he was
00:21:27lucky to escape. The other two cases of residents encountering
00:21:31predators ended fatally. The reasons for such bear behavior are the
00:21:34same as throughout Siberia. Yes, of course, the bear coming out to populated
00:21:38areas is primarily due to unauthorized dumps, people
00:21:42feed them, leave food waste, animal
00:21:45carcasses are thrown, well, in the forest, accordingly, all this
00:21:49attracts bears. In the republic, special hunter brigades
00:21:53have been formed. 24 in 12 districts.
00:21:56They patrol at night and in the morning, they are paid
00:21:5915,000 for shooting. In recent times, 135
00:22:03bears have been regulated. Alexander
00:22:06Grebenshchikov is a hunter with many years of experience, director of a hunting
00:22:09farm. At home, he has a collection of trophies obtained over decades.
00:22:13This is a simple goat,
00:22:15a local, a local goat was here,
00:22:19and... it was shot during
00:22:22the rut, but a bear is not just a trophy for him, it's
00:22:26an adversary he knows well, and he explains,
00:22:30the reason isn't so much hunger, the bear has unlearned to fear
00:22:33humans. In the nineties, in the eighties, there were commercial
00:22:37hunters who were штатные, they were in the forests, they sat in
00:22:41the forest, and hunted squirrels, there were many
00:22:44squirrel hunters, many sable hunters, they hunted sables
00:22:48and the bear... encountered humans in
00:22:51the forest. Now, however, there are few
00:22:54sable hunters, so it turns out that there isn't much
00:22:58human presence in the forest. This bear came down, it hadn't seen
00:23:02a human, and a human for a bear is, well,
00:23:05like another food source in the biological
00:23:08chain. And advice from an experienced hunter in case
00:23:12you do encounter a bear: don't
00:23:14panic, the most important thing.
00:23:18If possible, slowly, slowly back away, do
00:23:21not make any sudden movements.
00:23:23This bear will
00:23:27react to any
00:23:30sudden movement, to
00:23:33running. If a person runs, that's it, it's
00:23:37for its prey, it will catch up, the bear will catch up
00:23:40immediately.
00:23:47management for those.
00:24:30with shots, he hid somewhere nearby, saw
00:24:33us,
00:24:37ran away. Now near Agafya Lykova's hut,
00:24:41volunteers are on duty around the clock, helping her with
00:24:43household chores and making sure the bear doesn't come too close to the
00:24:47hermit's dwelling.
00:24:51The main thing now, experts say, is that the peak
00:24:53of confrontations and unexpected encounters with bears is yet to come. I
00:24:57certainly wouldn't want to be a prophet of bad things,
00:25:01but it's absolutely certain that the peak of conflicts
00:25:05will fall
00:25:08on the last weeks before they go into their dens and on
00:25:12the first two weeks after
00:25:15the snow cover falls.
00:25:18Well, it's always been this simple. If there are still tracks a week
00:25:22after the snow, it makes sense to be vigilant. The Ministry of
00:25:25Natural Resources has already announced a call for proposals from regions on how to
00:25:28change hunting laws. Hunters demand the removal of
00:25:32quotas and an extension of license validity for the entire season. We
00:25:35don't have a common understanding of a wildlife
00:25:38management plan, and we must manage it,
00:25:42throughout the entire territory of our country.
00:25:45Cold weather is coming soon, then it will become clear whether the bears have gone into
00:25:49their dens, or remained as stragglers. Mikhail Krechmar
00:25:52notes that if after a week or two after the first
00:25:55snow, bear tracks are seen, one should be
00:25:58wary. The peak has not yet passed.