A fan of online media? A brown bear steals and tears a newspaper from rangers' hut

The large bear went to check the wooden hut on Sinyaya river in a cutoff area of the West Sayan Mountains, part of the Sayano-Shushenskiy Nature Reserve. 

It is buried so deeply in taiga that the reserve’s inspectors can access it only few times a year. 

They have just returned from a routine winter count up of the animals, and went through data sticks from camera traps. 

One pictured a confident looking brown bear breaking into a small wooden house and leaving it with a newspaper in its mouth. 

‘’Tidying’ up huts is what brown bears typically do in taiga', said a message from the Sayano-Shushenskiy Nature Reserve.

'They can’t resist strong, unusual smells and often climb into wooden houses through windows, turning everything upside down.

'Usually emergency stacks of food are tied to ceilings, but bears find them within seconds, biting through cans of preserves, bottles of vegetable oil and bags with grain’.

‘They are also more than capable of breaking basic furniture like plank-beds, tables and shelves.'

'This time the bear got interested in a newspaper and spent some minutes tearing it to pieces after getting out of the house.’

Pictures: Sayano-Shushenskiy Nature Reserve, Igor Shpilenok

Some readers suggested in comments that the hut’s door was designed to to allow bears easily get indoors.

‘Experienced taiga travelers must know that a door has to open inwards, as brown bears always pull’, said Irina Denisova. 

The reserve’s statement didn’t say if the newspaper was a tabloid of a broadsheet. 

Sayano-Shushensky Nature Reserve in Krasnoyarsk region covers an area of 1,507.22 square miles. 

It was created in 1976 at the same time as Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam, the largest power plant in Russia.

The reserve’s team works on conservation and on studying effects of a large reservoir, created by the dam, on the local ecology.