New videos reveal the hidden lives of Andean bears

Camera collar footage is revealing the secret lives of Andean bears (Tremarctos ornatus), the only surviving South American ursid. A wild Andean bear in Peru was caught eating soil or clay, courting females and even cannibalizing a dead bear cub.

“It’s so hard to see an Andean bear,” says Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya, a wildlife biologist at Conservación Amazónica, a non-governmental organization in Cusco, Peru. Scientists estimate there are fewer than 20,000 left in the wild. “And it’s even harder to see what they’re doing.” Although the bears are deep brown or black with shiny, bespectacled faces and can weigh up to 340 kilograms, they are hard to spot in the dense, steep Andean forests.

Zoos and sanctuaries offer some insight into bear behavior, but not much. It is their behavior in the wild that is crucial in informing conservation decisions. The Andean bear is listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List and the species is under threat from poaching, habitat loss, mining and climate change (SN: 4/30/24). Now, collars equipped with video cameras are providing some clues about the bear’s natural behavior, researchers report Dec. 4 in Ecology and Evolution.

The project “is amazing and it’s unique,” says Mauricio Vela-Vargas, a wildlife biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bogota, Colombia, who was not involved in the research. “For the first time we have information that proves many hypotheses.”

Bears have long been involved in Andean folklore. In a Quechua village near Cusco, Pillco grew up listening to her grandmother’s stories about the ukuku – half-human, half-bear gods who climbed a Peruvian glacier to bring water to nearby human communities. She always wanted to find out more about the real bears, real ukukus, that lived nearby.

Pillco now leads the initiative to attach camera collars to Andean bears across Peru’s Kosñipata Valley. Sitting down and watching the videos may seem simple, but seeing the footage is just the tip of the iceberg. Before they could comb the footage, the Pillco team had to find bears, capture them and collar them.

The task was not easy. The valley’s terrain is rugged and inhospitable to hikers, says Andrew Whitworth, an ecologist specializing in tropical biodiversity at Osa Conservation, a nonprofit organization in Costa Rica. He had never seen an Andean bear before. Whitworth says he joined Pillco on the project, intrigued by “the excitement of doing something that’s really hard and a little bit crazy.”

To catch the bears, Pillco asked a local mechanic to help build the traps — large metal boxes designed to catch Andean bears and ping the researcher’s phones.

“Sometimes we had false alarms, but the first time was quite the experience,” says Pillco.

One night, they had sent a field assistant on a long hike through the broken forest to bait a trap near where they suspected a bear was roaming. On the assistant’s return, the phones of the entire search team began to ring ‘TRAP ALERT’. Pillco was convinced the assistant had done something wrong. She grilled him, “Did you close the door?” Have you set it right?” The assistant assured him that everything was done properly. However, she asked him to go and check.

“He turned, and the bear was there! … He was just waiting for the bait to be put in,” she says. Whitworth, who was almost too ill to move at the time, was so excited that he got out of bed and was among the first to arrive on the scene.

Pillco and Whitworth first tried Crittercams, small GoPro-like cameras that attach to special collars, on two bears they were able to capture. They were eventually able to attach another bear to a camera collar – another device that integrates video, GPS location and movement speed.

This bear wore a camera collar for four months. The researchers then had to retrieve the device.

“That was one of the hardest things,” says Whitworth. The team could release the collar remotely. But it did not fall immediately. Once they had a general location, the team, which included locals who knew the terrain, set out to retrieve it. They went through dense cloud forests, crossed a river building their own bridge, and walked for days until they reached the right area. Everyone combed the ground – including Pillco’s research dog, Ukuku. But it was a local guide who found it first.

Collared footage revealed behavior of the Andean bear that had never been recorded before. The bear consumed previously undocumented foods such as a type of nettle plant, a woolly monkey and a dead bear cub, and he spent seven days mating with a female bear (on vacation, of course). And although Andean bears are thought to be fairly solitary creatures, this bear encountered others, usually peacefully, many times.

The footage is important not only to scientists, but also to local communities, who own most of the land where Andean bears live. As people in those communities try to conserve land, knowing what kinds of berries and plants Andean bears like to eat helps land managers decide what species to grow. Pillco is also presenting its videos at an upcoming bear festival and is working with nearby schools to engage children with the forests and bears that surround them.

“We’re really looking to build conservation ambassadors with the people of the community, because I think it’s essential to empower them” to protect their land, Pillco says. “Because I can go, my organization can go, but the communities will stay there.”