When night falls on this pleasant city in the heart of Transylvania, the people who live on Jepilor Street bolt their doors and stay inside for the night. Children are no longer allowed out, and adults whisper stories of recent deaths and mutilations.
It's been centuries since Romanians have experienced this kind of clawed terror. In the forested hills that rise above this neighbourhood of apartment buildings, you can see evidence of the menace that keeps people off the streets: The footprints, claw marks and droppings of brown bears, dozens of them, on the edge of a continent that had nearly driven them to extinction.
Shortly before midnight, a small red-and-white station wagon pulls up, and a tall man dressed in head-to-toe camouflage steps out. The city bear warden has arrived.
"It's amazing," says Favius Barbulescu as he surveys the woods with binoculars, and inspects the latest round of damage to the high-security garbage bins. "There are 28 bears living here on Jepilor Street alone, which is more than they have in Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic combined."
This city has become the flashpoint in a showdown between a shrinking human population and Europe's only fast-growing bear population, and it sometimes looks like the bears are winning.
Elsewhere in Europe, bears are almost non-existent. In 2006, Germany saw its first wild bear in 170 years, which the media named Bruno and became a major celebrity until he was abruptly shot by hunters last June.
But Romania, which last year became the European Union's newest member (along with neighbouring Bulgaria), is the lone European country that is experiencing the opposite problem.
"It's fair to say that our bear population is well above its natural level, and it is increasing far too fast," says Serban Negus, who studies bears for the Brasov-based Forest Research Institute.
Romania's central forests and mountains are home to between 5,000 and 5,500 bears, by Mr. Negus's estimate, and that population is growing by 10 per cent, or about 500 bears, every year. This has led to a series of unfortunate encounters between humans and bears.
"The public opinion here is not very much on the side of the bears," the understated Mr. Negus, a pleasant silver-haired man, says over coffee at the foot of one of the mountains that ring the town. "There have been some incidents, especially right around here, and that has turned people against them."
Last year, a cyclist collided with a bear trying to cross the road, and was mauled; an American tourist was killed in the mountains; and there were two other attacks on paths in the hills. The year before, three Romanians were killed coming home from a party after one of them drunkenly provoked a bear. And lesser encounters put Romanians in hospital almost every week.
Recently, the bear crisis has provoked a fierce debate over how best to deal with the population growth. Biologists estimate that the natural bear population should be not much more than 4,000; most agree that the population shouldn't grow above its current levels.
In many countries, that problem was quickly dealt with in the 19th and 20th centuries: The bears were slaughtered by humans, either for agricultural protection or for sport.
But that was during a time of agricultural growth. Romania, even more than the rest of Europe, is experiencing a fast shrinkage of agricultural land and a large increase in forest cover, part of a larger reforestation across Europe. Its forests have become so dense and unpopulated that bears are relatively safe.
And, under the 34-year dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, bears were kept safe: He made bear hunting a serious offence to make the entire bear population available for hunting parties he held for his close friends and comrades. As a result of that legacy, Romanians remain wary of bear hunting.
Mr. Barbulescu, the Brasov bear warden, does what he can under the law: Each month, he rounds up a dozen bears, loads them onto trucks, and ships them deep into the Transylvanian forest.
But beyond this, Romania's bear population is kept in check through an ingenious policy devised by the government: It allows wealthy Europeans, especially Germans and Italians, to hunt the bears during seasons that span half the year.
In exchange for this rare hunting privilege, they pay a licence fee of between $15,000 and $23,000 per bear, depending on its size. That has been good for the tourist industry, and it's brought badly needed revenues to this poor country's coffers.
But the policy simply hasn't produced results. Romania allows just over 300 bear licences each year, which isn't enough according to biologists, and most years it hasn't managed to sell all of them.
This has led a number of conservationists, including members of Mr. Negus's centre, to call for a bear cull, similar to the government-sanctioned wildlife culls that Canadian governments regularly authorize to keep predator populations down to acceptable numbers.
While that idea has received strong backing from people and local governments in Transylvania, it has outraged some ecological and animal-rights groups, which point to the extinction of bears in the rest of Europe.
They suggest repatriating brown bears to their former habitats in Central and Western Europe. But the logistics are extremely difficult: Aside from the mountainous regions of the Alps and Carpathians, where bears tend to thrive, there are few places in Europe where they wouldn't be poking their snouts in human settlements.
The result, for the moment, is a stalemate, and a lot of work for the bear wardens.
"People are just going to have to learn to live with the bears," Mr. Negus says.
"There simply needs to be better communication between the human population and the bears, if we are to avoid further trouble here."
