Spectacled Bears - Shadows of the Forest Natural World

ROLLING THUNDER

In the mist of the Andean cloud forest in South America,

there's a shy, mysterious beast.

It's one of the largest animals in these forests, yet it's so elusive

that until recently very little was known about it.

RUSTLING

It's a spectacled bear.

Though glimpses of it in the wild are rare,

it's far more familiar from a children's book.

In 1958, a bear called Paddington

from deepest, darkest Peru

entered the lives of children across the world

through the books of Michael Bond.

There's one bear in South America -

the spectacled - so Paddington must be one,

and in the book at least, he eats marmalade.

But to biologists, the real book of its life is only now being written.

And as its forest home is disappearing fast,

we're racing to understand the real bear to stop it becoming extinct.

But what they have found out about this enigmatic bear

could put it into even greater danger.

New, staggering revelations are now coming to light.

The Andes run the length of South America,

and it's up in the central and northern Andes,

close to the equator, that the bears live.

Skirting the mountain peaks are thick, dense cloud forests,

which rise up to about 4,500 metres.

Being both high and on the equator, this is called the "high tropics",

rich in wildlife.

COOING

CHIRPING

This damp air creates perfect growing conditions.

The branches of trees are festooned with flowering plants.

The same bromeliads that attract hummingbirds also attract bears.

Though both sexes of bear climb trees, the female bears,

weighing a third less than the males, are able to reach

the more inaccessible plants on the outer branches.

Spectacled bears love bromeliads,

and with their extraordinary sense of smell, find them up in trees.

WHINING

What they can smell is the plant's sugar-rich core.

The bears are called "spectacled"

because of the markings around their eyes.

Actually, their sight isn't very good.

They rely much more on their sense of smell.

The spectacled bear is the most threatened of all the bears.

It's the last member of a family of bears called "tremarctine",

or "short-faced" bear.

Thousands of years ago, the other short-faced bears became extinct,

including a giant one that weighed more than a ton.

Above the cloud forest, it's too cold for trees to grow.

The land is carpeted

with vast swathes of tall grasses, called "Paramo".

Puyas are ground bromeliads that grow out here on the Paramo

and can stand over three metres high.

The bears are lured out of the cloud forest

to the sweet epicentres of the puyas.

Clearly this bear has a sweet tooth!

Perhaps this is the basis for Paddington's love of marmalade.

The bears are extremely wary, and live high in the mountains,

so getting any information on them has always been hard,

but what scientists were sure about

was that almost all their diet was plants.

Over the last few years,

with cloud forests being cleared at an alarming rate,

scientists have woken up to their plight.

In Ecuador, biologist Armando Castellanos has devoted 12 years

to finding out more about them.

Although Armando has studied many animals in the cloud forest,

his greatest passion has always been for the bears.

THUNDER

He is radio-collaring a wild bear that has been trapped and sedated.

This is a large male bear. He also has collars on other animals,

to build up a picture of where the bears are and what they're doing.

He hopes to find out, crucially,

just how much ground the bears cover.

Armando isn't the only scientist in the Andes

who's become obsessed by spectacled bears.

Further south, on the dry, rugged foothills of Peru,

spectacled bears are at the very edge of their range.

This is where biologist Rob Williams works with the bears

on a small reserve called Chaparri.

Rob came out here from England

as a bird-watching tour guide, married a Peruvian girl,

and settled here to establish a community-owned reserve

with his new father-in-law.

I first heard about spectacled bears, I guess, as a child.

I don't remember the exact moment.

Everyone knows Paddington came from Peru.

It was a mythical animal of the Andes

that no-one really saw or knew anything about.

I came as an ornithologist, interested in birds,

but I wanted to see a puma and a spectacled bear,

because these are the big, exciting animals.

Though there were rumours of bears living in the Chaparri area,

no-one, including Rob, knew for sure whether they were still there.

It was only when I started coming down here in about 1999,

just after the peace agreement between Peru and Ecuador,

that it became possible and I met people saying,

"There are still spectacled bears in an area."

With the local people here, and some other biologists,

we started to get interested in them, thinking how are they still doing.

It's amazing they're still here.

But in such a vast landscape and with limited resources,

how could Rob ever be able to find one,

let alone learn anything about them?

Remote cameras, triggered by an infra-red beam,

were a possible answer.

Unlike people, they neither smell nor move,

and can remain unflinching, night and day, for weeks at a time.

The dry riverbeds on the reserve

always have a few remaining pools of water,

and Rob knew that if the bears were there at all,

they would come to drink sooner or later.

Week after week, Rob and his team

visited each camera trap in the mountains,

returning to base with the crucial evidence on the memory cards.

What they found exceeded all expectations.

Seeing the first photo on the camera was really exciting, you know.

We didn't know how well it would work or how many photos we'd get.

We got a nice photo of one in a pool

with its face coming right up out of the water, looking at us.

We had the whole facial pattern - it was exciting.

We realised, "We can do this

"and we can use this to study these bears."

Gradually we built up a picture

and we know now that there are nine or ten bears

using this valley on a regular basis.

Probably five or six in it at any one time.

The study continues, but it's slow.

So Rob also values the information he's getting

from a group of rescued bears

which live in an enclosure in the reserve.

These bears have been rescued from captivity,

illegally held in circuses, zoos, factories,

saw mills, private people's houses.

They have a better life here. We can learn stuff from them.

But most importantly, the locals can come here and see the bears

and it creates a local source of respect.

The camera traps have shown us that the bears' behaviour

is quite different from what was believed.

People believed they were nocturnal. It's published in several reports.

But through the camera-trapping,

we've found there's no night-time activity at all.

He's also witnessed something else which is quite extraordinary -

the bears making beds in the trees.

Biologists haven't yet found a den,

but mothers and their cubs

have been observed to remain together for over a year.

Two cubs is the norm.

Not much more is known about their upbringing.

WHINING

As Rob gets to know spectacled bears better,

he's starting to understand

how they survive here at the very edge of their range.

In this habitat, especially in the dry forests,

they're trapped in the edge of their possible limit of survival.

You know, this is an extreme environment for them.

Their diet was thoroughly studied here 40 years ago.

Scientists decided that these bears were mainly vegetarian,

with protein from termites and beetles

making up a scant 2% of their meals.

Some Andean people, particularly those that keep livestock,

believe that bears are even predatory,

but this is something that scientists are quick to dismiss.

In my years here and in other countries, I've heard many reports

of amazing things from otherwise credible witnesses.

The in-built beliefs and hatreds towards predators

in Andean communities

can often lead people to tell you things they believe they have seen.

There's a man here who's told me he's seen a peregrine

cut the heads off four chickens with its wings.

It's obviously rubbish. He's otherwise a very reliable observer.

Rob thinks that scientists must stick to what they see.

Here in Peru, even at the peak of the dry season,

which lasts for three or four months of the year,

when there's absolutely no fruit, no insects, no nothing,

then the bears at Chaparri eat nothing more than bark.

Their teeth can rip deep into the trunk of leafless pasallo trees,

where sugars are stored, and this is enough,

amazingly, for the bears to survive.

Interestingly, the bears seem

to have a sixth sense for when and where to find fruiting trees.

When these berries appear much lower down the mountain,

the bears are soon onto them. Is it their sense of smell,

or is information being passed down from mother to cub?

Rob knows that bears quickly move into his area when fruits appear.

However, he has no idea how much ground

these same bears are also using outside the reserve.

Back in Ecuador, this is exactly what Armando is trying to find out.

Working at this altitude for weeks at a time is hard.

A horse is the only way to get around up here.

The horses on this ranch at Yanahurco are direct descendents

of ones brought from Spain by the conquistadores,

and 500 years of altitude have given them the lungs for the job.

It's soon clear Armando will need stamina too.

In this terrain, it's hard to pick up the signal

from the radio-collared bear.

At this high spot, he ought to get a good signal.

He needs line of sight to pinpoint the transmission from the collars,

and in this terrain, that can be hard.

STATIC

It seems that his big male bear has moved over 15 kilometres in one day,

and is now heading north west from the Paramo to denser terrain.

But these deep valleys don't just make the signal difficult to find -

they slow him right down.

Armando realises he needs some way of getting above it all.

He gets the help of local flying enthusiast Jorge Anhalzer.

Armando will take his receiver with him

and be able to cover much more ground.

Jorge does a final engine check. They'll be flying over terrain

where an emergency landing will be impossible.

THEY SPEAK IN SPANISH

ENGINE STARTS

Radio tracking from the air

allows Armando to build up a picture

of where his collared bears are moving.

After several flights over a period of months,

he is able to map the signals.

He can see the entire range

that the male bear has covered over that time.

TRACKER BEEPS

It is 16,000 hectares.

That's half the size of the Isle of Wight.

It's bigger than anyone had imagined.

He's also discovered that, within the same area,

there are also two females.

If a bear needs so much land to survive,

an encroachment on its territory puts it under enormous pressure.

People are pushing further and further into remote areas,

often clearing areas of once pristine cloud forest

to graze their cattle.

Every hillside that is cleared

denies the bear a few trees dripping in bromeliads

or a patch of sugar-rich puyas.

LOWING

The cattle are also being taken right up onto the high Paramo.

Scientists like Armando

are eager to find out how the bears are coping with these changes.

Back on the ground,

Armando returns to the spot where he obtained the most recent signal.

TRACKER BEEPS

The signal is very strong.

The frequency tells him it's the big male bear.

It must be close. But a condor is circling.

Though they're quite common here, to see them in flight like this

generally indicates that there's a carcass around.

Might his bear be dead?

But suddenly, the bear's signal strengthens

and Armando gets a sighting.

There she is. Over there.

It's alive and well.

Armando tries to see where the bear is heading.

It seems to be following a scent.

A dead cow.

And the bear seems very interested.

To Armando's amazement, the bear starts

to gorge on the belly of the cow.

It's one more observation that has helped turn everything that we knew

about spectacled bears on its head.

Forget beetles and termites.

This bear clearly has a taste for raw steak, too.

This extraordinary sighting encourages Armando

to continue his trek across the Paramo.

Four days later, another intriguing observation -

a long trail through the grass.

The ground has been trodden down.

It seems that something big has been dragged down the hill.

And not 50 nor 100, but 200 metres down the hill.

Armando follows the trail down.

At the end of it is another carcass.

It's another dead cow.

There are tooth marks of bear, and claw marks, too.

There are well-known cattle-killers up here - pumas.

But it's still surprising to find a spectacled bear scavenging

on one of their kills.

BIRD CALLS

Perhaps the bears are being pushed into scavenging meat

because their habitat is being broken up.

It's difficult for Armando to assess what bears normally do in the wild.

To study the bears' natural diet, Armando has started visiting

a much more pristine, unspoilt part of Ecuador.

It's a place so remote, it takes days from Quito in a Land Rover,

and then more days on horseback.

A dangerous journey along treacherously steep ridges

to the wild, pristine foothills of Mount Sangay.

And no-one comes here for a very good reason.

VOLCANO ROARS

Every now and then, quite randomly, it erupts.

The locals won't come within miles of here.

Armando knows what he's looking for.

This is dense, pristine cloud forest and Armando can recognise

the trail left by spectacled bears as they move through it.

After many hours of searching, he finds a vital clue...

..the faeces, or scats, of a bear...

..and in it, hairs.

Armando is sure that these hairs belong to the mountain tapir.

Mountain tapirs are indigenous to the cloud forests of the Andes.

They're about the size of donkeys, but because they are good to eat,

have been hunted out of most of their former range.

But at Mount Sangay, where there are absolutely no people,

the tapirs are abundant.

For Armando, it's a revelation

that spectacled bears have probably always scavenged on carcasses,

on indigenous creatures such as mountain tapir,

which were here long before cattle.

But this revelation also makes him reconsider

a lot of other assumptions he's held about spectacled bears.

Like Rob Williams in Peru,

Armando has been ignoring the local campesinos' rather wild claims

that bears were attacking live cattle.

He puts out the word that he would like to hear

from anyone making these kinds of claims.

Senora?

Se acuerda? Como esta?

Se acuerda de lo de...? A woman responds.

She lives in a region of Ecuador called Cosanga.

She recounts to Armando something extraordinary

she saw down by the river.

THEY SPEAK IN SPANISH

The tapir and bear escaped when...they see her.

If he had met this lady before he had been to Sangay,

he would have dismissed her assumption

that the bear was actually attacking the tapir.

But knowing now that some bears have a taste for raw meat,

he can't help but wonder whether there's more to this bear

than scientists have ever believed.

Less than 30 kilometres away, but still in the same region, Cosanga,

a campesino is keen to take Armando

up the hill to the clearings in the forest made for the cattle.

Here, the campesino pulls out a photograph - of a cow.

The cow has been fatally wounded.

The campesino claims it was attacked by a bear.

Two attacks, allegedly by bears, only 30 kilometres apart.

That's within the home range of one hungry male bear.

Claw marks on a tree prove that there are bears here.

THUNDER RUMBLES

Could it be that spectacled bears, like grizzly bears,

are attacking and killing large mammals?

If true, this would be shocking news for the scientific community.

And there are scientists,

like Rob Williams in Peru,

who don't believe the evidence stacks up.

The spectacled bear is a small bear.

The biggest ones that are reported are about 120, 130 kilos.

A cow weighs about four times what a spectacled bear weighs -

that's a huge difference.

There are very few predators in the world that take out prey alone

that are that much bigger than them.

They believe what they're telling you, but when you actually say,

"Whose cow has been killed?"

"It's the neighbour of my cousin's friend."

And, you know, I want to see someone... Why has no-one proven it?

No-one's ever shown us a dead cow

and we've got there in time and said, "Yes, a bear killed this cow."

But in a remote part of Ecuador,

that's exactly what people are saying.

There's a remote community at a place called Oyacachi.

Isaac Goldstein is a Venezuelan biologist

following the same leads as Armando.

Isaac has been investigating claims about bear attacks on cattle

across the bears' range in Venezuela and Bolivia,

as well as here in Ecuador.

Isaac listens carefully to what the people at Oyacachi have to say.

HE SPEAKS IN SPANISH

They've told these stories often, but few people have believed them.

The Ministry of Environment

didn't believe that the bear was attacking a cow.

The only known conflict with the bears

is that they are spotted in fields of maize.

Maize is increasingly grown in forest clearings,

and looks like the tall puya that the bears love to eat anyway.

So people and bears are in conflict already.

If people are also talking about bears attacking cattle,

what hope is there of local people caring for this bear?

Denis Torres works

for a conservation organisation called Andigena,

and thinks that local people

are being swayed by a long-held mistrust of bears.

The campesino believe the spectacled bear is a real predator,

because they have a lot of misconception, maybe.

It's the heritage for the Spanish people,

when they are coming to South America,

they have a long history of conflict

with brown bears in Spain or in Europe.

But scientists are going to have to get to the truth - and fast -

because local people are already taking the law into their own hands.

Hunting is thought to be a major cause of population reduction.

Nearly 200 bears are shot each year,

even though they're an endangered species.

The bear's reputation as a crop raider is bad enough.

Andigena don't want its image to be tarnished any further.

They make no mention of the stories of bears hunting down cattle.

HE SPEAKS SPANISH

Torres distributes attractive brochures

to farmers in remote communities

to help dispel any negative attitudes towards the bear.

The farmer living here in this area

has seen constantly one spectacled bear close to his farm.

And he told me,

"I don't have any problem related with cattle predation.

"In fact, the spectacled bear is very close to my home,

"but I don't have any problem with the bear.

"Sometimes the bear is eating the corn in my crops,

"but I don't feel afraid about the bear

"or any bad image about the bear."

But this approach is causing a rift with biologists.

I get very mad at them,

because they are preaching what they would like to happen

in the world, but that's not what is happening.

Como esta? Mucho gusto.

If we go to a settlement that is having problems

and we say to the cattle owners, "You have no problems,"

we will lose all the credibility

because we will be liars.

They know what they are seeing.

They are experts on their cattle.

The campesino believe the bear is the main reason for the cattle loss.

I am not very sure about that.

I think that the puma is the main animal provoking the cattle death.

At Oyacachi, Isaac Goldstein is increasingly convinced

that it's not a puma

but a bear that's attacking and killing their cattle.

A calf has been found on the Paramo, motherless and injured.

OK, we can see here clearly the claw marks of the attack.

Very superficial, however.

This is the only profound wound.

We don't see anything here

in the base of the skull or the throat, so it is not a puma attack.

And the mother of this calf is missing,

so we should look for her and see and confirm the bear attack.

We will look for the remains of the mother and confirm the bear attack.

The owner of these cattle, called Melchor,

continues alone in the search for his missing cow.

Following hoof marks and disturbed vegetation,

he enters the cloud forest.

He soon identifies an area on the ground within the forest

where there has been a huge struggle.

The ground has been kicked up and there are traces of hairs.

He found a dead cow -

one of his cows dead - and other signs of struggle.

He followed the signs of dragging...

..and then at the end of the signs he found the dead cow.

From what remains it's hard to tell

whether this was the mother of the wounded calf,

but Melchor is sure that it has been attacked by a bear.

Now, these signs of dragging

were exactly what Armando saw on the Paramo.

Perhaps that wasn't a puma attack after all.

Back at Oyacachi,

Isaac believes he's now building up the profile of a bear attack -

a series of distinctive clues.

He follow other trails and at the end of one of those

he found a big ground nest

with scats and claw marks on trees.

These claw marks tend to appear on trees

less than 100 metres from where a bear has fed.

Armando saw them at Cosanga.

Is this where little Paddington sharpened his marmalade spoon

into a butcher's knife?

There's even more emphatic evidence to come.

He's telling me that he have had previous attack on his cattle,

and showing me a picture,

and here you can see the typical signs where the bears attack cattle.

Isaac is now in no doubt.

There is a totally different behaviour between a puma kill

and a spectacled bear kill.

The puma kill, you see all the evidence in the throat.

That's the kill of a puma.

There's no way, no way, you can mistake one kill from the other.

There is no way.

And these are the same wounds that Armando saw

in the photos at Cosanga.

It's like solving a criminal case with humans.

You don't have to see the guy shooting...

at the person. You solve the problem with the evidence.

But down in Peru, Rob Williams remains cautious.

In Chaparri, he has absolutely no evidence

that bears kill other animals, so he prefers to understate the claims.

It is interesting, these new studies and the new evidence -

it is showing us new aspects of this animal we knew so little about.

We're learning that it is more of an opportunist,

it's less vegetarian than we originally thought.

Once upon a time, scientists just wanted to find out

enough about this bear to save it from extinction.

Now they cannot agree on the next step.

We need to be careful with what we do with any information that comes out

about predation with this bear.

We've got to report it. You've got to be, as a scientist, factual.

But we've got to put it into context

that it may happen in some areas, but in other areas it isn't happening,

and it may be, at worst, a few individual bears that learn this.

In the Andes, for many years,

people have said they're evil, predatory animals.

We need to be sure that they really are predatory

and think about solutions to the problem,

not just say "they're predatory" and create a worse press for the bear.

Because in the main, and in many areas like this,

they are not taking cattle.

Isaac agrees that it might not be a problem everywhere,

but he thinks it's time to face up to what's going on.

We cannot say that it is a widespread behaviour,

and that in all localities all bears attack cattle.

But in certain localities, certain bears become a problem,

and we have to deal with that problem.

The problem is how you...

keep the cattle away from the bears and the bears away from the cattle.

That's the main problem.

One solution might be to bring llamas

and guanacos back to the northern Andes.

Unlike cattle, they're native to the Andes

and have shared the mountains with bears for millennia.

They might be better than cows

at scrambling off steep slopes when chased by a bear.

Another solution to the conflict

might be to manage the cattle better -

fence them in to the lower slopes

or even pay out compensation money when cows are lost.

It's unfortunate that the only reason we are having problems

is because we've encroached on the bears' world.

The more we learn about the spectacled bear,

the more intriguing we find them to be.

They're surviving by changing their behaviour

as we replace their forest foods with cows.

They're doing their level best to hang on.

Are we doing our best to help them?

It'll be a very sad world if we can't live with spectacled bears,

with the 6,000, 10,000 spectacled bears -

if we can't find a space for them in six Andean countries.

The spectacled bear is the big terrestrial animal

in many of these habitats.

If we can't protect that, we'll lose the next one down,

then we'll lose the next one down,

and we'll end up with a poorer, simpler ecosystem.

Hopefully, with increasing knowledge will come

a better understanding of how we might take better care of this...

..the original Paddington Bear.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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