Brown bears vs farmers: the dark side of rewilding
telegraph.co.ukdeath can now strike at any time.As I walk down the mountain slopes with shepherd Philippe Périssé to inspect his flock, we find the remains of a recently killed sheep, the bones stripped clean.
Nearby its hide has been expertly skinned from the body. Philippe flips it over with his ganchou (the Pyrenean version of a shepherd’s crook) to find his family moniker ‘SA’ stamped on the bloody wool.‘It was a bear,’ he says, grimly. ‘They will walk off with the sheep in their mouths like a fox with a chicken.’The fog swirling around us is common in this region, enveloping the jagged peaks and scree slopes and rolling over the meadows.
Bears have notoriously poor eyesight and so, Périssé says, have adapted to time their attacks with the weather, creeping towards the noise of the tinkling bells the sheep wear around their necks.
The bells are part of a pastoralist tradition to locate their animals on the mountains, although the bears are also now taking advantage of this to launch surprise attacks. ‘Sometimes when the weather is like this I will stand here and listen to the bears crunching the bones through the mist,’ Périssé tells me as we walk, his three border collies hugging close to our side.This is bear country: the epicentre of the remarkable return of these apex predators to the Pyrenees over the past 26 years.
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