Defend Threatened Wildlife (continued)
To foster this instinctive attitude of identification, FCT has contributed to primary school curricula in our area of action, with bear theater and visual presentations; shared camera trap pictures of bears from the region’s forests; and given community seminars on avoiding conflicts between bears and the cattle kept by residents. Conflict mitigation was also the topic of seminars given by FCT to workers at the government’s largest hydroelectric facility, Amaluza, where camp garbage attracted bears and put them and the facility workers at risk. In another project, in collaboration with the Ministry of the Environment, FCT trained ten community park guards to monitored bear signs in the forest and páramos, and motivated community members to comply with regulations protecting native fauna.
Community park guards set up a camera trap in montane forest.
The Don Oso Program has supported a variety of scientific research projects (leading to MS and PhD degrees), including a study of bear habitat; multi-year camera trapping projects to identify the local bear population’s demography, its use of space, and its forest resources; and publications and the presentation of results at professional meetings.
A giant ground bromeliad, Puya hamata, that has been eaten by a bear in the páramos.
Studies were carried out in conjunction with the National University of Costa Rica, the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Fundación Natura (Quito), and the Ministry of Education of Ecuador. Please see our Publications List for details.
To study the bear and other threatened wild fauna is a fundamental objective of FCT. The knowledge generated helps make our conservation interventions effective, and when that knowledge is made available to the public, support of threatened wildlife is woven into the fabric of society.
The following are photographs of wild fauna residing in native habitats of the Andean Amazon
