Towards understanding bold behaviour of large carnivores: the case of brown bears in human‐modified landscapes

Abstract

Human–wildlife conflicts sometimes involve bold animals that do not fear humans and their activities. Such behaviour is detrimental to both wildlife and people and may lead to conflicts, which can be especially serious for large carnivores. Like most wildlife, these species have adapted to live in highly humanized landscapes by adopting human avoidance behaviours. However, bold individuals exist, which represent a main cause of conflicts, public fear and negative attitudes, that greatly influence management and conservation actions. Although costly decisions are constantly made to deal with such individuals, evidence‐based knowledge of their behaviour, that is how and when they move, especially in relation to human activities, is lacking. We analysed telemetry data of brown bears (Ursus arctos) that were GPS‐collared across Slovenia and Trentino (Italy) to explore spatial behaviour and rhythms of activity of bears that were identified as bold by managers and to assess if and how their behaviour differs from that of their ‘non‐bold’ conspecifics (hereafter, control individuals). Because other factors such as sex and age of the bear, season, daytime and region may affect behaviour, we also included these variables in our analyses. On one hand, bold bears were more active at the daytime and used open areas considerably more often than control bears. On the other hand, although differences in distance to settlements and roads, movement rates and daily home ranges were also found, they were not as pronounced as expected. Instead, other factors were found to affect bear behaviour and, most importantly, we found strong inter‐individual differences in all behaviours. Such results suggest that, although bold bears have some behavioural attributes in common that distinguish them from control bears, each individual differs from one another. Our study represents a first step towards understanding bold bears’ behaviour and provide novel evidence‐based knowledge that can help to better know and manage these individuals.

A ten-year community reporting database reveals rising coyote boldness and associated human concern in Edmonton, Canada

“…Similar interfaces between peri-urban and rural or rural and wildland areas frequently concentrate human-wildlife conflicts in many other species (König et al 2020). The pattern we observed may arise because coyotes in open areas are visible at greater distances, and may thus appear to be bolder; alternatively, bolder animals may be more likely to occupy areas with less vegetation cover, as has been reported for brown bears (Ursus arctos; Bombieri et al 2021). This behaviour might be expected of coyotes owing to their evolution in the arid southwest of the North American continent (Hody and Kays 2018).…”

Scavengingvshunting affects behavioral traits of an opportunistic carnivore

“…The ecological and conservation consequences of persistent and bold predators are complex. Bold predators are more prone to human-wildlife conflict and more likely to be lethally removed due to conflict situations ( Bombieri et al, 2021 ; Schell et al, 2021 ), and increased predator boldness could hamper predator conservation efforts in wildland-urban interfaces ( Nyhus & Tilson, 2004 ; Brooks, Kays & Hare, 2020 ). Despite this, the prevalence of increased boldness in predators expanding their range into urban environments indicates boldness is a valuable trait in novel environments ( Barrett, Stanton & Benson-Amram, 2019 ).…”

“…Our results provide insights into how foraging behavior is linked with other behavioral traits. Results will improve our understanding of the role hunting plays on individual behavior, which could impact predator–prey dynamics ( Szopa-Comley et al, 2020 ), human-wildlife conflict ( Barrett, Stanton & Benson-Amram, 2019 ), and predator conservation ( Bombieri et al, 2021 ) in wild populations.…”

Transdisciplinary deficit in large carnivore conservation funding in Europe

“…This complexity arises from several factors. First, large carnivores require extensive territories, which often results in overlap with areas used by humans, and subsequently, various forms of human-wildlife conflict arise, with potential for severe economic losses or even human injuries or deaths (Linnell et al 1999;Treves and Naughton-Treves 1999;Carter and Linnell 2016;Morehouse and Boyce 2017;Van Eeden et al 2018;Bombieri et al 2019Bombieri et al , 2021. Second, there are often divergent societal views on how to best resolve subsequent human-wildlife conflicts due to different values associated with carnivores (López-Bao et al 2017a, b;Swan et al 2017;Lute et al 2018;Salvatori et al 2020;Marino et al 2021).…”