Moving on from the Bear House

Achem...so we can just pretend that it hasn´t been 6 months since my last post and that I´ve been really good at keeping everyone up to date, right? Well, to say the least internet was just a bit challenging for those 7 months in Pucara as I wasn´t alway able to hike the hour each way to neighboring Apuela just for a computer. Since the last update I´ve had 5 more groups of volunteers, lots of fun tracking the bears and even 3 bear sighting! In May my friend Mason came to visit and volunteer for 3 weeks, a welcome face from home and we finished off the month with a great night out Salsa dancing.

June my mom came to visit for 10 days and I had a great time throwing her right into the mix. One day to get used to the altitude, the next we were sloshing our way through the rainforest, climbing hands and feet up dirt walls only to slide on our bums back down the other side. It was really great and she was a wonderful sport. Did some natural hot pools, headed t o Mindo for incredible bird watching, then finished off the visit with the City life of Quito. Took her dancing as well and, well, she was popular with the gents :D

July was my last month with Volunteers and we mangaged to fit in everything I had been wanting to get done for 7 months, they were a great group. We spray painted all the rubber boots that had been donated by past volunteers with the Bear Project logo then hiked into the VERY rural and poor pueblo of Azavi to drop it all off along with some medical supplies. We did tie-die with a natural berry called Chanci, but you have to remember to add 5 leaves of the Doah tree to make sure the color stays. So cool! Then we went Whitewater rafting, Ziplining, and celebrating the Parroquia (county) of Apuela´s anual festival. Oh, and packing up the house to head out. Crazy month that was really all over the place.

August I was living back in Quito. We closed up the Bear House, said good bye to the final group of volunteers, and boom, back to city life! Luckily, with the Bear Project we are never short of things to do :D

The Quito Zoo became my home for the next two weeks in August as I worked as a marketing intern. This entailed massive amounts of transations (aka translating the entire zoo to create an English guide for visitors, of which there was none before), taking photos for the website (check out Quitozoo.org to see a bunch of them!), and running a small backpacker survey to see why foreigners don´t come to the zoo (most of them haven´t heard of it…). It was a great 2 weeks with a very welcoming and friendly zoo staff making me feel right at home. And of course, I could see Andean Bears EVERY DAY!!! Their names are Pablo and Suro and they are very adorable chaps.

Now my time has switched back to all Andean Bears all the time. I´m staying with Andrés Laguna, a younger Ecuadorian biologist who works with the Project and am helping him with his Rural Environmental Education workshops. We had our first one yesterday and we are focusing on the Cow-Bear conflict (where the Bears having lost a lot of their hábitat to farming are unfortunately starting to muncho on a few of the local cows). Andrés has selected 5 communities that are especially being hit by this cow killing bear and we are conducting 3 rounds of workshops in each one. I did my first one with him yesterday and we had a great time! A little slide show, a small worksheet, then finger painting bear faces and running around with the bear masks playing games. That´s what I get to do in the mornings. Then Andrés takes over in the afternoon for the adults and does a separate slide show aimed at teaching them about the bears and the ¨Five easy steps to help prevent a Bear from attacking your cows¨. Sorted. Problem solved, right? I am really hopefull for the Project because we´ve had a lot of interest, questions, and good turn outs (considering a few of the communities are composed of only 10 families, it doesn´t take much to get a good turnout :D ).

I´ve got one more week with Andrés doing workshops as well as getting another trip up to Yanahurco to visit our rehabilitation Andean Bear, Bubu. We are all crossing our fingers and paws that we can get him released for good this next month. He is ready to be a wild bear and we are ready to set him free…just needing a helicopter to do that (if anyone has any extra ones, do send it down to Ecuador won´t you? Thanks!). So that´s our only hold up on that end, but hopefully he will be a free bear soon!!!

To sum up the future, well, I´ve got about 1.5 months left in South America. I´ll be leaving Ecuador and sadly the Bear Project the end of September to go travel in Peru and Bolivia for a quite speedy 3 week trip. Then landing back in the good US of A October 19th. Man time flies. Who knows if I´ll get another post up before then, but I will try. Thanks to anyone who still reads this despite the inconsistencies. Hope all my family and friends are doing well and I´m excited to catch up when I get back. Home for the Holidays!!! Xoxo Kerry

Ps Promotional stint…if anyone wants an INCREDIBLE Andean Bear Calendar, our Project has put one together after an International Photo competition we ran. It´s 2012 and stunning. Available on Zazzle soon! Hehe. Had to do it :D Love you all!

http://www.zazzle.com/andean_bear_bubu

So not that great at putting up updates, but no news is good news on this end. I would say life is settling down and I´m finally getting into a routine, but random rain storms, landslides, rundown buses, strangely early busses, and other strange surprises keep me constantly on my toes...but I love it!

This month we have four volunteers from New Zealand which means my Spanish improvement is slow but my English slang has greatly improved (that´s ush! means that´s cool...who woulda thought?). But they are a great group and really into hitting the hardest trails right away, which means Paramo! Paramo is the high elevation grasslands (like tundra) and they are stunning. From one of our trails that starts at 3,000m and ends at 4,200m (about 12,600 ft) on a clear day you can see four snowcapped volcanos and the capital city of Quito (a 4.5 hour bus ride away). Hiking at this altitude is incredibly tough, but so worth it when you make it to the top. And pics can´t capture it, so if anyone wants to visit?? Hehe...

We have 7 trails in all that cover everthing from just a dirt road to intense jungle action that requires a machete. Which means I´ve actually gotten quite good at the machete, I can walk the trail and hack up the trees at the same time! And I can peel sugarcane without chopping off my finger...so I¨m happy. The trails are all great and keep the work varied. Rainy season is slowing down now and the avocados are coming into season. We picked about 46 a few weeks ago and figured they would all ripen at different times and we would have a constant selection...instead they all ripened at once and we had a week FULL of avocados, and there is a lot you can do with avocados: Tuesday (in honor or Taco Tues) we had quacamole, Wednesday we had avocado salad, Thursday we had avocado soup, and Friday we had lemon avocado milkshakes. I´m just really glad this volunteer group loves avocados as much as me!! And we still have some left if anyone has any ideas :D

The other day after doing a trail with Armando (my boss) and the volunteers we did a mini-minga. Minga´s are community events where everyone comes together to work on a large project that a single family couldn´t do without help. It´s a really great idea and fosters such a good attitude of working together. Whoever is benefiting from the Minga provides lunch (and alcohol after it´s done) for everyone and so it´s kinda like a great party, except you also get something done. Examples have been tree planting along the main road to prevent errosion, landscaping at the local school, building a retaining wall, ect. We helped plant grass in a weedy field so that the owner could buy a cow and have somewhere to graze it. Really fun and such a great idea to get everyone together!

So life has been busy and always filled with exciting new things. Not a dull day here! (Relaxing and reading in the afternoon? Ha!) Now off to the fruit market and then back to the supermarket...then struggle back to the bus with tons of food and back to the Casa de Osos just in time for dinner! Life is good. As always, I love getting updates from all my friends and family back at home :D Happy St. Pattie´s day!!!

Around the dinner table

I´m finally getting settled here and into the routine here at the bear house. We have such a diverse group this month it makes the dinner conversations so interesting! This month we´ve got volunteers from South Africa/Switzerland, USA, Germany, India, The Netherlands, and France. Talk about interesting stories...it´s been a blast getting to know everyone and here their travel tales, walk with them along the bear tracking trails, and show them around the area. This picture is of us about to have dinner after a long day of hiking where we were able to hear Frida the bear´s collar. And as the person who has to do all the grocery shopping, let me just say that 6 people hiking at altitude every day sure do eat a LOT!

I finally made it to Otavalo to do the food shopping. There was a landslide (again) yesterday that kept me from going in, but today passage was clear and it only took 2.5 hours to get here. It was worth the wait though as the views of the andes from the road are just stunning (they´re up on facebook) and I have to pinch myself in the morning because the snowcapped peak of Cotocachi is just unreal.

It´s been great to be out here hiking everyday and I definitely feel myself getting in shape fast. Some of the trails are litterally 4 hours of just a slow, steady incline up. We stop about every 20 min to get out the radio and listen for the bears (we have 6 collared right now that we are tracking), and then we keep going up. Some trails are all in the sun and others you need to hack at a bit with a machette to make it though...keeps it interesting!

We recently had our dart pistol stollen that we need to tranqualize the trapped bears to put the collar on and this has been quite the blow for the project. At about $2000 a pop and the impossibility of importing items that look like weapons, we have been trying our hardest to track down the theif and get it back. We have until April at the lastest when the maize starts to grow and the bears start entering the fields for snacks. This is the best chance we have throughout the year to catch the bears cause it´s the only time we can deduce where they´ll be: at the corn. So fingers crossed we get that back before then...

The project is amazing and I continuously feel lucky to be a part of it. They really focus on research and the welfare of the bears. You never know when you board the plane quite what you´re getting yourself into, but I managed somehow to get into an incredible project with some of the hardest working people I know. I honestly don´t know when Armando and Sarah sleep. I am looking forward to the upcoming months: hopefully trapping more bears, getting Bubu released, moving forward on the construction of the sanctuary, training volunteers, tracking bears, and enjoying this incredible life in a very rural area of Ecuador. ¡Que chevre es eso!

Bubu the Bear!

For my first month in Ecuador, I´ve sure covered a lot of ground...and icing on the cake was meeting Bubu the Bear on Tuesday. So far my work with the Andean Bear Project (AndeanBear.org) has been incredible. I have spent about a week and a half getting to know the volunteers and our bear house in Pucara. I´ve gotten to travel as a translator to the countryside of San Gabriel to try and track a bear killing cows. And most recently I got to see first hand the amount of work and passion that the project puts into rehabilitating and releasing Bubu (the most adorable Spectacled Bear I´ve ever seen). This rehabilitation work is vital in order to try and enhance the low amounts of genetic diversity of the wild populations of Spectacled Bear...just by releasing even one bear we can strengthen their likelyhood of survival for future generations.

We were on the road by 6 am to make the 5+ hour drive out to hacienda Yanahurco to visit Bubu, who has quite a view overlooking a rolling river, hillsides filled with horses and deer, and occasionally Cotopaxi when it comes out of the clouds. I would love a view like that! The trip was rough in Armando´s car, sloshing through rivers, getting out to pile rocks so we wouldn´t bottom out, and crossing our fingers that we didn´t get stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Once we made it, the ability to be that close to a wild bear was incredible...and even though he is still in a cage (hopefully not for much longer!) you can tell that he is ready to be free. I am so glad I was given the opportunity to have met him before he is released and to spend (a slightly rainy) day photographing him in all his muddy glory. Now I´m ready to head back to the bear house with our new volunteers from Germany, USA, Switzerland, and The Netherlands. I can´t wait to get back out there and track some more bears!!!

Whirlwind

I don´t even know where to start, so much has happened in the last two weeks (has it only been two weeks?!)...lets see how this goes

So day one of work work meant meeting up with two new volunteers from Spain in Quito, hauling all our bags and loads of groceries/household goods from Quito out to the project. We try and bring more when we have volunteers to help, cause it´s a lot of stuff! A two hour bus ride brought us to Otavalo, a very cute town with lots of traditional goods (so hard not to buy it all!). Here we grab a quick lunch of the very traditional variety: potato soup with a chunk of some sort of meat, then a plate with rice, a small salad, and another chunk of meat, and fruit juice. It´s easy to get lunch here cause they serve the same thing to everyone, so no making choices :p Then we head to the grocery store for more food, then to the fruit market across town for fruits and veggies, then back to the grocery store for meat and cheese...once we have sufficiently loaded down with tons of food, we meet the volunteers back at the bus station and get on the second bus of the day out to Pucara (2.5 hours). We literally take up ALL the storage space on the bus, its fabulous. That´s basically the routine every 1st and 3rd Monday of the month when we get new volunteers. If the food doesn´t last two weeks, I make another ´run´into Otavalo (minimum 5 hours bus being a quick run).

Once the shopping in done, we get to the Bear House and do an introduction for them about the project and start teaching radio telemetry to get them ready for the field. Then the work starts the next day...we have about 7 plus trails with designated Listening Stations where you try and listen to the collars of the bears. For example, you tune 951 and if it beeps, then Frida is close, 947 is Enrique, ect. It´s fun when you hear them cause you know they´re somewhat close, so cool! It is a LOT of hiking though, especially when there is a mud slide and the buses don´t run. On Friday one of the volunteers and I hiked about 11 miles....just an average day. And it´s something like that 5 days a week. Talk about getting in shape!

So that´s the normal sequence of events that should be more or less what I´ll be up to for the next 5.5 months. These past two weeks though have not been normal and I´ve been busing all over the place learning tons about the project...

After a week at the volunteer house getting to know the trails, I headed off with the Film Volunteer we had for January to San Gabriel where a grad student of Armando (my boss) is working on the bear-cattle conflict. It´s a really interesting conflict and if anyone can dig up the old BBC show Natural World on it, it would be worthwhile to see. Anyways, some bears attack cows in some parts of the country and not in others. Scientists don´t all agree that it´s bears, so we are trying to prove that it is. To do that, we listen to accounts of local people who say they´ve had their cows killed by bears, then they lead us to where it happened and we try and track the marks left. Last week we followed a bear ´drag trail´down a mountain about 1 km through massive amounts of mud and vines. We finally did find the cow carcass though and it was pretty obviously a bear killing and not a puma, so it was worth while. We did a lot of interviews of locals, got to see some bear skins and bear paws of an older man in the town. They believe that if you brush your horse with a bear paw when it´s little, that the horse will grow up extra big and strong. Not good for the bears...but not widely believed either which is good.

After that adventure, I headed back to the Bear House for a few more days to keep learning the Listening Stations so I´ll be able to hopefully lead some hikes next month. It´s been fun to get to know the town and the people. It´s so small that everyone says hello, where are you going? and have a good trip every time you see them. We also have a house dog named Bobby who often accompanies us on hikes which is really nice. It´s incredibly remote, even by Ecuadorian standards. There is no cell phone reception unless you walk about 15 min down the road and stand on the Phone Rock. But you have to be in the right spot for it to work, and even then it´s questionable. We can use the phone at the local shop, but it´s rather moody and prefers to call conventional phones more often than cell phones. I don´t really know how this works as the phone seems fine, it just can´t call mobiles. All part of the experience. We can get to internet in the neighboring down of Apuela, about a 1 hour walk down hill from our place (luckily I haven´t had to walk back up yet cause there´s usually a pickup truck headed up who gives us a ride).

There are two bus routes into Pucara from Otavalo, the short is 2.5 hours and the long is 3.5 hours. Unfortunately the short is prone to weekly landslides when it´s raining and the bus drivers are very cautious and close down the route if there even a chance of too much rain. Then we have to walk the hour to Apuela and take the 3.5 hour bus from there. This is along a really nice road and doesn´t really get shut down. So although it´s a lot longer (and a pain if you have a ton of bags), we always have some method of getting to the city of Otavalo.

Right now I´m in Quito, we have a week before the next batch of volunteers (four from New Zealand) shows up. I´m spending the week getting to know the country a bit better. I saw my first Spectacled Bear at the zoo today. Pretty nice zoo actually, it´s all rescued animals. Tuesday I head up to meet Bubu in Yanahurco. This is the bear that´s been under rehabilitation to be re-released into the wild. He is in a very remote part of the Paramo of Ecuador (the highlands) and so the fact that I get to go up and meet him is a really lucky opportunity for me. I´m really really excited and so happy to be able to get up there.

Thats about as much update as I can handle for now, but more soon hopefully...with pics!!!

Getting my feet wet

Well, it has been four days in Ecuador so far and already it feels like I've been here a month. The days have been packed to say the least but the experience has been wonderful. After finally getting into Quito 2 days after planned, I woke up and left the first morning, heading out to Atahualpa for Spanish school. If anyone wants to learn Spanish, this is the way to do it!

I was lucky enough to be the only student and I stayed with the family that runs the school: two sisters, both their daughters, their mom, and their brother. The whole family lives in a three story house and don't speak any English at all. Talk about immersion right away! Spanish classes started upon arrival as I had a lot to catch up on and we zoomed through the material. I think I had about three years of classes in three days...

Atahualpa is a very cute town, up at about 2,000m in the Andes and the view from their kitchen window was stunning. A lot of people still ride horses around and the clapping of their hoofs on the street durning class made me so happy! The third day there I got to go with them to help milk the cows at 6:30am. Whoa, so cool! Definitely the best milk I've ever had...still warm :D Then that afternoon I helped them catch a chicken so we could have chicken soup for dinner. Talk about fresh food. It's about as organic as you can get up there.

I'm back in Quito now for a day and head out to Pucara to start tracking bears. I'm excited to get back to the forest and away from all the smog (though Quito is a really nice city and very bike friendly!).

Thats all for now, next post will be Bear-y Bear full (I couldn't help myself :D) Off to the jungle!!!

Let the travel begin...again :D

And so, almost two years to the date after having left for Equatorial Guinea, I am off to explore a new continent: South America. The last year and a half since my return from Africa has been wonderful. I graduated UCSD, spent some time kayaking in La Jolla, and about a month after graduation I moved to the Big Island of Hawaii. There, I had the amazing opportunity to work with two fantastic girls and one epic boss. The work was great in that it got me outside, but I don't know how fast I'll be running to get another job studying Yellowjackets (Picture is of a Vespula going towards the flower Ohia Lehua, endemic to Hawaii). Living in Hawaii for 5 months was incredible and I got to spend a week traveling with my mom and two weeks on Kauai with three of my best friends from college, and I got to see my godfather too and ride a helicopter!!!



So, to say the least, though I have not been great at keeping up my blog for the last year and a half, life has been good to me and I'm looking forward very much for continued adventure. To anyone who reads this, I'll try and keep it updated for the next 6 to 8 months as I live in South America working with the Andean Spectacled Bear (see adorable picture to left). If you want more information on what work I'll be doing, check out the site andeanbear.org which is great for explaining what our organization does. I'll be working there as the Volunteer Coordinator until at least July and hope to travel around the continent (as long as my savings hold) for up to two months after that. I'll have very limited internet access, but will make a point to write a blog at least once a month so you all can know what's going on with the bears :D Thank you to all my family and friends for continuing your support of me while I gallivant around the world, I do promise that I will eventually settle down...some day ;P