The body of a brown bear cub, which was struck dead by a car, was found on Monday morning on Mojen-Taash road in Shahroud, Semnan Province.
This is the sixth bear victimized in the area in road accidents over the past year, Ali Akbar Qorbanlou, head of the provincial office of Department of Environment, said regretfully.
"An adult female and four more bear cubs had been earlier found dead around the intercity roads of Shahroud," Mehr News Agency quoted him as saying.
Unfortunately, much of brown bears' natural habitat has gone through human-induced changes, Qorbanlou added.
"Mining operations and scarcity of food are the main factors driving the bears out of their habitats around Shahvar Mount to unsafe areas."
Warning signs have already been installed along the roads, specifically in rural areas, to make drivers more cautious of the wildlife wandering around. However, the official said, this has not decreased the fatalities resulting from car crashes.
Urging drivers to pay extra attention while passing the roads, Qorbanlou called on the public to report any cases of animal death or injury to the Protection Unit of the DOE and avoid moving the animals themselves so that experts can study their remains.
"Some of the found carcasses are so carious or mutilated that it is impossible for DOE experts to do any sort of study on them," he added.
Brown bears were once native to much of Asia, some parts of the Atlas Mountains of Africa and perhaps most of Europe and North America, but are now extinct in some areas and their populations have greatly decreased in other areas.
The populations in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran are generally very small and fragmented, thus at high risk of genetic isolation, and they occupy only small segments of their former range.
