Bears? Bears. Bears!

So long long ago, way before I went to Intag for the first time, long before I even arrived in Ecuador, I was doing some online background research in my dad´s office in Windhoek. And an intriguing link came up -- I found myself on a website for the Andean Bear Project ( http://www.andeanbear.org/ , check it out, it´s cool ) which was asking for volunteer bear trackers. Six months later, I am back in the cloud forests of northern Ecuador, and this time I get to play with radio equipment.
The Andean Spectacled Bear, the smallest bear in the world, is an endangered species found only in the Andes Mountains. Currently, it is badly threatened by loss of habitat due to deforestation. The project aims to save these animals from extinction through rehabilitation and release of captive bears, and by researching bear behavior using radio tracking equipment. Bears are caught using special cages designed by project director Armando, sedated and fitted with a radio collar. Volunteers spend their time hiking and using radios to listen for signals emitted by the collars. The signal allows us to determine whether the bears are active or not, and in which direction they are from set points along the hikes. By a process called triangulation, use of three of these points can then show where the bear is located. Sounds simple, not as easy in practice. Signals are easily distorted by reflection off of mountains, the equipment is old and falling apart anyway, and actually getting a triangle on the map is rare. Unfortunately the bears are threatened directly by the farmers also because they like to eat corn. A few months ago, a bear was caught in a cage, sedated, collared and released. A week later it was found dead with bullet holes in it, but the community in the area in which it was found apparently blamed the death on the Andean Bear Project, claiming that Armando had oversedated it.

I hike every day of the week, 4-8 hours a day, and have the weekends and all other time off. So far I have occupied my free time by reading a lot (yay I have time to read books that aren´t assigned by classes), baking bread and making jam, watching dvds on a friend´s laptop, talking, napping and taking care of Pig.
Pig? Who the heck is pig? Well, it all started on day 1, when my fellow rookie volunteer, Joe and I saw a very cute pig next to a schoolyard. This, combined with our friend Val´s recent purchase of a horse (cost him U$200), gave us the idea that we too, could get a cool pet. Why did we want to get a pig? I dont know. What are we going to do with it? I dont know, feed it, make sure it doesnt hurt itself.... But pigs are so much work, why didnt we get a dog? We have plenty of time to take care of one, we are two people, it´ll eat all our compost and the dog living at the volunteer house before our arrival managed to wake everbody up regularly by barking at night and it also racked up $40 in mauled-chicken costs. Plus, Armando said it was ok. So now Joe and I are in possession of our very own Saddleback Pig (they get real big but this one is small, 4 months old), it is orange and white, and in order to take it home I had to carry it across a very very rickety bridge. That was fun, I thought I would fall most of the time but luckily pig was speechless for once. Petrified I suppose. Pig generally makes a lot of noise. Grunting normally, but when Pig is annoyed, she squeals so much that ten babies together would be put to shame. I am not joking, it is so loud and high-pitched, you want to do anything to make it stop bleating like that. Pig is pretty smart too. So far she has escaped her rope-harness 3 times. Which is kind of good because at first she would wind the rope around a tree until she got stuck and at that point start squealing (this always happened at 6 in the morning.) The first time she got loose it provoked a pig-hunt through the bushes that degenerated to Joe, Kim (another volunteer) and I chasing it across a field for a while.

Other exciting things of note:
-- getting a lift uphilll to the start of a hike and getting stuck in the remaints of a mudslide. We end up with a (to give him the benefit of the doubt) confused truck driver, who kept driving the truck into parts of the road with the most mud, getting the truck more stuck, while we pushed and pulled and dug out wheels the whole time. The driver kept giving Alberto (employee of Andean Bear Project) and me the shovel instead of helping out himself, and then he still charged us for the ride.

-- 8 hour hike with Alberto to deactivate a cage. A radio collar is used on the cages which emits a signal when the door shuts (hopefully on a bear, though pumas also in the past.) Alberto not only walks extemely quickly, he doesn´t take breaks and we had to get to and then climb a very remote mountain to reach the cage. Basically, by the end of the day, I was tired from 2 steep climbs, covered in cuts from various vegetation material and running out of water forced me to drink from a mountain stream that Alberto showed me and then, after I drank, he told me it could make my stomach sick. If he hadn´t had to bushwack so much on the unkept trails, I wouldn´t have been able to keep up. But I did get a machete lesson and practice. (1. cut with sharp side and at the end of the blade; 2. cut at an angle) Good life skill.

-- Full day Minga (work with community members on given project) harvesting corn for Alberto. We spent 6 hours in a cornfield. I got lots of sun and bug bites. But it was cool to see where corn comes from.

-- Just came back from summiting the nearby mountain of Imbabura (4600m). 3 friends and I left Intag for the weekend, hiked all yesterday afternoon, camped in the paramo (grassland occuring at high altitudes) and got up very early this morning to finish the climb. It was a great view before the mist obscured it at the very top. We had some fun rock scrambles involving all 4 of our limbs and we faced cold temperatures, falling snow and strong wind at the top. Definitely worth it.