Clouds and fog in the normally dry mountains near Cerro Venado.

Wow, what a difference a little rain makes in the dry forest! When I woke up this morning, I walked away from the base camp to look at the clouds and fog rolling through the valleys. It was just before dawn, and at first I thought it was still raining. Then I realized that what I thought were raindrops falling on me were actually flying ants!

A swarm of flying ants congregating and competing to mate after two days of rain.

As the light of the sun seeps through the dark clouds, I can see that the color of the landscape is changing. Instead of being brown, as it was only a day or two ago, it’s becoming bright green! There are thousands of tiny plants at my feet, each shorter than the width of my little finger. I have no idea what kind of plants these are, but it is impossible to walk anywhere without stepping on them. I knew that arid habitats often have an abundant number of seeds waiting in the soil for just a little moisture to trigger germination and growth, but it is one thing to “know” that something happens and another thing to see it right in front of your eyes. I can almost hear the plants growing…

Russ Van Horn is a senior researcher with the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research. We’ll be posting more about his trip every few days!

Javier and Robyn hike through the dry forest on their way to a waterhole.

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!

After a few days of watching the small valleys where the sapote fruit is still plentiful, we’ve seen bears in the distance only twice. This is a much lower frequency of bear sightings than the Spectacled Bear Conservation (SBC) team gathered last year while the sapote was fruiting, but we don’t know why this is so. Jose walks through several valleys, scanning for evidence of recent sapote feeding by bears. He finds no fresh signs. Apparently the bears have shifted their movements back up into the hills, weeks earlier than they did last year, and the year before that. Variation between years in the behavior and ecology of wild animals is not unusual, and this is why it’s important to conduct long-term research. Knowing this is not very reassuring at the moment, however; it just feels like we’re having bad luck!

After returning from his walkabout, Jose checks the remote camera at another waterhole, and we learn that one bear or another has been visiting this other waterhole every four to five days. This sounds like a much more promising site than the sapote trees, so we shift operations and methods again. Every morning Javier and Robyn hike up to the waterhole and sit in a blind all day, waiting. The rest of us wait in radio contact at a distance, ready to hustle to the waterhole if a bear is darted.

Heavy fog and light rain obscure the rugged terrain of the study site.

Russ Van Horn is a senior researcher with the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research. We’ll be posting more about his trip every few days!

A DTCC staff member on a pickup service call

Last year, we received approximately 1,000 tortoises from the pickup service, and most were unwanted pets. We are anticipating that the number will increase this year as we reach out to educate the public about proper captive care for these special animals.

Angie takes a call on the hotline.

We are excited to start educating pet desert tortoise owners about captive care because we know this is a crucial step in ensuring the health of captive tortoises. A great majority of pet desert tortoises we received from the hotline last year were not healthy animals; interestingly, most had health issues that could have been prevented with small changes to nutrition and housing. With the San Diego Zoo operating the DTCC Pet Desert Tortoise Pickup Service, we will get the chance to talk to people face to face and address these issues. We also plan to offer a captive-care class at the DTCC. The topics we will be discussing include:

- Proper feeding and watering of pet desert tortoises
- Burrow construction
- Toxic plants in your yard
- Importance of desert tortoises living outside
- Brumation (hibernation)
- Sexing your desert tortoise
- Desert tortoises living with other domestic pets

We will also conduct health assessments on pet desert tortoises and be able to recommend tortoise veterinarians in the Las Vegas area. The class will be another way for us to get the word out about conservation of the desert tortoise. Our hope is that as the word spreads, we can begin to understand how many pet desert tortoises there are in the Las Vegas area, and we can make strides in decreasing that number.

We would like to coordinate with veterinarians and other local businesses to arrange for them to serve as authorized drop-off locations for the hotline around the Las Vegas Valley. These locations will help ease the demands on the pickup service staff, especially during our peak season from April to October. It will also provide pet desert tortoise owners anonymity when dropping off tortoises, so those who hesitate to call the hotline because they are required to provide an address and phone number may be more likely to turn in their pet desert tortoises.

We are looking forward to the New Year and new endeavors, and the new hotline will help us to spread our message of desert tortoise conservation all over southern Nevada and beyond!

IMPORTANT NOTE: It is against the law to remove a desert tortoise from the desert! If you come across one, even if it is a hatchling and seems helpless, it is healthier for the tortoise to stay in the wild than to be disturbed and brought to the DTCC. The wild desert tortoises that Clark County picks up only come from development sites and are removed by authorized biologists that are permitted by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The new Pet Desert Tortoise Hotline number is 702-488-9422.
The wild Desert Tortoise Hotline number is 702-593-9027.

Angie Sawyer is a research coordinator at the San Diego Zoo’s Desert Tortoise Conservation Center. Read her previous post, We Love Volunteers.

The team sets up camp on a ridge between two dry valleys.

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.

We’ve moved to a different campsite because it was obvious that staying by that waterhole longer would not be an efficient way to immobilize and collar Andean bears here. Members of the team have seen bears coming down to feed on sapote fruits at lower elevations, so we’ve moved down, following the bears. This new campsite is also a dry camp and is more exposed to the sun, but visibility is much better than higher up, next to the waterhole.

The dry valley at the field site.

As time passes, there are numerous demands for my attention, but I can’t allow myself to be distracted. If a bear were to come down from the mountains into the valley, it might only be visible for a few seconds, so I can’t stop watching. Gnats appear and start flying into my eyes and ears and bite my face, hands, and wrists. Pairs of birds that I suspect are probably flycatchers, fly across in front of me and perch in a shrub only 20 meters away. This area is known for being home to a high number of birds that live nowhere else, so it’s tempting to watch these birds through my binoculars for just a little bit, but I force myself to keep my mind, and eyes, on guard for bears. A large vulture, probably a king vulture, soars into my peripheral vision and then crosses back and forth over the valley. It would be so easy to get a good look…but I’d rather get a good look at a bear!

A sapote tree in a dry valley at the field site.

At 10:30 a.m., I see Robyn briefly as she changes position. At 11:27 a.m., everyone returns to camp. The field team doesn’t expect bears to be feeding in these valleys at mid-day, so we’re taking a break for lunch and to rest. It’s harder than you might think to keep alert for hours in the sun! Other than the bear sighting, the most interesting topic of conversation is Jose’s temporary friend. As he was sitting watch, he felt something on his back, underneath his shirt. This is nothing unusual, as there are a lot of gnats, and ants crawling on all of us. What was unusual was that this visitor seemed to be longer than an ant could be. Jose realized what it was and made the wise decision to not swat at his “guest,” which was a large centipede. The centipede, about 10 inches long, walked up his back, across his left shoulder, and down his left arm, exiting his shirtsleeve and going on its way.

We’re all back in place by 2:30 p.m., except for Jose. He’s hiked up into the hills to replace the memory cards at some remote cameras. We’ll look at those photos later and decide whether or not to stake out a different location. At 4 p.m., the breeze dies, and the gnats return. Fortunately, at 4:15 p.m. a swarm of golden dragonflies follows the gnats. Jose and the others return to camp at 4:40 p.m.. A bear, possibly the same bear as seen this morning, crossed back over into the upper part of the other valley at around 3:30 p.m. but it kept walking up into the hills, away from where we waited.

A fox is caught by a camera trap at a waterhole at the study site.

Russ Van Horn is a senior researcher with the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research. We’ll be posting more about his trip every few days!

A physical examination of wild Andean bear named Chris.

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!

GPS satellite radio collar, ready to be placed on Chris.

A GPS radio collar is properly fitted to Chris’ neck.

When he was darted last year, Chris had large blisters, or sores, on the pads of his feet. Robyn Appleton and her team can only guess that he’d worn down his footpads walking long distances on the rocky trails of the dry forest. This year, his feet are in good condition, which leads us to more questions: why were his feet more worn last year than this year; did he walk more last year than this year? If so, is this because he dispersed from his natal home range last year? Dispersal is the term for the process by which an animal relocates from one living place to another. A natal home range is the area where an animal was born. In most species of mammals, males disperse from their natal home range to a new area at around the time they go through puberty. In a few species of mammals, it is females that disperse, not males. The currently available evidence suggests that female giant pandas disperse but male giant pandas do not; male brown bears and American black bears disperse, but females of these species do not. No one has collected much evidence on whether it is male Andean bears or female Andean bears that disperse, but the probability is that males are the dispersing sex in this species. Were Chris’ blistered feet a clue as to whether male or female Andean bears disperse? Only time, and additional data collection, will answer that question.

We have additional questions on our agenda. We’ve seen and heard several bears in the area exhibiting behaviors that lead us to ask, is this the breeding season for Andean bears in the dry forest? If so, has Chris sired cubs? What determines whether one male sires cubs and another male does not? We can generate hypotheses to address these questions, but it will take a lot more work and data to test the predictions of these hypotheses and reach conclusions about the answers to our questions.

After we finished our physical examination of Chris, we moved him to a comfortable, safe place to recover. The last we saw of him, he climbed up a 10-foot-tall (3 meters) rock face and slowly walks uphill, out of sight into the dry forest. Forty-eight hours later, according to data transmitted by his new GPS collar, he’s 2.72 miles (4.38 kilometers) away, in an area with plenty of sapote trees, which produce fruits that bears in this area often eat. We, on the other hand, have moved less than 100 yards (91 meters), because we’re continuing to try to collar more dry forest bears. I wonder if the next one will smell like Chris?

Russ Van Horn is a senior researcher with the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research. We’ll be posting more about his trip every few days!

For the Ballentine Family in Maryland, their mantra became “Turn it off when you leave it behind. Whatever IT is— whether light, radio, computer, television—IT needs to go off.” Nine-year-old son Henry even offered his perspective and vowed to cut back on his lighting use in his bedroom.

The Carmignani-Goodman Family in San Diego blanched at the thought of using low watt bulbs, thinking about the “swampy hue” the bulbs would produce. Thus, they were delighted to “see” that low-impact bulbs now provide the typical warm glow they craved. However, the family wondered at the logic of using meters and monitors that require electricity to tell consumers how much electricity is being used in their home!

Seeing “blue” is the new “green” for the Abramson Family at Yale University in Connecticut. The CFL bulbs give off a bluish hue, but if the family can get the rest of the dorm rooms on campus to use them, the university will be using 75 percent less energy! They also discovered the phenomenon known as “vampire power”: even though an appliance/computer/recharger is turned off, if it’s not unplugged it still “sucks up” electricity.

The Dewar-Yates Family in Chicago admitted that their home was the “hands-down winner in energy consumption” and immediately made a huge effort to improve. Turning out the lights (or at least using less) can have an unexpected effect: it gave the illusion that the family was not at home! Could that be why they haven’t yet received their order of Girl Scout cookies?

Having the home electrical monitor displayed in a prominent location (the kitchen!) was great motivation for the Turkle Family in San Diego to cut back on energy use, as the thing really jumped when they used appliances like the clothes dryer, hair dryer, and toaster. Solar panels, anyone?

Blog post readers voted for their favorite attempts at electricity-use reduction effots. Congratulations to the Ballentine and Abramson families! Each will receive San Diego Zoo sweatshirts for their “hibernation” efforts to help them keep warm.

Challenge #5: It’s All Fun and Games
Our families will take a look at their recreational and entertainment choices. See what ideas they come up with to make going green fun! Your favorite family will receive a Caravan Tour at the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park. For added fun, we’ve asked some celebrities to write about efforts to reduce their carbon footprint. See who has taken the challenge in our Famously Green category!

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.

Even though there is little drinking water in this area for wildlife, the bears may go for days without drinking, based on data from GPS satellite collars on some of the bears and photos from camera traps. Where do the bears get moisture when they’re not visiting waterholes? Robyn’s hypothesis is that they obtain some moisture from the sapote fruit and from eating cactus. One of our research goals here is to understand the ecology of water in this habitat, and one of our conservation goals is to promote protection of the watershed and the waterholes.

Just after dawn in Lambayeque, Peru.

Just before sunset in Lambayeque.

We talk in whispers about what veterinary actions to take under different circumstances, how to proceed with research, how to raise funds for research, local politics, and what cold beverage we each crave. I’m yearning for a strong ginger ale I first drank in Kenya, while working on my doctoral research. I’ve never found this beverage for sale in the United States, but it would taste great right now, almost as good as a swallow of clean, pure water. We’ve used 20 liters of water in the days since the last jug of water was carried up to our campsite, even though we’ve used as little water as possible. The water jug is now dry, but with luck we now have to wait only four or five more hours before the hikers arrive with another full jug.
Tick.
Tock.

Russ Van Horn is a senior researcher with the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research. We’ll be posting more about his trip every few days!

My Zoo work hat after a few days in the dry forest.

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.

The flight from San Diego to Atlanta was just long enough for me to compose some long-overdue e-mails, and my time in the airport allowed me to send them off. Luckily, I still had the eight-hour flight from Atlanta to Lima during which I could finish some writing tasks that were due while I’d be in the field. One of the minor, yet critical, challenges of leaving for the field is that I have to think ahead of all the deadlines that will arise while I’m offline for a few weeks, or months: deadlines for progress reports, funding proposals, abstracts for conferences, etc.

In Lima, I had a quick and easy trip through the customs checkpoint, and then I carted my bags upstairs to a coffee shop with wireless Internet access for a few more hours of work before catching my flight to northern Peru. I boarded the flight for Chiclayo as the sun brightened the cloudy sky and immediately fell asleep, for the first time in over 24 hours. The flight was smooth, and I didn’t dream of the tasks behind me, or those ahead of me.

My good luck continued to hold. As I walked out of the Chiclayo airport, it was obvious which person was there to meet me. Not only was he the only person not wearing the badge of a licensed taxi driver, he also held up a sign reading osos, which means bears in Spanish. He’d been sent to start me on my ground trip from Chiclayo to Cerro Venado, where I’d spend most of the next 24 days.

A short taxi ride took us to the ground transportation terminal, where it is possible to take a bus to the local villages or hire a taxi for the trip. We couldn’t afford to wait for the bus, so we joined several others in a cab ride to the village of Batan Grande, passing by green fields of sugar cane below low, dry mountains. At Batan Grande, we stopped to drop off some of my excess gear, including a set of clean clothes for the flight back to Lima. Javier Vallejos leads SBC’s field team, and his wife, Pepa, renewed my sagging soul with coffee and breakfast while their young son watched a DVD on the wildlife of Manu National Park (see Cocha Cashu: Wild Nature).

Mototaxi loaded with Russ' gear.

The fence and gate constructed by the local cattle owner’s association, with help from SBC.

Two young men were waiting in the shade of a shrub for me to arrive. Wow, my trip required a lot of coordination by Robyn and her team! Isai Sanchez and Jonathan Vallejos helped me carry my gear up to the nearby base camp, where we reorganized it into backpacks. It was the hottest part of the day in an area where temperatures reach over 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), so we napped in the shade until it cooled off a little. We hiked along the foothills until we reached another campsite, where we met another member of the SBC team, Jose Vallejos.

After a quick meal, we grabbed our backpacks and set off uphill, heading toward a campsite where the others waited near a waterhole. With luck, we’d be collaring bears that approached this waterhole.

Nearly ripe sapote fruit

Russ Van Horn is a senior researcher with the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research. We’ll be posting more about his trip every few days! Read Russ’ previous post, Andean Bears: Camera Trappers.

We wanted to see if the families participating in our Green Family Challenge #3 could come up with a creative way to make a climate-change-reduction dinner, from store to table. Each family took on the challenge with gusto, resulting in some tasty meals!

With cloth San Diego Zoo bags in hand, the families turned to farmer’s markets and co-ops to obtain the freshest produce and discovered that prices were similar to those found at supermarkets. The Ballentine and Dewar-Yates families joined co-ops and, although leery about trying “new” vegetables, they are now enjoying produce not normally on their menu at home. The Ballentine Family in Baltimore had to make their co-op bag of food last several days when they were snowed in!

The Kranz and Carmignani-Goodman families had organic chicken on their menu, although finding such chicken proved to be harder than it sounds. The Turkle Family purchased sustainably harvested wild salmon and paired it with fresh veggies grown in their backyard (now that’s local!). If locally produced food wasn’t available, families tried to find organic equivalents. The Abramson Family, living in a college dorm, vowed to make better choices (eat local, eat in season, and eat less meat) in the dining hall and made valentines out of recycled materials with delightful results.

Blog post readers voted on the best creation. Congratulations to the Kranz and Turkle families! Each will receive the San Diego Zoo’s own Zoo Brew coffee, which is certified as organic and shade grown.

Challenge #4: In the Dark?
Families will monitor their home’s electricity use and share their attempts to “hibernate.” Vote for the family you think made the best effort, and the winners will receive San Diego Zoo sweatshirts. For added fun, we’ve asked some celebrities to write about efforts to reduce their carbon footprint. See who has taken the challenge in our Famously Green category!

Amy holds a panda cub at Wolong.

My panda cub encounter didn’t happen here at the Zoo, though: I was on one of our San Diego Zoo WorldWild Tours to China. As part of the trip, we went to the Wolong Giant Panda Reserve Breeding Center, where we were able to play with panda cubs for a few minutes and have our photos taken with them! Not only was it fun to see the cubs play with each other, but the way they interacted with the people in our group was also special. You could see that each panda cub had its own personality—some being feistier than others! One traveler in our group had a lifelong dream of holding a giant panda, and it touched my heart to witness his dream come true!

As director of the Zoo’s WorldWild Tours program, I’d like to let people know that we still have a few spaces left on our May 2010 trip to China, where all participants will be able to play with giant pandas cubs! Because the Wolong Breeding Center was destroyed in the 2008 earthquake, we’ll be visiting Wolong’s satellite facility in Bifengxia, which had 16 cubs born last year! At Bifengxia we’ll also have the opportunity to reunite with our beloved San Diego Zoo-born Hua Mei and Mei Sheng, as well as Tai Shan, the National Zoo’s panda “cub” that recently arrived in China. In addition, we will visit the Chengdu Panda Breeding and Research Center, where we will be able to see Mei Lan, Zoo Atlanta’s panda cub that was sent to China with Tai Shan.

Our China adventure will also include visits to Beijing, Shanghai, and Tibet—yet I know that our panda encounter will most certainly be the highlight of the trip for most of you!

Amy Parrott is the director of the San Diego Zoo’s WorldWild Tours program as well as the director of major gifts in the Zoo’s Development Department. Here’s more information on the upcoming China trip.