Yesterday I sat in a bear hide for the first time this season.
I was there with my friend Miha Mlakar, who runs the network of bear photo hides at Slovenianbears.com. I have photographed bears with him many times over the years, but this hide was new to me. That was a nice treat.
Like the others, this one is built for photography, too. The sun comes from the right direction. The background is a clean forest, not a wall of branches. The hide sits at eye level with the bears. Even the timing of the day is planned around the light. I liked it a lot.
Three hours of birds
I arrived around 2 PM. The light was harsh, the forest was quiet, and there were no bears. None.
What I did have were birds. Jays, wood pigeons, chaffinches, blackbirds. They came and went in front of the hide for more than three hours while I sat there and waited. This is the part nobody photographs and nobody posts. It is also most of the wildlife photography.
Then the jays sounded the alarm, and every bird in front of the hide left at once.
The nervous one
A young, medium-sized bear stepped out.
He was very skittish. He checked the air, checked the trees, checked behind himself. A few times he simply ran off — false alarms — and then came back a minute later as if nothing had happened. He clearly did not feel safe out in the open.
Then he ran off one more time, and this time he did not come back.
An old acquaintance
Soon after, a female appeared with two cubs from this year.
Miha knows her well. He has been watching her for about ten years, since she was a cub herself. I am fairly sure I have photographed her before too, in another hide, in another season. There is something strange and good about that — most wildlife encounters are one-time meetings with a stranger. This one was not.
The three of them settled in and foraged. The mother never stopped working — constantly lifting her nose, reading the air, turning her head. The cubs, meanwhile, could not have been more relaxed. They wandered, poked around, ignored everything.
The big male
Then all three jumped up and moved away about 20 metres.
A big brown male had come out of the forest.
What surprised me was how fast she read the situation. Within moments she decided he was not a threat, and went back to feeding. I expected more drama. There was none. He fed, she fed, the cubs fed, and that was the arrangement for the rest of the evening.
The light kept getting better as the sun dropped. Then it was gone, and I kept shooting anyway, the way you do.
Knock knock
The sun had already set when I heard Miha at the back of the hide. Knock knock. Time to go.
Except the bears heard him long before I did.
The male was gone in a split second — into the shrubbery, without a single sound. For an animal that size, that is hard to believe until you see it. The female did something else entirely: she stood up on her hind legs to get a better look and figure out what was happening. Then, once she had decided, she and her cubs walked calmly into the forest.
End of story. I drove home in the dark, very happy.
All brown bear photos from this day
A few things worth knowing about these bears
The two cubs in these photos were born in the den in January or February, blind, hairless, and weighing between 340 and 680 grams — less than a bag of sugar. By six months they average around 25 kg. Source: Animal Diversity Web
Because she has cubs, this female will not mate again until they are independent — usually two to four years. So the male who walked in yesterday was, from her point of view, simply another animal eating in the same place.
And Slovenia has a lot of these animals for such a small country. The last genetic census, based on 2,863 droppings collected by almost 1,000 hunters and foresters, put the population at 737 bears at the end of 2023 — about a quarter more than in 2015. Source: Lovska zveza Slovenije
One detail from that study stuck with me: the Primorska motorway acts as a wall. In ten years, researchers detected only 45 bears on the north-western side of it. The bears in the Alps are still almost exclusively males. Source: Biotehniška fakulteta, University of Ljubljana
If you want the practical side of this — how the hides work, what gear to bring, how to book a session — I wrote that up separately in Photographing Brown Bears in Slovenia.
And if you would rather just go: talk to Miha. He is the right person for it.
