VERY big bears of Chukotka

[Osweo]

You know, that bit of Siberia that nearly reaches Alyaska! ;)

A little cryptozoology, if I may. Anyone here heard of the rumoured existence of a huge bear up in the far eastern Russian Arctic? Chukchi aboriginal reindeer herders are the source of the rumours, but are reported to deny any 'mystical' or 'supernatural' aspect of what they regard simply as a rare and distinct species. The Inuit on the opposite side of the Bering Strait also tell of such a monster. Aklo and Irkuyem are native names for it. More than twice the size of a Polar Bear, with an odd 'hyaena-like' figure, caused by its longer forelegs...

I first came across it in a travelogue I'm reading at the moment by Marina Galkina. A quick Net Search didn't reveal much in English, so I've been mining the 'RuNet' for more information.

Some good stuff there:
http://www.vokrugsveta.ru/vs/article/2042/
http://gallery.net.ru/lib/kuvaev/twocolor.html
http://unusualanimals.info/polumif/017.php

I'm tired now, it's late, but I'll translate a few highlights tomorrow. :thumb001:

Sabre-toothed relics of the ancient Cave Bear who so fascinated our earliest Europeans are mentioned!

[Loki]

Perhaps a few surviving relics of Arctodus simus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_faced_bear)? ;) They did range into Alaska, so it's not unthinkable that they may have ventured across the Bering Strait.

[Osweo]

Perhaps a few surviving relics of Arctodus simus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_faced_bear)? ;) They did range into Alaska, so it's not unthinkable that they may have ventured across the Bering Strait.
Similar things are said in the Russian links, aye. And that picture does look very like the descriptions I've read. :thumb001:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Arctodus.jpg/240px-Arctodus.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bd/ArctodusSimusReconstruct.jpg/180px-ArctodusSimusReconstruct.jpg:eek:

Running Bears, eh? Did you ever see that documentary series 'The Velvet Claw', about the evolutionary history of the Carnivores? Superb, so it was. It was on when I was about 12 I think, and I was bought the book too. They had good animations of these old beasts. I always regretted that the history of Order Mammalia in the last 65 million years has always been eclipsed by the bloody Dinosaurs. :( Bit like how the Barbarians of Europe have always played second or third fiddle to the Mediterranean civilisations in our popular culture's image of the past. Bloody Tutankhamun! :mad:

[Loki]

1fn5QGQPtRM

[Osweo]

Marina Galkina To the Ends of the Earth

P128 (staying in a Chukchi reindeerherders’ camp)

“It grew dark, a tusklaya moon rose over the ridge. Our conversions were drawn to the mystical. I asked them to tell me about encounters with Big Bears.

According to the deerherders, a few kilometres below the mouth of the Chumeveem (a left tributariy of the Tanyurer) there stands a wooden cabin, where the hunter Girkin lives. Recently (autumn 1997) he shot a ‘very big bear’, the legends of which had spread from Kuvaev’s books to that of Orlov). As a matter of fact, the Chukchi regard this bear as a completely natural inhabitant of the region, not a whit fantastical. They described it to me without a shade of wonder. Aye, there is a big bear. Aye, he’s different from the usual sort, or even a very big brown bear, as in his figure there is something that smacks of the osanka of a hyaena. “And the pelt – that’s the size of a vezdekhod*,” concluded one of the herdsmen who had recently killed a normal bear and given me its pelt to sleep on – “I saw it myself.” I pictured this to myself; six metres in length, the size of a vezdekhod, and I shivered. Of course, pelts can be stretched and sizes exaggerated, but all the same, the comparison made an impression on me.
* An all-terrain vehicle on caterpillar tracks, used widely in the tundra.
….

P152.
Looking over the mountain slopes through my binoculars, I see a bear in the distance. He is five km away, very fair, with a darker and very fat rear. I even took him for an oil drum at first. I marvel at how healthy and plump he looks, even clear to see at this distance, as he waddles along lazily. To the side I notice two moving dots. People? No, these are bears too, but how small they seem in comparison with this prime specimen! They are young, but not cubs. Could it be that I am looking at the legendary “very big bear” himself? I try to approach, to see better, but the mountaion slope obscurs my view and the puzzle remains unsolved… :P


From the book ‘The Very Big Bear” by Oleg Kuvaev:

“In 1898 the world first heard of the existence of the largest predator in the world – the huge brown bear” wrote the Belgian zoologist Bernard Eivelmans.
Herdsmen of the remote Chaunskaya Vallet in Chukotka also spoke of the navodyaschem horror of this monster. Farley Mowet, a Canadian writer, recorded in his book ‘People of the Deer Land’ tales of a fearful brown beast twice the size of a polar bear, as current among the inhabitants of Alaska.

Kuvaev wnet in search of the creature.

“Right at the end of a rough Chukotkan summer, geologists returning fom the upper Anyuy told that they had seen a huge bear wandering on one of the ridges, very light in colour, almost white. A polar bear could not have managed the 100s of kilometers from the shore of the Icy Ocean … ( I didn’t let on that it might have been the animal I was looking for) … fearsome, lonely, dying of hunger as all living things had left the area that summer. I decided to set out and follow the trail myself.


It’s easy to dismiss these rumours with scepticism, were it not for the established fact of the existence of the Kodiak bear. Normal bears weigh in at around 300kg, big ones 500, big Grizzlies up to 700, but that sent from Kodiak Island to Berlin Zoo weighted 1200 kg.

19th Century Mountain Engineer Aleksandr Cherkasov living in Zabaikalye:

“It should be noted that bears grow to enormous size in Siberia. I happened to see a pelt of a recently killed bear in an outpost of Krasnoyarsk Province that measures twenty and a bit chetverts from nose to tale.” Chetvert = 17cm. 20 = 3.4m = ELEVEN FEET!!!!!!

Local Cossack hunters of Anadyr region (southern Chukotka) deny the existence of any over 500kg.

“This means that we are probably not dealing with usual Asiatic bears, but of something else, exotic (or possibly a relict?), living in such remote places and met with so rarely that hunters haven’t come across them. Indeed, the herdsmen spoke not simply of a big, but of a ‘peculiar’, ‘fearsome’ bear. ‘Peculiarity’ could be explained by unusal external appearance, colour for example, and ‘fearsome’ could refer to size and aggressiveness.

Farley Mowet’s letter to Kuvaev;

“It seems to me that your giant bear could turn out to be a relative of the North American grizzly, which as you know is the biggest on Earth… In so far as they live not far from the Bering Straits, it is quite possible that in the past they could migrate into Siberia. Their tracks are enormous, and even from these it is clear that this beast is twice the size of the usual bear. I view accounts of encounters with gigantic bears on Chukotka as fully credible. It might possibly involve those bears who had drifted across the Straits on the ice, or crossed them on foot in an exceptionally hard winter. I say this because the Alaskan grizzly is a great wanderer.”


It is difficult to judge whether a dryland grizzly could drift on the ice. But to cross the 70km frozen straits would probably not prove too difficult for him. That would explain the wonder of people meeting a ‘puzzling bear’ – the form of the grizzly is unfamiliar to the herdsmen of Chukotka. It would also explain why it is so rarely encountered. Incomers would quickly die off through lack of suitable mates. But this musing forces us to doubt the alluring hypothesis of the survival of a relict bear of former times in the remote mountain valleys. (Indeed, Farley Mowet with his accustomed writers’ romance did not refrain from just this: “In the Tongat Mountains on the Labrador Peninsula, the Eskimos tell of another type of bear, with very long wolves’ teeth. No white man has yet seen such a bear, and it may be amyth. However, the description ansers very well to that reconstructed for the Cave Bear, which is supposed to have diead out several thousand years ago. This could all serve as a faint hope that a small number are living even now. And were this so, I would search for them exactly in the mountainous parts of Verkhoyansk, Kolyma and Anadyr.”)

[Osweo]

Valery Orlov’s Book ‘Kainyn-Kutkho of the Koryak Mountains.

“I turn to you with a certain request. Please help me to find a scientific organisation or relevant person, concerned with unknown mammals. I have already approached the Academy of Sciences with this request. The animal I speak of is a type of bear, in this there is no doubt. It would be the eighth species of this family. It is of a very large size, roughly twice the weight of a common bear. But it is strongly distinguished by the structure of the body. The hind legs are shorter than the front, and between the legs is placed a курдюк, ‘kurdyuk’* or fatty sack, which permanently touches the ground. The local inhabitants (Koryaks and Chukchi) call it ‘Irkuyem’ with the stress on the ‘U’. In Koryak this means ‘trousers dragging on the ground’. The Tigil Koryaks call it ‘Kainyn-Kutkho’ – ‘God-Bear’.”

Thus began the first letter of Rodion Nikolaevich Sivolobova, a 36-year resident of the small settlement Tilichiki, on the Korf Bay, northern Kamchatka, to the magazine ‘Hunting and Hunting Life.

*Kurdyuk is the word for the special tail of certain ungulates that contain fatty deposits, a bit like the camel's hump. Unsurprisingly, I had to look that one up!