Wildlife biologists like Wolfgang Schröder said it straight away, now it’s official: the brown bear that was run over by a train and fatally injured on May 23 near Schwarzach im Pongau in Salzburger Land is the animal that had been killed in the six weeks before moved through the Upper Bavarian mountains and killed three sheep near Oberaudorf. The comparison of the DNA of the carcass with the gene traces on the torn sheep has now shown, said the State Office for the Environment (LfU) in Augsburg.
It is also not clear whether the cub came from the bear population in Trentino, Italy. The comparison with the authorities in Italy and Austria is still ongoing, said an LfU spokesman. In the meantime, however, it is firmly assumed that the approximately two-year-old young animal migrated from Trentino. The reason: no other bear region in Europe is as close to Bavaria as Trentin, and cubs regularly migrate from there. It is therefore very likely that bears that suddenly appear in Bavaria come from there.
The brown bear was first detected in Upper Bavaria in mid-April, near the Ursprungpass, a border crossing from the Miesbach district to Tyrol. His appearance sharply aggravated the dispute over the return of wolves and bears, especially after the sheep killing near Oberaudorf. The animal behaved – apart from this incident and another in the Berchtesgadener Land, where the sheep were also unsecured on the pasture – completely inconspicuous. In Upper Bavaria, no one saw the young bear. Most of the evidence came from wildlife cameras. Thanks to these photos, the LfU experts were able to understand that the bear migrated eastwards along the mountains. So it was a matter of time before he moved to Austria. In the collision with the train, the bear may have died immediately. The Salzburg state government decided on the day of the accident that the carcass should be prepared and used for hunter training.