Arcturos

The Arcturos bear sanctuary in the village of Nymfaio, near Florina, on Tuesday announced that five orphan bear cubs that were cared for at its facilities have now been released back into the wild.

Just four months old, bear cubs Bradley and Cooper are still bottle-fed but they will soon have to forage into the Greek forest if they are to eat on their own.

The pair of orphaned cubs, rescued by the Arcturos sanctuary in northern Greece, will be trained to survive in the wild - and anything else their mother would have taught them.

The brown bear sanctuary Arcturos announced the adoption Tuesday of two three-month-old orphan bear cubs, named Bradley and Cooper, that had been found and cared for by a farmer in Kozani in northern Greece.
The group bemoaned that the one week the cubs stayed with the farmer was far too long.

The Environment Ministry has ordered the closure of the Greek Wildlife Hospital on the Saronic island of Aegina, known by its acronym EKPAZ, following a series of inspections that established that the conditions in which the facility kept animals were "tragic." 

Ten Greek conservation groups on Friday issued a joint statement expressing support for the government's draft bill aimed at overhauling regulations for protected areas of natural beauty but adding that the legislation was not comprehensive enough.

A brown bear cub was found dead on Tuesday near the village of Aghia Kyriaki in Kastoria, northern Greece.

According to members of wildlife conservation group Arcturos who saw the animal, and Kastoria Forestry Department staff, the bear most likely died because it consumed poisoned bait as it showed no visible signs of injury.

Two bears were run over and killed within the space of a few hours on Monday at the same location on the Egnatia National Highway near Siatista in Kozani, northern Greece.

One of the animals was run over by a truck, while the second, a pregnant female, was hit by a car.

Two Greek wildlife conservation groups, Arcturos and Callisto, on Friday called for a barrier to be erected on a section of the Egnatia Highway near Kozani in northern Greece after a bear was killed in a road accident on Thursday, the fifth such incident this year.

Mitsos, the oldest ward of the Arcturos society for the protection of the brown bear, has died, the organization announced on Wednesday.

Once a so-called dancing bear in the Peloponnesian town of Tripoli, Mitsos was seized in 1992 when he was about 3 years old and was the first bear to be inducted into Arcturos's protection program in Florina, northern Greece.

The Arcturos bear conservation society in northern Greece said Thursday that a young bear has been killed after being hit by a vehicle on the road between Kolokyntos and Mesopotamia, near the town of Kastoria.

Officials said the motorist drove off without alerting the authorities.

No more details were immediately available.