Here is the article, today from CNN:
Record warm winter stirs sleepy bears
Friday, January 14, 2005 Posted: 1:42 PM EST (1842 GMT)
TALLINN, Estonia (Reuters) -- Estonia's warmest winter for two centuries has woken some of its 600 bears several months early from hibernation, wildlife experts said on Friday.
The bears' early reappearance has raised concerns for the survival of this year's cubs.
"It has been very warm and wet and many flooded rivers have forced bears out of their dens and out of hibernation," said Kalev Manniste, a senior official at the Baltic country's State Forest Service.
"Just a few days ago a hunter was telling me that he saw a she-bear with a very small cub walking across the field," he told Reuters.
"The cub the hunter saw looked too small to survive the winter."
She-bears normally give birth to tiny walnut-sized cubs during their winter hibernation and suckle them for months as they grow, before the spring thaw awakens the mother and she leaves her den.
Local media and hunters writing on Internet sites say that across the country bears are moving about the forests at a time when they normally sleep and would not be seen for another two to three months.
Temperatures have stayed above freezing, compared with the average temperature of minus 5 Celsius (23.00F) for January.
Neighboring Russia's normally ferocious winter has also been mild.
Interfax news agency reported this week that a bear in a zoo awoke from hibernation two months early, while another did not go to sleep at all.
Now, this is the kind of thing that sparks what we call natural selection. The warm winter is putting environmental pressure on the bears. Many of the young will not make it to spring because mommy is out roaming too early.
Will this yield a more robust group of cubs in the future from those who do survive?
Or will this cut the population of the bears to the point where people are concerned?
Will the cubs of these cubs who survive all be born earlier in the winter to allow maximum development before a possible early spring? Or will birth dates always be related simply to the estrogen cycle of the females, which is not related, to the best of our knowledge, to an early thaw...
How much of the gene pool will be lost with the cubs who do not survive?
What will replace it?
Here is a wonderful example of a natural and not man-made pressure being placed upon a population of mammals. It will be interesting to see what happens.