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MADRID - Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is now affecting the natural world.
Normally European brown bears would already be in their long annual sleep in the forests of Spain's Cantabrian mountains. Bears are supposed to slumber throughout the winter, drawing on stored body resources, because frozen weather makes food too scarce to find. They can lose up to 40 per cent of their bodyweight.
But many of the 130 bears in Spain's northern cordillera have remained active, naturalists from Spain's Brown Bear Foundation said. The bears now find that there are enough nuts, acorns, chestnuts and berries to make winter food-gathering sorties "energetically worthwhile", scientists told El Pais.
This is probably due to milder winters, Guillermo Palomero, president of the foundation, says. "Our teams of observers have been able to follow the perfect outlines of tracks from a group of bears."
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