Bulgaria’s Environment Ministry is going to enhance its monitoring of the population of brown bears in the country as a result of the problem with killer bears.

The new measures will include “cross-monitoring” with the participation of the environmental inspectors, the Forestry Agency, NGOs, and zoologists from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, announced Environment Minister Nona Karadzhova. They will become effective as of the fall of 2010.

According to Karadzhova, the most important factor in determining measures to tackle the killer bear problem is knowledge of the precise parameters of the brown bear population in the country.

Present estimates of the number of brown bears in Bulgaria vary from 150 to 1150 bears.

The Minister said there are no pending requests for the hunting down of brown bears. Early Thursday morning local hunters in the Banite Municipality, Smolyan District, hunted down a suspected killer bear.

The situation in the Smolyan District located in the Rhodope Mountains in the very south of Bulgaria has been tense over the past few months as in May 2010 a bear killed a 65-year-old man near the village of Kutela, and in July near the village of Malka Arda another bear attacked and severely wounded a 64-year-old woman, who survived as her sister managed to scare off the beast. The two incidents happened within a range on 30 km.

Both killer bears have been hunted down with the permission of the Environment Ministry.