ROMANIA - If You Go Down To The Woods Today ............

Most of you have already seen some pictures of my encounters with brown bears yesterday so I will use this post just to tell you a little bit about what happened yesterday evening. 

I booked a bear watching excursion with a company here in Brasov. They are obviously very popular so you do need to book in advance. I therefore joined 7 other people in a minibus for a journey of about 40 minutes out of Brasov up into the forested hills. There were actually two minibuses going to different places.

There are populations of European Brown Bears in Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria and at the moment they are thriving mainly because neither of these countries are particularly densely populated and therefore habitat loss is relative slow.

Although protected by EU law, in Romania hunting is allowed on a quota system to manage the population, which of course, is a very contentious issue and the main focus of the efforts in the forest we visited was to reduce unintentional contact between man and beast.

Once the minibus had parked up we walked for about 15 minutes into the forest and were then ushered into a hide near a small clearing. Almost as soon as we were inside a bear appeared. Obviously I was in the hide and my phone is not a flashy one, so enlarging the images, reduces the quality somewhat but you can get the gist of what we saw.

They have an amazing sense of smell so would have been aware quite quickly that we were about. The clearing was set up as one of six feeding stations in the forest hence why they could put a hide there and be relatively sure the bears would show up for tourists. The purpose of the feeding stations was not to feed the bears per se, that would make them dependant on human contact which is not the object of the exercise - they are wild animals. It is to supplement their hunted and foraged diet so that they do not feel the need to leave the forest and stray into populated areas or on to busy roads looking for food. The guide was saying that so far the programme had been sucessful and that he wished it would be replicated in areas of Romania where bears are becoming problematic for farmers.

We learnt that when hiking in Romania you should always stick to open tracks and not walk through undergrowth - they are lazy animals and sleep during the heat of the day pretty much almost anywhere shaded. They grow to between 200 and 250 kgs. And most importantly they will chase you obviously, and can out run you, but will never attack you from behind. The guide said they are very gentlemanly in combat as they want to be facing you when they strike.

Just as we were getting ready to leave the hide a bear suddenly came out of the bushes - we saw 4 different ones at various time while we were there. This meant that we had to remain in the hide until it had moved on in the other direction to that which we wanted to go in. The result was that when we did eventually make the 15 minute walk through the forest back to the minibus there was a very uncomfortable tension in the air amongst the group!!

All in all a very good excursion and one I would recommend, but Romania is not a place to just go out into the woods on your own for us non local folk. When I did the 7 Ladders Canyon hike earlier in the week, I can now reveal that the guide had a canister of bear spray in a pouch on the strap of his backpack.