Over 3,000 bears culled in Russia after wave of deadly attacks: ‘we’ve never had this’

Seeing what looked like a brown blob in a tree while driving through Siberia’s Irkutsk region, 36-year-old Daria Tyurneva pulled over, curious to get a better look.

She was not expecting to find a bear cub, perched on a branch, several metres up.

“We stopped, without turning off the engine or taking off the gear, because we knew the mother could be somewhere nearby,” Tyurneva said, showing a phone video she recorded of the bear.

Her sighting was one of several to spook Russians in recent weeks, as the country grapples with a spate of deadly bear attacks.