More than 200 sheep have plunged to their deaths in the Pyrenees while apparently trying to escape a brown bear. The bears have been reintroduced to the mountain region over the past three decades after being wiped out by hunters.

The sheep, which belonged to a farmer in Couflens, south-west France, are thought to have taken fright when the bear appeared in the area last Sunday.

After the predator attacked one of the sheep, 209 others in the flock panicked and hurled themselves off a 200 metre-high cliff on the border between France and Spain. The bodies of 169 sheep were found the next day at the foot of the cliff in the Spanish village of Lladorre. The other dead animals were found in France.

The Spanish news agency Europa Press said bear fur had been found on one of the dead sheep and would be analysed to try to establish exactly what had happened.

Although the French government will compensate the farmer for his loss, the incident has provoked an angry response from the local branch of the French farmers’ federation.

“Pastoralism – which protects biodiversity and keeps the mountains alive – is not compatible with the reintroduction of large predators,” said the Confédération Paysanne de l’Ariège.

The last female brown bear native to the Pyrenees was shot dead by hunters in 2004. The French government has been engaged in a repopulation programme since the early 1990s, using bears from Slovenia. There are now thought to be about 30 brown bears in the region.

More than 130 sheep died in a similar, bear-related incident in the French Pyrenees last year.

Farmers on both sides of the border blame the bears for attacks on their livestock and the predators are sometimes killed. In September last year, the corpse of a brown bear – a protected species in Spain – was found with a gunshot wound to the chest in the northern regions of Asturias.