Have you, too, been wondering what the chances are that you'd ever meet a bear while on a walk?

Not that long ago, Latvians would most likely see bears in fenced nature reserves, and sightings in the wild happened maybe once in a blue moon. Now, they frequently make the news and stir up conversations at the dinner table.

Latvia's most recent count found at least 190 bears, according to Jānis Ozoliņš, senior researcher at the Silava forest research institute. That's up from around 70 bears just five years ago.

So the brown bear has indeed returned. Now what?

A reason for the rise is that bears have started reproducing here, rather than just passing through, Ozoliņš explained. Last year, researchers counted at least 18 mothers with first-year cubs in eastern Latvia.

Latvia is a beginner at living with bears, since no living generation has had to co-exist with them. Now is the perfect moment to build a proper management system, before panic takes the wheel.

Fear of bear attacks has already prompted calls to allow hunting. But Ozoliņš says that shouldn't be the priority; bears vanished from the Baltics because of hunting, and numbers are still too low to take it back up. Besides, bears are strictly protected across most of the continent.

Instead, he says, we should prevent bears from figuring out that farms offer easy dinners, protect beehives properly, define more precisely what damage should qualify for compensation and what steps farmers should take to properly protect their farms. It's also important to train intervention teams for real emergencies. Latvia currently has neither the legal basis nor the qualified people to remove a dangerous bear.

There are plenty of examples for Latvia to learn from: Estonia has over 1,000 bears, and a long-standing bear hunting tradition (unlike Latvia). Their system still has hiccups, though, as last year their population-control hunts were temporarily halted by a court due to animal rights and conservationist arguments.

Sweden, Croatia, and Slovenia all have bears too, alongside well-established ways to manage them: monitoring, intervention teams, public education, and strictly regulated hunting.

But what if the bear is already in front of you?

“It's easy to say if you haven't met one yourself,” Ozoliņš said, before starting to recite the list from memory: don't run – not right away at least; if the bear hasn't noticed you, then quietly leave. If it has, make it clear that you're a human – talk, sing, or crack a branch – and then slowly move away.

Don't try to convince the bear that you're stronger and more aggressive than it is. “The bear will not understand that,” Ozoliņš explained. A bear that runs after you might not be hunting you, he added: “It may simply want to know: what exactly is running away from me?”

After all, it most likely came to the forest for the same reason you did: berries or mushrooms.

The bear population is growing fast, and it will become more common to meet one. The fence that has run along the eastern border with Russia for the past few years may also shape where bears settle: they used to roam freely back and forth, but now have to turn back. Ozoliņš says we'll see the fence effect in about five years.