Classroom lesson 路 Wildlife馃嚘馃嚤 Albania

Brown bear - shy giant of the forests

Around 200 still live in Albania's wild mountains

A brown bear walking through a green forest clearing

Photo 路 Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

The brown bear is one of the largest wild animals in Albania. Adult bears can weigh as much as four grown-ups put together. Around 200 of them live in the country's wildest mountain forests - especially in the north, where the Albanian Alps rise into Montenegro and Kosovo.

Tell me more

Albanian brown bears are mostly quiet, shy animals that prefer to keep away from people. They eat berries, nuts, roots, insects and a bit of fish from mountain streams. Only a tiny amount of their food is meat - they spend most of their day looking for plants and grubs, like very large slow gardeners.

In late autumn, when the weather turns cold, bears find a hidden cave or dig a den. Then they sleep for most of the winter. They aren't fully asleep like a hedgehog - their hearts beat slower and they breathe gently, but they can wake up if something disturbs them. In spring, they come out hungry, often with new cubs by their side.

Cubs are tiny when they are born - smaller than a kitten - but they grow fast. By the end of summer they are following their mum everywhere and learning how to climb trees, find berries and stay out of trouble. They stay with mum for nearly two years before going off on their own.

Brown bears are now very rare across Europe, and Albania is one of the few places where wild ones still live. Park rangers work hard to keep their forests safe, so that a hiker walking through the Alps might (very occasionally, if they are lucky and quiet) glimpse a brown back disappearing into the trees.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01How might sleeping all winter be helpful when food is hard to find?
  2. 02Why is it useful for shy animals to live in forests that are hard to walk through?
  3. 03What would help wild bears and people share a country safely?
Try this

Classroom activity

Make a 'bear's year' wheel. Divide a paper plate into four parts - spring, summer, autumn, winter - and draw what a brown bear is doing in each. Add a tiny cub appearing in spring. Pin all the plates around the classroom.