If you go down to the woods today in Italy, prepare for a big surprise. After years in which brown bears appeared to be heading for extinction at the hands of hunters, poachers and vengeful farmers, conservationists are celebrating a bear population boom.

Dozens of cubs have been spotted after a successful conservation programme.

The comeback marks a happy departure from a spate of bear killings in recent years, which ultimately turned public opinion back in favour of the animals.

Giuseppe Rossi, the head of the National Park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise, said that the Italian public had been deeply shocked two years ago when three bears were found poisoned, including a ten-year-old rare Marsican bear called Bernardo.

Bernardo had become a familiar sight to locals and tourists, scavenging for food from farms and gardens.

Another of the dead bears was his female mate. Their deaths, “an act of barbarity”, had “raised public awareness” of the need to safeguard the species, said Mr Rossi.

Italians were also outraged in 2006 when German hunters shot dead a bear called Bruno that had wandered over the mountains into Bavaria and was accused of savaging sheep.

There was another outcry last year when Bruno’s brother, codenamed “JJ3”, was shot dead after wandering into Switzerland.

Researchers at the “Action Plan for the Protection of Marsican Bears” (Patom), the Italian bear management agency, said that losses from shooting or poisoning had been counteracted by an “unexpected resurgence”, however. “We were overjoyed the other day to observe six female bears with ten cubs in the mountain woods and meadows of the Abruzzo,” one researcher said.

A spokesman for Patom said that the revival was due to “public vigilance” and increased patrols by the forestry service and electric fencing erected with the help of WWF, the conservation organisation. The number of Marsican or Apennine bears in Abruzzo, believed to be about 50, has risen and could even double when cubs are born this spring, researchers said.

A similar success story has played out in the Trentino-Alto Adige region in the Italian Alps, where ten years ago only three brown bears – all males – survived, reduced from 70 in the 1950s.

But in 1997 ten bears were captured in Slovenia and transferred to the area in a repopulation programme partly funded by the EU.

Despite several deaths – one was hit by a car, one drowned in a lake and a cub was carried off by an eagle – conservationists counted at least 24 bears and cubs recently in the Adamello-Brenta national park, north of Lake Garda.

Francesco Borzaga, the head of the Trentino branch of the WWF, said that brown bears were not normally dangerous to man: “It’s a question of reciprocal respect.” Although brown bears may look cuddly, they can weigh up to 300 kilos and run at up to 40 miles an hour.

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