Flora, Fauna, and... Feudalism? Recounting the Bears of Slovenia

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS BY HUNTER FIDLER

"When we find ourselves in truly quiet places, it can feel disorienting or even anxiety-inducing, because instinctually we know – when the forest falls quiet – it means there's a predator nearby."

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If you were to map the world by sound instead of borders, the lines would blur in ways that no cartographer could show. Kenya would be a buzzing jumble of contours, because even when the grass is still, there is an electric hum in the air of photographers like myself looking to capture something great. Zimbabwe would appear as a cluster of craters like the moon, where the distant roar of lions or the call of a fish eagle dots the landscape like the iconic kopjes themselves.

But this summer, I didn’t spend any time in the grasses of the savannah, for once. I spent it among the trees.

I’ve been drawn to the forest more and more as the year draws on, especially as it was this year that my personal life has evolved into an increasingly more urban one, now following the perfunctory commute to the office, the gym, and then back home to the suburbs. The trees have been a necessary gravity tethering me to the important things in life.

I’m not sure how Slovenia would show up on our map of sounds, or if it would even show up at all. The small, European country is home to the forests that I wandered into this summer. And looking back, it feels like a secret place that I’m still nervous to share too much about. Too much of this world has been lost to the mere presence of humans, and the thought of Slovenia’s soundscape forming ridge lines and hotspots frightens the part of me that wants to hold on to precious things.

In fact, those forests were probably some of the quietest moments I’ve ever experienced. You don’t really realize how much noise is happening all around you at any given moment in mundane life. In the city, there’s always an underlying hum, isn’t there? Cars driving by, power lines overhead, the air conditioner cycling air… always something there that we’ve subconsciously filed away in our brains as ‘quiet.’ For this reason, when we find ourselves in truly quiet places, it can feel disorienting or even anxiety-inducing, because instinctually we know – when the forest falls quiet – it means there is a predator nearby.

On average, brown bears stand at just over three feet tall when they're on all fours. This makes them appear much smaller in comparison to the massive trees around them. Their true size is revealed when they stand up, where they can reach heights of seven feet or more.

Blind spot

Four hours go by, and then a branch snaps. It’s loud, or at least it feels like it, because the stillness up to this point has induced a meditative state inside the small, wooden hide. Your senses are alert; you scan the tree line – left, and then right, and then left again, over and over – until you start to see things in the shapes of the pines and the rocks that scatter the forest floor. Is that a fuzzy ear just over the crest of the hill, or is that a pinecone? To maintain sharp focus and be absolutely silent while doing so is exhausting, believe it or not, especially after hours on end. I even nodded off several times.

Another branch snaps, this time louder. Okay, I’m awake now. Jays have scattered in a flurry from sifting through seeds on the ground. Something threatening has come here.

And suddenly, none other than two Eurasian brown bear cubs come stumbling through the meadow in front of me, play-fighting with each other as mom reluctantly trudges on from behind. She rolls her eyes, at least in my mind, but in reality she’s probably on the lookout for a scent she picked up nearby: human.

A squabble breaks out among two cubs who fight over food on the forest floor. Their mother doesn't bother to separate them.

She can’t smell me now, though. Seemingly against my will, I’ve made a temporary home out of the hide I’m in. Or at least that’s what it feels like, because this small wooden room is my bedroom, office, and bathroom (hence the bucket in the corner) for the entire evening. It’s built specifically for bear watching, with only a singular hole at the top of the wall that connects to tubing outside, which travels along the tree 40 feet above the ground and disperses the suspicious smell of human above the canopy. I’m locked in from the inside, in case the bears get a little too curious. All this in an effort to appear as a blind spot to the most sensitive nose in the European wilderness.

But people who come to Slovenia to seek out its abundant populations of brown bear aren’t masking themselves to avoid an attack; it’s the other way around.

The hides are specifically designed for bear viewing. Simply hiding from view isn't enough to mask oneself from their acute sense of smell. That's why the hides come with tubing that travels up the trees and disperses human scent above the forest.

'Quote un-quota'

Every movement I make inside the hide is cacophonous. The creak from shifting in my seat, the rustling from adjusting my lens atop the bean bag – each could be the reason mama bear and her cubs take off from the way they came. Luckily, they don’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary, and they continue foraging for fruits and sedge undisturbed.

Well, relatively undisturbed, I should say. As mama bear forages, she lifts her head once every thirty seconds or so. She sticks her nose in the air and ‘looks’ around. The scent of a human will instantly trigger ‘danger’ to her olfactory bulb, and she will communicate with her young to run.

Brown bears' sense of smell is believed to be more than 2,000 times more powerful than a human's. They have one of the most sensitive noses in the animal kingdom, only rivaled by that of an African elephant and a bloodhound.

Slovenia has a long history with bear hunting in the region. It’s a practice that is still legal today, albeit with strict regulations. The marketing around Slovenia’s brown bears will tell you that they’re some of the most numerous in all of Europe, with an estimate of nearly 1,000 individuals among a country that’s less than 8,000 square miles in size, which is on the rise from 2023’s estimate of around 750 individuals.^[1] (“How do they measure this?” you ask. By analyzing literal tons of bear scat.) Recent tourism marketing in the area also promotes Kočevsko as a “secret forest” that’s home to elusive predators like the brown bear, as well as the Eurasian lynx and gray wolf. But I couldn’t help myself from pondering – while watching this intimate moment of a mother bear lifting a rotted log in search for insects – what reason would the largest predator in Europe have to be so elusive?

Up until the 1930s, brown bear hunting in Slovenia went largely unregulated, resulting in a historic low of about 30 to 40 individuals left in the wilderness.^[2] They were seen as a charismatic and highly valued trophy species among hunters – a perspective that nearly brought them to their extinction. The numerous populations that we see today come from past conservation efforts that span back to the 1940s, but important measures include the 1966 establishment of the Core Bear Protective Area of over 1,300 square miles within southern Slovenia as well as the recent EU Habitats Directive, which prohibits the disturbance and killing of protected species during periods of hibernation, breeding, gestation, rearing, and migration.^[3]

Additionally, Slovenia has set their own annual ‘quota’ for bear killings – or as the scientists call it, ‘removals.’ This number, which gets re-evaluated on a seemingly annual basis as well, encompasses all known bear removals involving humans. In 2023, that number was 230 individuals,^[4] which seems quite high considering that would account for nearly a third of the known individuals at that time. However, ‘removals’ aren’t strictly from hunters, which only make up about 60% of human-bear disturbances; the number 230 also encompasses the 16% or so of bear deaths that occur from vehicle collisions, meaning that one bear that perished from a mountain road accident is one less bear that hunters are permitted to hunt in the season. Depending on who you ask, some will say that illegal hunting still occurs in the region, but it is ridiculed enough by the local community to where we don’t see it as rampant of an epidemic as we do of poachers in southern Africa.

Slovenia is one of six European nations that permit the hunting of brown bears. Others include Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Croatia, and Russia. However, it is illegal to hunt or disturb pregnant brown bears as well as mothers with cubs.

Family Feudalism

I spent five days searching for the bears in three different hide locations throughout the Dinaric region of southern Slovenia. This area sits within the Core Bear Protective Area from 1966 that now extends to over 2,000 square miles and hosts about 80% of Slovenia’s brown bear population.^[5] Of those five days, three of them included sightings, and on one particular day, we had multiple cohorts of bears in the same place at the same time.

Brown bears are generally solitary animals; the only notable period in life where they commune with other brown bears are when mother bears raise their young. This period usually lasts two to three years before the cubs become independent and generally fend for themselves for the rest of their lives. So, to see ten bears from three or four different cohorts in the same space is a pretty special occasion that usually only happens around concentrated food sources.

I spent about an hour or so observing mother bear and her cubs forage around the clearing. The hide sat on the edge of the meadow, which offered a fairly wide range of view considering the dense forest surroundings.

I could tell they were getting bored with the place. Maybe they weren’t finding enough to eat here, or maybe the relative lack of canopy in this area made them feel too exposed. But right as I thought they were leaving, suddenly all three of them were spooked by something over the ridge’s edge. They caught scent of something. All three of them in a row – as if they knew a very sweaty photographer was next to them in a hide that could easily double as a sauna – stood up to get a visual on what they had already sensed: other bears.

As the other cohort of three waltzed in – a mother and two cubs, also – the original group ran in my direction and nearly brushed against the hide as they made their escape somewhere behind me. This new cohort was much darker and more slender than the other trio; their fur had a silver-ish sheen in the light. I was amazed at how two different families of the same species could look so dissimilar.

This new group took over the feeding ground, but it wasn’t long until another cohort showed up and challenged their dominance over the land. At one point, a battle broke out among the matriarchs, and opposing vassals followed suit with their mothers, casting sharp glances at rival cubs when they encroached on each other’s stash of fruits. There was even an outsider or two that showed up out of curiosity but was likely too intimidated to abandon the tree line.

I believe about nine or ten of them had entered the clearing at one point. The alliances and rivalries were clear to even someone like me who doesn’t speak bear, with the adults vocalizing their disdain for kin that were not their own. It was something I managed to photograph from their interactions.

Sitting, unplugged, listening

A year ago, I traveled to Kenya to explore what, in my mind, were truly ‘wild’ spaces – spaces that were defined by the calls of birds in the trees, the roars of lions at night, and the rustling of grass in the never-ending expanse of the Maasai Mara. I remember feeling the exhilaration of being the first to discover a mother lioness watching over her two cubs as they played in the riverbed before the sun had lifted above the horizon. Equally, I remember the guilt I felt for competing for ‘first’ among a bustling sea of tourists. My idea of wilderness has shifted so much since then.

Before hearing about Slovenia and making a plan to travel there, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you where it was on the map. I considered it an unassuming country that couldn’t rival the Mara of Kenya or the Pantanal in Brazil. But as I’ve explored more about the influence that human presence has had on the natural world, I find myself yearning for places that maintain the untouched quality that nature intended in the first place. It’s an ever-unfolding paradox, right? The human desire to exist in places lacking other humans... or perhaps it’s just introversion.

Slovenia brought me closer to wilderness than the Mara ever could. It is a space where the absence of sound itself defines its place on the map.

I did a lot of sitting in Slovenia – sitting, unplugged, and being very intentional about not bringing my own ego with me into the forest. And in the end, I witnessed moments just meters away of ordinary life to the forest but of extraordinary purpose to me.

I’ve carried with me the understanding that even silence has texture. I imagine it threads through every landscape, if only faintly, and it's only earned by those who tune in. ↟

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About the author

Hunter Fidler is a Hampton Roads–based photographer specializing in wildlife, portraits, and real estate. His work aims to capture moments with clarity, honesty, and heart. Whatever the subject — house, human, or the occasional elephant — he’s after the shot that tells a story. See more of his work at www.hunterfidler.com