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Marcos Hidalgo has only come face to face with a spectacled bear once in his life. It was 2018, and on a fieldwork route in Guaramacal, Venezuela, he came across a not very large specimen, a juvenile individual that he says defied a maxim of researchers of this species: “If you look for a bear, you won’t find a bear.” », he says on the phone from the Venezuelan Andes. For once, he was so paralyzed that he couldn’t even take out his phone to take a picture, so he devoted himself to remembering the memory in his mind. At this point, the agricultural production engineer on loan to the Conservancy had been tracking the spectacled bear for a number of years. The Guaramacal Andean Bear Project, which she is conducting, is now the only systematic study in the country collecting information on this species, which is not widely distributed and has been classified as “Vulnerable” and “Vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). ” Classified ” in the Red Lists of Fauna of Venezuela.
Hidalgo proudly says he has accumulated more than 15,000 entries in the database that keeps track of this Andean bear, or Tremarctos ornatus as it is known. His work allowed him to take stock of what they eat: a 75% plant-based and 25% animal-based diet that, like all bears, includes fruit, bromeliads, palm trees, vertebrate eggs, and honey. It also has clues as to its behavior in this tropical cloud forest. “The presence of bears is due to the rainy season. Between November and April they come out into the open wasteland and sightings can occur. Puppy sightings usually take place between April and August. But there is an even more important achievement that is part of this effort that Hidalgo embodies: that in 2021 the Venezuelan state established the José Gregorio Hernández National Park in the sprawling Ramal de Calderas of about 50,000 hectares between the states of Trujillo, Mérida and Barinas, which is a good bit of habitat ensured for the conservation of the species.
Members of the Guaramacal Andean Bear Project in Guaramacal National Park, May 2022. Guaramacal Andean Bear Project
Tracking down a mammal of this size – they can range from 1 to 2.2 meters tall and weigh from 60 to 170 kilos – is not easy. In Venezuela, rapprochement has been through interviews with farmers, theoretical estimates, and very few documented sightings. In 2018, Hidalgo incorporated the first camera traps into the study, making it possible to identify bears whose white spot on their face represents a unique footprint. With them he has managed To about 34 individuals on about 23 covered hectares, of which about five are juveniles born between 2021 and 2022, exactly at the time these forests became a national park, births that one are good news. “El Ramal de Calderas is a key conservation area in the tropical Andes of South America. It functions as an ecological corridor for the spectacled bear’s survival as an umbrella species, allowing for the conservation of thousands of other species, territories and ecosystems,” comments the 33-year-old researcher, who hails from the same forests that the spectacled bear inhabits.
camera geeks
The biologist Edgar Yerena is one of the pioneers in the study of this species and since the 1990s has promoted the creation of the national park, the creation of which was recently approved by the Venezuelan government. He was also Hidalgo’s mentor. “The most viable form of conservation is to place all areas where the bear lives under protection, as this prevents deforestation and encroachment of the agricultural frontier. Another counterpart to this preservation is that these are the most productive hydrographic basins in the Andes. In Santo Domingo, Boconó and Masparro there is a large flow of usable water. Those of us who think of bears think their protection is a good measure, but it’s in the best interest of all of us, not just bears.”
These mammals require a lot of space to live. The new park adds another piece to a giant ecological puzzle that serves as a corridor. “The only way to ensure the bears don’t go away is to guarantee a system of protected areas for the Andes to put this puzzle back together, some pieces of which are still missing, but the Calderas branch was a major win.” , adds the biologist.
A specimen of an Andean bear captured by a hidden camera in a forest in Venezuela Guaramacal Andean Bear Project
Yerena, also a professor at Simón Bolívar University, emphasizes that one of the values of the research and conservation project carried out by Hidalgo is that the young man lives in the area he is studying, so monitoring is much more viable for him … than for other researchers in a country with stifled universities and no budget for fieldwork travel. “Bears are flexible in their ecological adaptations, this data allows us to learn more about their particular behavior in Venezuela, which is not the same as in subtropical countries like Bolivia, where they also live and where we have more information.”
Not only that. Local guides, some of whom have become rangers in the new park, are part of Hidalgo’s research team, which he has trained to identify bear eater tracks and manipulate camera traps. There are a total of ten men who go on an expedition every three months to cover up to 30 kilometers of mountains in one day, following the tracks of bears. “We have a sampling design that polls teams every 90 days and it’s almost 100% effective: where we put up a camera, a bear walks by, and the bears are fans of moving the cameras, have some from us they get very far from where they were installed,” says Hidalgo. The videos he has posted on his social networks also show his fondness for standing in front of them, sniffing them and eluding his passionate science with some disinterest. The captured images are not just a scientific document. They also let rural communities in the state of Trujillo know that the bear, which they thought was extinct, had not entirely disappeared.
challenge at the limit
Hidalgo started with 10 cameras, which he received through an Idea Wild grant, then grew to 30 stations and now has more than 50. It’s a task he’s tackled solo, seeking sponsorship from companies ranging from sausage makers to enough for mountaineering shoes. It also appeals to the solidarity of those who wish to provide an Amazon gift voucher to purchase more cameras in the list of devices they have on the project’s Instagram profile. “We need more cameras and we choose international funding because all of this work is basically pro bono. I’m a university professor in Venezuela making barely $28 a month.”
The spectacled bear is distributed in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, the latter two countries where it is estimated to have the largest populations. For Yerena, with fewer individuals, Venezuela faces the most difficult challenges for its conservation. One of them is in the Sierra de Perijá, one of the largest contiguous forest areas, but crossed by a border. In this area of the indigenous peoples, the spectacled bear has its own name in other languages: it is called mashiramo in Yukpa, masirsa in japrería, sabaidaku in barí, koju or jez in wayuunaiki. But language is not a bridge to be crossed in order to preserve it. “There are very few bears on the Colombian side because the entire slope of the Sierra has been razed to the ground. On the Venezuelan side it’s better protected because there’s a national park, it rains more and it’s the largest contiguous forest area we have, but it’s like an island that houses bears. It’s inaccessible. This is a bulwark that we must protect with an agreement with Colombia in order to manage this population in the most effective way.”
Beyond the binational agreements that we are waiting for, Hidalgo has already established a relationship on sustainable development with the residents of some municipalities of the Ramal del Calderas. In addition to being involved in research and education on this species, it promotes agroforestry using coffee as a model to improve the quality of life in the community of Las Negritas, located between national parks, which serves as a livelihood for the residents and also as a home for the spectacled bear.