Bra\u0219ov County has the most bears per square mile<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The project ran from 2021 to 2025 and cost 57.3 million lei. The ministry led it with Romsilva, the Marin Dr\u0103cea forestry research institute and Kronstadt, the city-owned forest agency of Bra\u0219ov.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two samples with the same genotype mean one bear, so the lab can estimate animals instead of adding up sightings, the method also used for brown bears in the French Pyrenees<\/a>. Harghita, Buz\u0103u, Vrancea, Mure\u0219 and Covasna follow Bra\u0219ov on the density list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Post\u0103varul, a Natura 2000 site between Bra\u0219ov, Predeal and R\u00e2\u0219nov, 6 motion-triggered cameras on 1,288 hectares (about 3,180 acres) picked out 24 different bears in 2020 and 22 in 2021, the project’s zoning report says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr. Cristian-Remus Papp, then wildlife practice coordinator at WWF-Romania, said in 2024 that no law or cull will resolve human-bear conflicts sustainably without managing attractants such as waste and supplemental feeding sites. Bears can detect them from up to 5 kilometers away, he said, and hunting alone is not enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The zoning report sketches five stages. A young bear picks up the smell of food from a distance and comes to the edge of town at night, then by day, and eventually turns up in crowded places such as resorts and parking lots. At the end, such animals “cannot be rehabilitated in most cases,” the authors write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hiking, berry picking, mushroom collecting and off-road sports in bear habitat, combined with easy food, push bears to expand their territories into previously bear-free areas, WWF wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feeding sites in the forest are a separate question. L\u00e1szl\u00f3 G\u00e1l of Babe\u015f-Bolyai University, with WWF-Romania’s Alexandra Sallay-Mosoi and Cristian Papp, put camera traps at hunters’ feeding sites 2 to 4 kilometers (1.2 to 2.5 miles) from a busy tourist town, in a corridor of about 64 square kilometers (25 square miles).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over 283 days the cameras logged 27,007 recordings but found no evidence of spatial overlap with bears detected in the town, the team wrote in an abstract for the TusnadEcoBear conference, held in B\u0103ile Tu\u0219nad in October 2025. Feeding sites can work, they concluded, as long as hunting staff avoid direct contact with the bears during feeding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The zoning report maps four habituated bears relocated from the Bra\u0219ov area. A bear from Poiana Bra\u0219ov, the ski resort above the city, was taken to the Bucegi Mountains and was back in the same spot within 3 days. After a second move it came back in 1 day, and the hunting ground manager shot it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A mother with cubs from the city of Bra\u0219ov, released in the Lotru Mountains, crossed 7 counties and settled near the resort of P\u0103ltini\u0219. A young female from Predeal died 2 days after her move to the Codru Moma Mountains, when her collar sent a mortality signal. In capital letters, the authors wrote that for bears in repeated contact with people, relocation “is not a viable solution in the medium and long term.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Romania’s national project handed out 1,140 electric fence systems to protect livestock, crops and property, much like a fence around beehives on a Virginia solar farm<\/a>. Bra\u0219ov County logged the most reports of wildlife at the fences, 198 of 1,888, and the monitoring report says they failed only when a system was not kept to spec.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since November 2025, feeding a bear in the wild can cost 10,000 to 30,000 lei. In conflict zones, the zoning plan wants bear-proof containers, emptied daily, for good reason, as anyone who has read about a bear living under a house for a month<\/a> knows.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHow a forest bear turns into a town bear<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Relocated bears found their way back<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Fences, fines and bins that bears test<\/h2>\n\n\n\n