Russ is studying wild Andean (or spectacled) bears in the Lambayeque region of Peru and sharing his adventures with us. Read his previous post, Another Day Older, Another Day Wiser?

Well, we have to be creative and persistent in our quest to collar Andean bears in the dry forest. The last few weeks have shown us that although we have learned more about the bears here than we have elsewhere, we still have a lot to learn!
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Russ is studying wild Andean (or spectacled) bears in the Lambayeque region of Peru and sharing his adventures with us. Read his previous post, To Smell a Bear.

The sky last night was clear, so the stars were bright overhead as we cooled off and settled into a new campsite. The moon was just past full, so we could easily have stayed up later, but we were all tired from hiking in the afternoon sun with full backpacks, and we went to sleep early.
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As you walk into the Giant Panda Research Station at the San Diego Zoo, the first bear you see is Su Lin. She’s been going through some definite hormone changes recently, and our research team is monitoring her. With these changes comes a restlessness that makes it rather difficult for our guests to get a photograph of our girl! Currently, we are seeing her sleep a good part of the day, sitting in water and playing, and walking a good bit! These are all behaviors that we have seen previously with Bai Yun, so she’s really not surprising us, except with how early she started her estrus this year!
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Could it be we are nearing the end of our fantastic remodel of the Conrad Prebys Polar Bear Plunge at the San Diego Zoo? Anyone who has remodeled their home knows the joys and dilemmas that improvement brings. Most of the work that impacted our bears was completed last fall with the building of our management yard and the experience wall.
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For people viewing the giant panda cub here at the San Diego Zoo for the first time, seeing him up so high in the trees can be a little worrisome! So often we think of bears just keeping all four limbs on the ground. Well, we have bears that say, “No way!” to that. From the young age of four to five months, giant panda cubs begin climbing up the trees for a nap, a long snooze, to get out of Mom’s way, and to get away from danger!
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Russ is studying wild Andean (or spectacled) bears in Peru and sharing his adventures with us. Read his previous post, 20 Liters Down, 5 Hours to Go.

I’m sometimes jealous of people who can describe how things smell, or taste. I know the same words that they do, but they truly understand how to use the words. If I could, I would describe for you what a wild Andean bear smells like. Instead, all I can say is that “Chris” smelled like a bear.

I’ve been familiar with the general smell of “bear” since I was a child, growing up in black bear country. Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to smell black bears and brown bears across the mid-western and western United States, but this is the first time I’ve ever sniffed a wild Andean bear. Yep, Chris definitely smells like a bear!
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Neoteny: reaching sexual maturity while retaining juvenile characteristics.

Pandas are so cute. What draws us to them? Why does the panda appeal to so many people? The answer might be neoteny—keeping a juvenile appearance into adulthood. Babies are cute. Our own young have characteristics that we humans respond to such as a big, round head, large eyes, a high forehead, and a roly-poly body. We are programmed to respond to these babyish looks. Babies just make us like them and want to care for them. It is part of our human makeup.

Human babies aren’t the only young that attract us. Puppies appeal to us. They have the short snout, big eyes, high forehead, and clumsy way of moving. The attraction we have for our own babies also endears us the young of many mammals. (more…)

Russ is studying wild Andean bears in Peru and sharing his adventures with us. Read his previous post, From San Diego to Dry Forest in 36 Hours.

There are serious logistical constraints involved in Andean bear fieldwork, whether in the cloud forests of Cusco or the dry forests of Lambayeque. In the dry forest, the critical constraint for we humans is water. For those of us waiting to collar bears, it’s WATER, in jugs of 20 liters (5.28 gallons), carried in backpacks from the flat lowlands into the rugged hills.

Although we’re camped near a waterhole, we don’t actually have access to any of the water in it; that water is for the wildlife to use. Based on what they’ve observed, Robyn and her team from the Spectacled Bear Conservation Society (SBCS) believe that bears travel down trails higher on the canyon walls to feed on sapote fruits at lower elevations, and return up this canyon to drink and swim in the waterhole.
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In some ways, it’s a long trip from San Diego to the dry forest of Lambayeque, where I’m going to work in the field with Robyn Appleton and the field team from the Spectacled Bear Conservation Society or SBCS (see post The Bear Goes over the Mountain). Yet in other ways, it’s only a few hours away.

The goal of my trip to the dry forest of northern Peru is to work with Robyn and SBC’s team to capture several Andean (also called spectacled) bears, and fit them with satellite GPS collars. Dr. Meg Sutherland-Smith, a veterinarian with the San Diego Zoo, will provide top-notch veterinarian care for any bears we immobilize during her stay and give Robyn and I additional training and advice in these procedures (see Meg’s post, Peru: Room with a View). The data we obtain from these collars will give us insight into the amount of space that bears need in this tropical dry forest, which is a threatened habitat.
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In recent years, Bai Yun has displayed behavioral signs of estrus in an unpredictable pattern. The pattern of expression has been very truncated, encompassing a few short days of intense behavior alerting us to her mating readiness. This has been a change from the pattern of her younger years, in which the behavioral trends in her estrus were more lengthy and signaled well in advance that her body was preparing for mating.
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