Drought and conflict with farmers are threatening Bolivia’s Andean bear – the real-life Paddington Bear. Now a beekeeping project is helping protect this endangered species.
Elsa Limachi looks silently at the mountains around her small straw house. She is scanning her surroundings for the Andean bear. This small “spectacled” bear, with its circular golden markings around its eyes, is the real-life Paddington Bear.
Unlike the marmalade-obsessed fictional favourite, Andean bears are not social creatures. They are difficult to spot, but they are there, roaming through the dry Andean forest in southern Bolivia, Limachi says.
The inter-Andean dry forest lives up to its name with a landscape dotted with dense trees and bushes, where green merges with yellow and brown. The earthy tones of the landscape provide the perfect camouflage for the Andean bear’s dark brown fur.
Limachi lives in San Lorencito, a remote farming village in Tarija, southern Bolivia. For generations, the community saw the Andean bear as a threat, responsible for killing their cattle and eating their crops. These often-false beliefs led to retaliatory killings.
“Several years ago, we didn’t want the bear around because we thought it was not only dangerous, but also harmful to our cattle and crops,” says Limachi. “The farmers would always blame the bear, but bear attacks were the cause of only 5% to 10% of livestock deaths”, she says, adding that poor management practices of cattle, diseases, tumbling accidents or snake bites, were the main reasons for cattle losses.
The Andean bear’s conservation status is vulnerable. The bear’s main threats are retaliatory killings, habitat fragmentation and degradation, and the effects of climate change on the reproductive success of the species.
Bolivia and Peru are home to 70% of the Andean bear population, but the species can also be found in parts of Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina. It is the only bear species residing in South America and there are an estimated 2,500 to 10,000 mature bears in the wild, according to ecological models.
In contrast to Paddington Bear, who always keeps a marmalade sandwich tucked under his hat in case of a hunger emergency, the Andean bear feeds on bromeliads, exotic plants related to the pineapple, and other hard vegetative matter growing on the mountainside. But when there is not enough food in the forest, this opportunistic hunter may attack cattle, leading to conflict with farmers.
In San Lorencito, conflict with farmers has led to illegal retaliation killings, threatening the Andean bear’s long-term survival. Witnessing the declining bear population in the region, Bolivian biologist Ximena Velez-Liendo came up with a novel plan to minimise conflict between farmers and bears: Bee-keeping.
Velez-Liendo is the founder of the Andean Carnivore Conservation Programme (ACCP), a conservation project led by Chester Zoo in the U.K., along with other organisations, including WildCRU, Foundation Segré, Darwin Initiative and Whitley Fund for Nature.
The aim was to provide the community with an alternative economic activity to cattle farming. Velez-Liendo established the bee-keeping project in 2018 following a regional assessment which revealed that farming communities were killing one to two bears every year.
“The objective was to reduce retaliatory killings of bears by reducing cattle farming, as well as to improve people’s attitude and tolerance towards bears,” says Velez-Liendo, also a research associate at the wildlife conservation research unit at the University of Oxford and Chester Zoo in the UK, based in Tarija.
“We do not provide the full cost of the bee-keeping setup. We provide 70% of the total cost, and the beneficiary provides the remaining 30%,” says Velez-Liendo. “We found out that people value and care more than if it had been completely free.”
In 2018, there were five bears in San Lorencito – two males and three females –according to a camera trapping study by the ACCP. “It was common to hear of bears being killed in the community. I used to hear that from my dad when I was a child, and then from my husband,” Limachi says.
Mariolina Heredia, 29, the elected secretary of San Lorencito, has four active beehives. Her harvest, which happens once to twice a year, supplements the diet of her three children. “I wanted us to be part of the project, because I saw that it was going to be something good,” she says. “I thought we could sell the honey or keep it for our own consumption…I don’t sell the honey now, because I use it to feed my children.” In her role as secretary, Heredia has helped to promote the bee-keeping project, encouraging other members of the community to participate. She has even organised training courses.
It remains to be seen what effect this bee-keeping initiative will have on the Real-life Paddington Bear population, but it can only be positive, as well as providing a completely different, and more easily managed, income source for the local farmers.
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