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Between 10,000 and 13,000 brown bears live in Romania, which has the largest population of the animal in Europe outside Russia. Brown bears are embedded in Romanian national identity. But human encroachment on wild lands — and ursine population growth since a 2016 hunting moratorium — has thrown the human-bear relationship out of balance.
Bear attacks are rising. Rural villagers have been mauled while tending to their fields. Since 2016, bears have killed 20 people, according to a report by the National Institute for Research and Development in Forestry.
Rukmini Callimachi, a reporter on The New York Times’s Real Estate desk, was born in Romania and was a young girl when her family fled the country’s Communist rule in 1979. She spent enough of her youth there to understand the symbolism of the bear.
This summer, while on a reporting trip in Romania, Ms. Callimachi found that a source of national pride had also become a problem. The Real Estate section published her story this month.
Below, Ms. Callimachi explains how she came up with the idea for her article and how she conducted her reporting. This conversation has been edited and condensed.
What gave you the idea that there was a story worth telling here?
While returning from the far north of Romania, where I was working on a Real Estate story about the interest in traditional architecture there, the path back took us through bear country. Within a couple of hours we passed three bears. In talking to Gelu Trandafir, my Romanian colleague and a companion on this trip, I started to understand that this landscape I knew from childhood had changed. Bears are so numerous and, sadly, used to eating human food, and the threat of bear attacks is so significant that in these areas it’s no longer advisable to go hiking or jogging.
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The post A Homecoming, of Sorts, to a Place Where Bears Run Wild appeared first on New York Times.
