From the archive
8 Aug 2026
There are roughly eighty-one Marsican brown bears left on Earth, and all of them live in one Italian mountain range. The 2025 census that produced this figure was the most complete ever attempted: researchers from ISPRA and Sapienza University walked some 6,000 square kilometres of the Central Apennines, collected 854 hair samples, and genetically identified 70 individual animals. Forty-three females, thirty-eight males. That is the entire subspecies, counted by name, more or less.
The number that matters most is not eighty-one but sixteen. Fifty-six bears hold the historic core around the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park, a population that has remained stable, or increased slightly, over the past decade. Another nine live in recently colonised country nearby, enough to show the core and its edges are now one continuous population. But only sixteen bears occupy the wider, peripheral range - too few to be secure, and the part of the map where the recovery will either happen or not.
The census also explained why. Habitat quality is not the limiting factor out there; connection is. Areas linked to the core by usable corridors hold significantly more bears than equally distant land without them, and places with more road deaths, poisoning and poaching hold fewer. The density figures put it bluntly: 4.4 bears per 100 square kilometres in the core, 0.4 outside it. A tenth.
This is the gap Rewilding Apennines works in, through the EU-funded LIFE Bear-Smart Corridors initiative. The work is not glamorous and none of it involves touching a bear: electric fencing around orchards and beehives, bear-proof waste bins, restoring old fruit trees, talking with the communities the bears are walking towards. The premise is that a dispersing bear does not need wilderness so much as a valley where the bins don't feed it, the fences keep it honest, and the people have decided in advance to share the place.
If you keep bees, hens or fruit trees in bear country, fence them before the bears find them, not after. Electric fencing around orchards and beehives, and bear-proof bins for the village, are the measures Rewilding Apennines puts in along its corridors; a fence erected in advance is the difference between a passing bear and a problem bear.
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