Desperately seeking Viviane - the Tibetan brown bear

Even if the weather is not quite playing ball at the moment here in France, you can tell it's summer.

How come?

Well those silly stories start surfacing in the mainstream media, taking up more than their fair share of time and space, and bringing perhaps relief and a smile to an otherwise gloomy day.

The most recent one is the tale of Viviane, a Tibetan brown bear, who is one the loose.

Normally the 32-year-old whiles away her days at the Sigean African reserve, a 300 hectare wildlife park not far from the city of Narbonne in southern France.

No, don't ask what a Tibetan bear is doing at an "African" reserve alongside lions, giraffes, rhinos and the like.

Nobody's quite sure how Vivian managed to escape, but at the weekend escape she did, perhaps deciding that she was tired of the reserve owners' apparent lack of geographical knowledge and who knows, set on investigating the whole wide world that lay beyond her enclosure.

Ever since she has been playing a game of hide and seek, keeping local authorities busy with police, firefighters and vets armed with tranquilisers taking part in the search.

A Tibetan brown bear (screenshot BFMTV report)

While the fruit and veggie eating plantigrade apparently doesn't present an immediate danger, police have warned the public not to approach her.

"If someone sees her, they shouldn't panic because this type or bear is rather timid and not at all aggressive," the directeur de cabinet du Préfet de l'Aude, Nicolas Martrenchard, told reporters.

"But there are some things worth avoiding," he added.

"People shouldn't get too close to her, try to feed or trap her and at the same time they would be advised to avoid eye contact or startling her by running away."

Wise words indeed because measuring 1,60m and weighing in at 130 kg plantigrade, Viviane, as timorous as she might be, is probably not an animal you would wish to encounter or upset.

On Monday she was spotted a couple of times and is now believed to be on the nearby l'ile Sainte Lucie - no not the Caribbean island but another reserve in the area surrounded by swamp land.

But that doesn't seem to be making the job of capturing her any easier.

Not only is the search area a vast one, according to Martrenchard, it's also not easy to access...unless you're a bear who also happens to be good at hiding.


L'ourse Viviane aperçue dans l'Aude - 25/06 par BFMTV

Hunters turn rescuers as they save a man's life

Hunters often get what some might consider something of a bad rap here in France where the activity is, in many rural parts of the country, undeniably something of an institution.

If they're not "accidentally" killing the wrong animal such as Cannelle the bear then hunters might well be inadvertently shooting each other.

Not surprising perhaps as with over 1,350,000 registered hunters, France has by far the largest number of any European country with only Spain (almost one million), the United Kingdom (800,000) and Italy (750,000) coming close.

So it's good to come across a hunting story that entails saving a life rather than taking one - be it intentionally or by mistake.

On Saturday a party of hunters in the southwestern French département of Tarn became "saviours" rather than "destroyers" when they rescued a man.

Arifat cascade (screenshot from YouTube video)

The group from the village of Arifat had gathered in the forest to hunt deer but instead, according to the regional daily newspaper La Dépêche du Midi, heard cries of pain.

They were coming from a 39-year-old man

"He was groaning and lying on his back when I found him," the president of the club, Christian Valéry, told the newspaper.

"He told me he had fallen eight metres from a nearby cliff as he had been taking photographs of animals and hadn't been able to move for two days."

The hunters immediately switched mode and became rescuers as some of them went off to contact the emergency services - there was no mobile 'phone reception in the forest - while the others remained with the injured man.

He had broken his leg and pelvis and was suffering from hypothermia and dehydration after at spending two nights out in the open with temperatures dropping to minus 10.

It was, as one of the hunters said, a miracle that the man was discovered as the accident occurred in a remote part of the forest pretty much in the "middle of nowhere".