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Certificate - Etheses - Saurashtra University

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Hokkaido, the Hokkaido brown bear (Ursus arctos yesoenis) habitat has been severely<br />

limited by human activities, especially the forestry practices and road construction<br />

(Mano and Moll, 2001). It inhabits the island of Hokkaido and the neighboring<br />

Russian controlled islands Kunashiri and Etorofu.<br />

In India, the potential Himalayan brown bear distribution range is about 36,800 km 2<br />

based on the 2005 estimate, of which more than 10 % is protected under the existing<br />

network of protected areas in India (Sathyakumar, 2006a). The Himalayan brown bear<br />

occurs in very low densities in the sub-alpine and alpine regions between 3000-5000m<br />

in the Greater Himalayas and in some parts of the Trans-Himalayan regions<br />

(Sathyakumar, 2001 and 2006a). The Brown bears are largely confined to the<br />

northwestern and western Himalayan ranges in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal<br />

Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and the Asiatic black bear occur in Jammu and Kashmir,<br />

Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, est Bengal, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam,<br />

Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura, Manipur and Nagaland (Sathyakumar, 2006). They<br />

occur in the rolling uplands and alpine meadows above timberline in the Himalaya,<br />

ecologically separated from the forest dwelling Asiatic black bear (Schaller, 1977). In<br />

the north-western Himalaya, the brown bear is reported to occur in the sub-alpine and<br />

alpine areas (Sathyakumar, 2001 and 2006a). Practically nothing is known about these<br />

populations today, and little information is available about the population in Burma,<br />

Tibet, western China, Korea, and Manchuria. The early reference of occurrence of<br />

brown bear in India dates back to nineteenth century. After the sheep had left their<br />

summer camps at altitudes varying from 10,000 to 13,000 feet, it was not by any<br />

means uncommon to see ‘Bhrubbu’ as the hillman call him, feeding on the grassy<br />

plains in the morning and afternoons and signs of digging and hibernation in first<br />

3

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