Atlas der Säugetiere Nordrhein-Westfalens

Braunbär

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Brown bear

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Ursus arctos

The distribution of the Brown Bear once extended across all of the Holarctic Region. Here it colonized the temperate zone. Through the destruction of the habitat in Europe it was pushed more and more onto island areas. In Germany and thus also in NRW a complete extirpation occurred. Data in the history of the extirpation are rare. Exact data a hardly available. Whether names like Bär or Bähr in old archive files (for example in the annual records of the Abbey of Herford in the 14th century) reer to the Brown Bear Ursus arctos or the Wild Boar Sus scrofa (which was, and in part still is, called "bear"), is not always clear. The last certain records of Brown Bears in Westphalia are as follows:

• 1445 near Soest (after the chronicler B. von der Lake, cited in Seibertz, 1860)
• 1446 near Albersloh near Münster (after the Red Bich of the City of Münster)
• Between 1506 and 1551 (after the chronicler Cornelius, cited by Landau 1849).

The bears of Soest and Albersloh possibly still belonged to an isolated remnant. The Wittgenstein bear may still have had a connection to the Hessian population.

Author

Heinz-Otto Rehage

Citation

Rehage H-O (2025): Braunbär (Ursus_arctos).In: AG Säugetierkunde NRW — Online-Atlas of the mammals of North Rhine-Westphalia. Downloaded from saeugeratlas-nrw.lwl.org on 2025/04/01