They find dead in a cave in Palencia the bear that fought against a male in June and her two cubs

A team of Environment agents from the Junta de Castilla y León has located in the mountains of Palencia, in a well 33 meters deep, the corpses of a bear and her two cubs.

Last June a video captured some images in which a female bear – which corresponds to the one found – was seen fighting with a male to protect one of his cubs.

He ended up dying off a cliff and the female fled with at least one of her children.

The Environment agents followed their trail, and began to leave water and food in the cave where they had taken refuge, but now they have certified that the plantigrades died.

The bodies have been referred to the Wild Animal Recovery Center, located in Burgos, to determine with a necropsy what has been the cause of death and if indeed the young bears are children of that adult.

The agents of the Board have had the support of the Brown Bear Foundation and those in charge of taking care of the Montaña Palentina Natural Park, where these mammals were found.

On June 5, some mountaineers watched and recorded a tough fight between two adults.

The male, following a common practice in his species that consists of trying to kill the litters of the females so that they come back into heat and reproduce again, tried to kill one of those small specimens.

The mother stirred and, in the struggle, the bear ended up falling off a cliff many meters high and could not survive.

The female did come out of the attack alive and was able to take refuge with the attacked calf in the gallery where her bodies have now been located.

The experts who have studied the case, as reported by the Board, detailed that the bear could have suffered serious injuries as a result of the serious confrontation, according to the blood samples that appeared in the area where they were looking for her.

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The bear hid next to the cub in a cavity with very difficult access and the human teams have only been able this time to supply food and water to the plantigrades without knowing very well the connections that gallery could have, but with the certainty that they had sheltered in that place between abrupt gorges.

This area of ​​the Montaña Palentina and the Cantabrian Mountains is one of the main habitats for brown bears, a protected species that has recently increased its population.

The president of the Brown Bear Foundation, Guillermo Palomero, insists that the outcome, despite being negative, is still "expected, things that occur in nature."

The specimen was already badly injured and predictably – the expert reconstructs the facts – when entering the limestone cavity, full of holes “like Gruyère cheese”, it ended up falling down one of the chasms and her puppies suffered the same fate.

“As the days passed without news and it was full of chasms and galleries, it was concluded that they could be dead,” explains the naturalist.

Palomero harbored the hope that, despite the fact that the cameras installed outside the hollow did not show movement of the clan, they had found a crack or exit on the other side, and that later they could be observed again.

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Accident of two bears that fell in the Palentina Mountain

Palomero's experience allows him to ensure that it is relatively common for all kinds of animals to regularly appear in limestone galleries or caves of mountain systems that fall down deep chasms that they have not been able to detect.

"We found many dead animals such as wolves or mountain goats and bears, it is nothing exceptional," says the leader of the Brown Bear Foundation, who as the weeks went by and there was no record or views of the bears, beyond A little outing that one of the cubs made shortly after taking shelter in the bear, was losing hope of seeing the family alive again.

In Cantabria, he exemplifies, there are several very deep wells in which they often find all kinds of species and for this reason it should not be considered, as he warns, a great threat to subsistence but rather one of the natural risks that these species run when They are found in a wild state, as is the case of the Cantabrian Mountains and these places in the mountains of Palencia, where sightings of plantigrades or even incursions of bears into populated areas in search of food or hives are frequent.

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