Within the LIFE DINALP BEAR project 3 bears have been so far fitted with GPS collars in Slovenia – 2 females and 1 male.

The first female (no. 41110, age 6, 120 kg) was captured at the edge of Loška dolina. During her tracking, she spent most of the time on Javorniki Mts. above Loška dolina (yellow dots on the map). Unfortunately, she managed to remove her collar so tracking has ended already after two months. We will use the same collar to fit it on another bear in the near future.

The second female (no. 41112, age 13-15, 131 kg) was captured on Snežnik plateau. She spent most of the time around Snežnik and occasionally approached the vicinity of the village Zabiče (red dots on the map). We are still monitoring this bear and she is currently spending most of the time around Sviščaki. At the moment she feeds almost exclusively on beechnuts, which is typical for autumns with abundant beechnut production. We expect her to enter her winter den shortly.

The male (no. 41112, age 10-15, 175 kg) named ‘France’ was captured near Sodražica. He soon moved south and spent most of the time on Racna gora and around Babno Polje. He often crossed the national border with Croatia and entered Gorski kotar area (blue dots on the map). He was fitted with a special GPS collar, which has built-in video camera which records videos from the bear prospective. Because the camera uses a lot of battery, lifetime of such collar is only about a month. After the battery ran out, the collar dropped off automatically. We managed to retrieve the collar and send it back to the manufacturer, who downloaded the recorded videos. We’re looking forward to now go through about 30 hours of video recordings with intimate moments from France’s life. We will prepare a compilation of the most interesting recordings and publish it on our web site.