At an altitude of 3,600m, up on the Eastern Cordillera of the Colombian Andes, the green of the mountain fades to a pale olive. The trees give way to sun-flowered frailejones and the lack of oxygen makes it hard to breathe.
I’m in La Laja Nature Reserve, adjacent to Chingaza National Natural Park (CNNP). My guide, Luis Guillermo Linares-Romero, biologist and research leader, points to a limestone cliff on one side of the mountain.
“Look,” he says, his voice bursting with excitement. “There it is!”
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In the distance, a black furball is slowly but effortlessly descending the cliff. Our binoculars confirm what our hearts are screaming. An Andean bear!
The animal occasionally raises its head, as if looking for, or sniffing, something particular. Clambering down gently, as if it has all the time in the world, the bear finally reaches its prize – a puya, a large, terrestrial bromeliad found at high altitudes across South America.
Settling down on a bed of moss, the bear uses its huge claws to tear into the plant’s spiny, rosette-shaped leaves, grabbing them with both paws and munching on their soft, white bases.
The Andean bear
The Andean bear, also known as the spectacled bear after its distinctive white mask and facial markings – unique to each individual – is South America’s only bear species.
It lives in the Andes Mountains, from Colombia and Venezuela in the north to Bolivia in the south, and is known to occur in at least 23 protected areas within Colombia.
Typically solitary, except during mating and while caring for young, the bear roams, on average, 15km per day, including swimming across rivers and lagoons.
Not only are these remarkable bears expert tree-climbers, they also construct leafy nests in the canopy, in which they eat and rest.
As they build these dwellings, they break branches and create gaps in the canopy, allowing sunlight to reach the plants on the forest floor. This process alters the structure of the habitat, earning the bears the nickname ‘gardeners of the forest’.
“More than 90 per cent of visitors to La Laja really want to see an Andean bear,” says Linares-Romero. “It’s the same in the other nature reserves and in the national park.”
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Life in La Laja
Yet here, in the buffer zone outside Chingaza, this enthusiasm for the Andean bear has not always been shared by local communities. For many years, the bear’s presence was met not with admiration, but with resentment, as farmers saw this charismatic mammal as a persistent troublemaker.
A long conflict took hold, with livestock losses (mainly cattle) often met with acts of retaliatory poaching. This direct persecution, coupled with habitat loss and fragmentation driven by agricultural expansion, drove Andean bear populations into steep decline.
Though Andean bears do feed on both dead and live animals, studies on the bear’s diet have found that this behaviour tends to be opportunistic.
Contrary to its cousins elsewhere in the world, the Andean bear feeds mostly on a variety of plant material, including bromeliads and palms.
This makes it a vital seed-disperser in its preferred habitats of Andean forest and paramo – a tundra-like ecosystem that lies above 3,000m in the tropical highlands of South America and Costa Rica.
The paramo of Chingaza supports many other iconic species alongside the Andean bear, including the white-tailed deer, puma, bearded helmetcrest and Andean condor, as well as more than 500 bird species and 1,400 species of plant, from moss to frailejones.
These plants play a crucial role in the water cycle, capturing vast amounts of water from clouds carried by ‘flying rivers’, the moisture-laden winds that rise from the Amazon and move up the Andes.
Often described as a “hotspot within a biodiversity hotspot”, paramos are rich and biodiverse highland islands – and are increasingly under threat from mining, global warming and the expansion of agriculture.
“The Andean bear is important because it’s considered an umbrella species – its conservation indirectly protects many others,” says Robert Márquez, coordinator of the Andean Bear Conservation Alliance (ABCA).
“This bear does not just live anywhere – it requires an extensive habitat with little or no human intervention.”
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A dwindling population
Across its range, the Andean bear has been listed as Vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The species is estimated to number fewer than 10,000 individuals in the wild, and its population is thought to have declined by 30 to 50 per cent in the past 30 years, largely due to habitat loss and human pressure.
“We have, sadly, records of some areas where bears used to be seen, but have vanished,” says Márquez.
“We believe there are many places where, if more drastic management measures are not taken, we could lose Andean bears altogether.”
Officially designated in June 1977, Chingaza National Natural Park is among the 10 most popular natural parks in Colombia, receiving nearly 20,000 visitors per year.
This 76,600ha protected area lies just 50km from Bogotá and has been vital in preserving not only paramo and Andean forest but is also the main source of water for the 10 million people that live in the capital and other nearby towns.
The strategic management of the park and its positive impacts over the years have earned it international recognition, such as inclusion in the IUCN Green List for Protected and Conserved Areas in 2020.
In 2007, with the help of organisations such as the Wildlife Conservation Society and Alexander von Humboldt Institute, park researchers started to monitor the Andean bear inside the protected area using camera-traps and radio collars.
Their aim was to establish a baseline of where to focus conservation efforts, and to understand the factors affecting the population decline.
Four years later, of 380 photographs captured on the camera-traps, Márquez was only able to identify 14 individual bears, a stark indication that the species was on the brink of vanishing from Chingaza.
This sparked an urgent conservation strategy to prevent this vital species and the logo of Colombian National Natural Parks from disappearing from one of the country’s most iconic protected areas.
Working with local people
During this period of research and monitoring, bears continued to cause problems for farmers, with more incidences of bears eating crops and cattle, raising angry reports and concerns from farmers to the authorities.
Márquez and his colleagues realised that conservation had to extend beyond the limits of the park boundaries and into the surrounding communities.
“Local farmers are the best allies we can have when it comes to conservation,” says Arley Muñoz, CNNP ranger in charge of researching and monitoring the Andean bear.
Guided by this approach, the park began working directly with locals around Chingaza, engaging with them as essential partners in conservation.
To date, the park has signed 113 conservation agreements with local farmers, who now commit to protecting, instead of hunting, any bear passing through their land.
Local families, too, have become part of the monitoring and surveillance effort. By recording the bears with their phones and notifying rangers when an individual is approaching, they can help to prevent damage to crops and livestock.
In return, the park provides the farmers with organic fertilisers, timber so they don’t have to fell trees and electric fences to prevent their animals from straying into the forest.
They also launched an education programme for communities and schools. Thanks to these efforts, the Andean bear population of Chingaza and its surroundings is on the upswing.
“We now have a total of 75 individuals in our database, plus 15 or 16 unknown bears that we have not yet been able to identify,” says Muñoz.
It’s a substantial increase compared to the early days of the conservation programme – a time when Linares-Romero worked as a ranger in Chingaza.
“Back in 2013, it was very difficult to see a bear. You would come across their tracks but actually seeing a bear was like a myth – it was almost impossible,” he recalls.
The conservation effort and the species’ associated recovery have started to change the perception of the bear in the community. What was once considered a threat has become an ecotourism opportunity.
“You could say that my mother was the driving force behind this project,” says Linares-Romero. “She didn’t study ecology but was always very environmentally conscious, thinking about conservation at a time when it wasn’t talked about very much.”
La Profe (‘the teacher’), as Marina Romero is known, knew she wanted to turn her land into a protected area, especially as the waters coming down ‘her’ mountain supply more than 5,000 people in Fómeque, the nearest town.
In 2004, the area was designated a private reserve, La Laja, one of the first private conservation initiatives in the area.
Since then, the Linares-Romero family has focused on transitioning to less dependency on livestock and crops. They have brought tourists in, collaborated with universities on research, and launched education partnerships with schools.
The Rochester School of Bogotá, for instance, has been associated with La Laja since 2015. The school has adopted the bear as a symbol, and brings students on field trips to set up camera-traps and learn about the importance of protecting this charismatic mammal.
Many other people in the community are benefitting from ecotourism and the new demand for lodgings, meals, guiding and other services.
Hernando Ríos, a former hunter, now supplements his farming income with work as an ecotourist guide for the Maza Fonte Association, a community-based tourism organisation formed 14 years ago.
“I stopped hunting – I now take care of the bears,” he says. Ríos, like many others in the community, exchanged his shotgun for binoculars and a camera.
“Now, if I see a bear or a bird, I take them with me in photographs,” he adds with a smile.
Even though, for Ríos, becoming an ecotourist guide in his 40s has been challenging, just seeing how his actions are helping to protect the paramo has been worth the effort.
“I always tell my clients that there are no guarantees,” he says, “and people often say to me, ‘If we don’t see the bear, just seeing this landscape is enough.’ But I do love it when we have a sighting, as my clients leave happy.”
Once seen as the enemy, the Andean bear is now the guardian of the paramo, protecting water, wildlife and people, and creating livelihoods.
Chingaza has demonstrated that, with the right approach, bears and humans can co-exist as allies. It’s a conservation model that can be adapted throughout the species’ distribution.
Back in La Laja, our bear stands, then disappears. No doubt he will continue to patrol this mountain, searching for more tasty puya, scratching against trees and resting in a canopy nest hidden somewhere on these slopes.
Feeling the excitement of encountering this bear in its natural realm fills me with hope, knowing that wildlife can rise against the odds when given the opportunity.
Photos by Sebastián Di Doménico. Sebastián is a photographer whose work has been seen in National Geographic, The Guardian, El Espectador and more. Follow him on Instagram @sebastiandido.
