Vienna Review

"If nothing is done, there won't be any brown bears left in Austria in a few years' time, it's an endangered species," said WWF Austria's Christoph Walder.

Walder, who heads up the brown bear preservation project, was addressing a public meeting in Vienna Monday alongside by experts from the Research Institute for Wildlife and the Environment (FIWI).

The WWF is pushing for a "grand coalition to support brown bears" with the help of provincial governments, hunters and farmers, Walder said.

Brown bears disappeared from Austria's forests in the 19th century, chased away by hunters.

But after a single bear wandered in from neighbouring Slovenia in 1972, WWF Austria launched a programme to reintegrate them in the early 1990s, during which period the population grew to 35 bears.

Now however only two males -- Djuro and Moritz -- remain. The unexplained disappearance last year of Elsa, the last female, has ended hopes of re-building the Austrian bear population.

Experts are still puzzled as to what happened to Elsa.

"We've considered everything: disease, migration, but some of our bears may also have been killed illegally," said FIWI expert Georg Rauer.

In May, a first such attempt to reintroduce the bears was launched in Upper Austria province, uniting local government officials, hunting groups, farmers' groups, the Austrian economic chamber, FIWI and WWF.

Under this initial project, two or three animals will be brought into Austria from its southern neighbour Slovenia, which has some 700 bears.

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