A German man was airlifted to hospital after he was mauled by a bear as he was trying to prove that the animal had left its den due to logging in the area.
The eco-activist is in a serious but stable condition following the attack.
The man from the group called Wild Carpathians Initiative, had travelled to the Carpathain Mountains in Poland along with another campaigner to see if the area had been affected by logging operations, reports The Telegraph.
The two expected the bear’s den to be empty due to the logging, but when they looked into the den got a shock when its occupant was actually home.
The creature chased the pair through the woods, before one of the men tripped and was mauled by the disturbed bear.
Michał Gzowski from the Polish State Forests shared pictures from the incident on X, formerly Twitter, as the incident was caught on a trail cam.
He wrote: “A camera trap captured a bear attacking an eco-activist. He wanted to prove that the lair was empty because foresters had destroyed his habitat.
“Quite an irony of fate – pseudo-ecologists were attacking foresters, GOPR and policemen, and now these people are saving their lives. Will there be a Darwin Award?”
The Darwin Award is a tongue-in-cheek honour for individuals who ‘contributed to human evolution’ by allegedly making themselves victims of natural selection by their silly mistakes.
A spokesman for the Wild Carpathians Iniaitive admitted that the activists should not have disturbed the bear as it was preparing for hibernation in the Bieszczady Mountains, part of the Outer Eastern Carpathians.
Marek Józefiak, an environmental policy officer at Greenpeace told the Guardian: “Poland is protecting the Carpathian mountains poorly.
“Only 3 percent of the forest is really protected, the rest is being logged or built on,” he said.
“Despite the fact that most Polish bears live in the Bieszczady Mountains, there are only two special zones for protection of bear dens.”
