Austria's brown bears face extinction: WWF

Yahoo News 29 Feb 08;

Austria's brown bear population is facing extinction as only two of the animals -- both males -- are still alive out of a population that had numbered at least 35, the World Wildlife Fund said Friday.

Only 19-year-old Djuro and his seven-year-old son Moritz are definitely still living in the Limestone Alps in central Austria, said the WWF, which had taken DNA traces taken from the hair and excrement from

A complete study of the Austrian brown bear population, carried out by the WWF in collaboration with the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology (FIWI), is set to be published in the next few days.

The study shows that out of the total population of 35, nine bears have died and the fate of another 24 is not known.

The last tracks of Elsa, Moritz's eight-year-old half-sister, were seen in a riverbed in northern Styria at the beginning of 2007, said the FIWI's bear expert Georg Rauer.

"We hope very much that she'll have given birth to cubs again this year and that they'll soon turn up somewhere," Rauer said.

But since mother bears with cubs are particularly shy, the experts estimate they will not know her fate until May at the earliest.

"It appears that with Elsa we may have lost the last female bear able to reproduce," said WWF project leader, Christoph Walder.

Given the recent mild weather, Moritz is expected to come out of hibernation fairly soon, but he has been searching for a mate for more than two years without any success, WWF said.

His mother, Rosemarie, has not been seen since 2002.

Djuro is the only surviving bear of three brown bears imported from Slovenia in 1993. He has fathered 22 cubs with a number of different females, including his daughters, Elsa and Rosemarie.

"But he, too, has been looking for a mate for three years without any luck," WWF said.