A Lot to Learn

By: David Jackson, Project coordinator, Andean Bear Project

Since both Leo and Beto were rescued as young cubs, we knew the task of rehabilitation would be difficult. We had to rely on the animals’ natural instincts, nurturing them using various rehabilitation techniques in order to provide the bears with the necessary skills to survive in their natural habitat.

From the time when Leo and Beto were rescued, they have spent the majority of their rehabilitation in the Santa Martha Rescue Centre, about an hour south of Quito. They began in small enclosures, where they were given very close attention. At first they had to be bottle fed, since they were so young they would have still been suckling, should they not have been snatched from their mothers. They remained in conditions of round-the-clock attention until they were big enough to be relocated to a larger enclosure in September 2005. Here they remained for a few months, accompanied part of the time by Colleen, a female bear who was successfully released in Yanahurco last October. Unfortunately, due to their constant escapes from this enclosure, they had to be moved to a smaller, yet safer enclosure in February 2006. They remained here until their relocation to Yanahurco for release this July.

The July release date came about following a contact from the BBC Serious Andes team, who were interested in coming to Ecuador to film our project. Kindly, the BBC offered to donate all the funds necessary to cover the reintroduction project. They funded the materials for the rehabilitation enclosure, the permissions from the Ministry of Environment, the transportation, radio-collars and various other costs to allow the reintroduction process to run smoothly. Accordingly, we applied for and recently obtained permissions for release from the Ecuadorian Ministry of Environment and upped the rehabilitation process to prepare the bears for the wild.

In the last three weeks before the release, it became my responsibility to adapt the bears’ diet ready for release. I subjected them to a higher level of natural food sources, whilst reducing the quantity of their captive diet. This prepared their digestive systems for a natural diet on release, and also developed their food manipulation skills to optimise their survival chances in the wild. The first of the three weeks of intense rehabilitation was spent in Santa Martha Rescue Centre. The bears were taught to eat suro, bromeliads, puyas and palms, which we collected from Intag in the north, the nearby Pasochoa reserve and in the vicinity of the Rescue Centre itself.

Initially, the bears had no problems eating bromeliads and palms, were relatively efficient with the puyas, but had problems with the bamboo-like suro. In the wild, bears eat suro by opening the stem and eating the soft centre. Something had to be done to make Leo and Beto recognise suro as a food source, and to increase their skills in opening the stems. We tried an old trick of implanting dog biscuits into the stems, but what really seemed to work was the infusion of a sugar solution. Using this technique, the bears learned to open the suro, and from this point, recognised it as a food source.

Over the week in Santa Martha, the bears seemed to become more relaxed and playful. Each day, we transformed their cage into a mini forest, by planting suro, palms, and tree branches containing bromeliads to see how they would cope with encountering their food in its natural form. The bears revelled in this ‘pseudo-forest’ and recognised their food in this form immediately. This gave us a good indication that the bears would soon settle into a cloud forest environment.

Now for the journey to Yanahurco to see how they would cope in the paramo (high altitude grasslands)

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