Bornean Sun Bear Conservation

Category: BSBCC, Siew Te Wong, conservation, education | Date: Sep 23 2009 | By: Siew Te Wong

Story by Hannah J. Ryan | September 23, 2009
Montana Kaimin

http://www.montanakaimin.com/index.php/outdoors/outdoors_article/researcher_shines_light_on_forgotten_species/3970

Malayan sun bears don’t have it as easy as Monte. In Southeast Asia, the world’s smallest bear species faces poaching, deforestation and a host of other woes, according to Siew Te Wong, a graduate in wildlife biology from the University of Montana.

On Tuesday evening, Wong, founder and CEO of Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, presented his findings from nearly two decades of research on the tiny and fledgling bear populace.

“I often call the sun bear a forgotten species,” Wong said.

Wong said the bears face threats from hunters because bear meat is high on the menu in the wild meat markets of China. Their body parts are common in traditional ceremonies and costumes and are used for medicinal purposes.

Trapping the cubs is a common practice due to their popularity as pets when young.

“The caged bear is something I cannot live with,” Wong said.

Poaching in Southeast Asia is creating what Wong calls the “empty effect,” leaving the rainforest and clear-cut areas devoid of mammals and birds and replacing them with palm oil plantations and silence.

Above all else, Wong said the largest problem facing the bears is human encroachment.

“Habitat loss is the     biggest, biggest, biggest threat to the sun bear,” Wong said.  “Southeast Asia will loose 75 percent of its native forests by 2100.”

Wong began to study the Malayan sun bears in 1998 in a rainforest of Malaysian Borneo for his master’s thesis.  In February 1999, after a year of preliminary research, Wong and his team spent four months in the humid forest building and setting a variety of traps in an attempt to detain live sun bears for their studies.

Wong describes this stage of his research as “the goofy stuff you see on the Discovery Channel.”

Elephants, who dislike foreign objects in their forest, would crush his traps made from oil drums as if they were soda cans, he said.

While sun bears are small in size, they are strong, Wong said, flashing photographs of shredded tin roof traps and metal oil drums with basketball-sized holes punctured in the sides.

But the 100-pound mammal did have a weakness that Wong discovered after many setbacks.

“Believe me, I tried everything, but after trial and error, chicken guts worked best,” to tempt the finicky bears, Wong said.

Wong said that he and his team caught their first sun bear in June 1999. Wong and his relieved team sedated the bear, took its bodily measurements, drew blood samples and fitted the little guy with a radio collar.

In an effort to keep the bear from disappearing, Wong founded the bear conservation center. The center provides facilities for rescuing and housing captive bears, increasing public awareness locally and internationally about this mammal and rehabilitating young bears for release back into the wild.

Even with Wong’s years of work to improve the bears’ status, they still face an uphill battle.

“There’s a lot of work to do right now,” Wong said.

For more information on the Malayan sun bear, Wong’s research and the BSBCC, visit http://www.sunbears.wildlifedirect.org.

Tags: Bornean Bear Conservation Centre, BSBCC, Siew Te Wong, sun bear

9 responses so far

Category: captivity, sanctuary, sun bear in the wild | Date: Sep 04 2009 | By: Siew Te Wong

Contented Bear?

Check out the video.. one of the sun bears was making a weird sound. It’s the one in the basket, her name is Suzie. Perhaps Papa Bear, Wong Siew Te can explain why?

The above video was posted on LEAP blog by Sue. 

Hi Sue,

Thanks for posting this behavior on sun bears that not many people know about. This sound is a “suckling” sound when the bear such a particular body part of themselves or other bears. It is fairly common among the captive sun bears, especially young ones. The reason behind this is actually quite sad.  

In the wild, mother sun bears nurse their cubs up to 2 years or even longer. During this time, besides suckling for mother’s milk, the process of suckling also let the cubs seek comfort and feel secure and safe being side by side with their mother. This behavior is best explained by human babies sucking pacifier to seek comfort. Same theory: no milk draw out from the pacifier, but the suckling action make the babies feel comfort and safe.

Most captive sun bears share the very similar stories: they all were being captured by poachers and separated with the mother when they were at very young age. These were serious traumas, especially those mother bears being slaughtered in front of the babies. There was a story that I will never forgot in my life: a tiny baby sun bear was tied up for sale at Gaya Street Sunday market in Kota Kinabalu, and its mother was being cut up in pieces for sale as meat. This kind of trauma is way beyond anyone’s imagination. Anyway, these baby bears grow up without mother and without a chance to suckle. However, suckling is an innate behavior. When the cub is hungry or feel uncomfortable, they suckle their mother’s breast. For these poor captive bears, they do not have their mother around, but the urge to suckle is very strong. So they learn to suckle on something handy. This “something handy” can be any part of their body like limbs, toes, or paws. More commonly was something that they can “latch on” like their own penis for male bears or vulva for female bears. If there are other young bears around, they may suck on each other’s ears. They always suckle on the same object or the same body part over and over again that later become their favorite suckling object.  

The suckling behavior may progress to their adulthood if they are constantly under stress. It is consider as a kind of “stereotypic” behavior. I worked with a female sun bear named Batik. Batik was about 2 year old when I released her into the forest. During her life in captivity, she suckled her left hind feet constantly, especially when she feel stress or threat, to a point where there was a hairless, bare patch on her left feet leg. She was kept in a small cage when she sucked most. When she was reintroduce into the forest, her suckling behavior ceased thereafter. New hairs grew back from her bare patch on her left hind feet.

Tags: Bornean Bear Conservation Centre, BSBCC, Siew Te Wong, suckling, sun bear

No responses yet

Category: BSBCC, Siew Te Wong, conservation, education | Date: Aug 28 2009 | By: Siew Te Wong

Malaysian actress Joanna Bessey interviewed Siew Te Wong on the plights of sun bears at Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre. The program was aired globally in BBC World News on April 4th 2009.

You can read more about the filming at http://sunbears.wildlifedirect.org/2008/11/06/sweat-and-smell-the-bears-is-good-to-be-back/

Tags: Bornean Bear Conservation Centre, BSBCC, Joanna Bessey, Siew Te Wong, sun bear

2 responses so far

Category: BSBCC, Siew Te Wong, education | Date: Jul 03 2009 | By: Siew Te Wong

Thank you Minnesota Zoo and Brookfield Zoo for hosting my talks on the plights of sun bear on June 29^th and July 2^nd, respectively.

Special thanks to Christine McKnight from Minnesota Zoo and Karin Schwartz from Brookfield, for their helps to make the talks possible. I am glad that both talks have good attendances from zoo keepers, volunteers, students, and sun bear fans and supporters. I hope the talk was informative and educational. I hope the messages on the plights of the sun bear can be reach out to even more people so that more people will know about the conservation issues of sun bears and help them to survive to the next millennium.

My next talk will be at Bronx Zoo at noon on July 8^th. New Yorkers, please plan to attend!

Tags: Brookfield Zoo, Minnesota Zoo, Siew Te Wong, sun bear

2 responses so far

Category: Research, Siew Te Wong, education | Date: Jun 25 2009 | By: Siew Te Wong

It all begins at the fall of 1989 when I first came to Taiwan from Malaysia to continue by college education. I recalled it was the second day of my college life in National Pingtung Agriculture College when I saw the poster of Bird Watching Club (BWC), posted at the notice board of the 1^st Restaurant, announcing its first meeting of the semester and recruitment for new members. The poster caught my attention because of the word “Bird”. At that time, I never knew there was an activity call “bird watching”. What I did know about birds was keeping cage birds for amusing or bird singing, the hobby that I have been doing for few years at that time-keeping and breeding birds. The first impression after seeing that poster was “what a COOL student club!” As always, the first feeling toward something is always the right of choice: I am going to join them!

Sure enough, Bird Watching Club at National Pingtung Agriculture College, which later upgrade to National Pingtung Polytechnic Institute, and finally Nation Pingtung University of Science and Technology, has become an important part of my two years college’s life in Taiwan. I saw and recognized my first brown shrike during a morning bird watching activity here in the campus; I did the first bird interpretation for visitors, raptor count and New Year Bird Count at Kenting National Park in southern tip of Taiwan; and get to know Prof. Kurtis Pei who was the advisor of the BWC, and of course, fallen in love with Sun Chia-Chien, my wife, all under the activities and name of BWC.

We called ourselves “Bird People” or “birders”. We carry a pair of binoculars and spotting scope wherever we were going and trying to identify every single feathered creature we saw. Through my binoculars, I saw, learned, and appreciated the beauty of nature and our feathered friends, and what the Creator has given to this world to make it more colorful and joyful. However, also through the same pair of binoculars, I saw the unlawful activities of mist netting and poaching of birds. That was the first time I was introduced to the word “conservation” and later on, “endangered species”, and then “wildlife research”.

My interest on these three topics multiplied during the two years I worked as research assistant for Prof. Pei, involving various research projects including wildlife surveys, radio-telemetry study of barking deer at Little Ghost Lake area, camera trapping, and also taking care of orangutans and other endangered species at the newly established Pingtung Rescue Center for Endangered Species.

In 1994, I quitted Pei’s lab and further continue my education majoring in Wildlife Biology at University of Montana, USA. It was considered as a “difficult task” for many people from ordinary Asian family. The same year, I met my then future academic advisor, Dr. Christopher Servheen, who was looking for a Malaysian student to conduct an ecological study on sun bears. I took the challenge and later became a mission. In 1998, I stated the field work for my M.Sc. project, studying the ecology of Malayan sun bears in Danum Valley, a lowland rainforest of Borneo. For the first time, the study revealed the mysterious life history of this little known bear and many ecological aspects of Bornean rainforest. The study did answered what I plan to answer at the first place. However, it also generated a series of desperate questions and urgent needs to do more conservation and research works for sun bears in Southeast Asia: sun bears remain the least known bears and one of least studied large mammal in Southeast Asia. Their habitat, the lowland tropical forest, is disappearing at alarming rate due to illegal and unsustainable logging, human development, and large-scale conversion to agriculture land, especially into oil-palm plantation in Malaysia and Indonesia. 

In 2002, I started my doctorate program at the same university. In view of there were so much unknown about sun bears and issue with logging, I decided to study the effects of logging on sun bears and bearded pigs at Danum Valley, the same study area where I did my MSc study in Sabah, Malaysia Borneo. The three years of field started in 2005 and ended in 2008. Like most studies on large mammals, the fieldwork has face tremendous challenges and difficulties. We sweated, bled, cried, and even lost our life working in one of the harshest place on the planet.

Although the focus of my studies was on wild sun bears, I never forgot about the unfortunate condition for captive sun bears that I came across over the years. These captive sun bears were all in desperate needs of help from us. These bears were kept as pets because of their cuteness when small and relatively small size. They were all kept in small cages, unhygienic environment, and in some places were completely disgusting! Some were cubs, some were full grown adults, and some were old individuals. All of them suffered from serious stereotypic behavior, pacing all day long if there were any room in their tiny cage for them to pace. Seeing these bears in these captive conditions were completely heartbroken. However, I choose to find them, see more of them, and learn more about the stories behind them. This is how the idea of Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, BSBCC, first came in to my mind. BSBCC is the conservation project that I am working now in Sabah (http://sunbears.wildlifedirect.org/). The centre aim to conserve, to research, to introduce and to educate the public about sun bears and their plights. In short, BSBCC is one of the very first project in the world to help sun bear and to raise awareness to conserve this forgotten bear species.

Sun bear like most wildlife is forest dependent species. They simply cannot survive outside the forest. My experience working in Southeast Asia shows desperate situation for the continuation and survival of both wildlife and local forests. Much more work is needed to ensure the long-term survival of the native wildlife and forests. In many parts of Southeast Asia, the tropical forests are disappearing rapidly to a point where too late to do anything. In contrast, due to the economy and political stability, Malaysia still has a chance for conservationists to save the last stronghold of Southeast Asian rainforests and wildlife. We need distinguished biologists to train local students as conservationists and biologists, to educate public and government on the importance of conservation, and to study the flora and fauna in order to understand better its functions. I am and I was, trained as an “animal expert” or wildlife biologist for all these years. I hope to use these knowledge and training to do a great job in my career to conserve wildlife and forests.

The conservation history of Taiwan has come from a long way from a country where the word “conservation” and “animal welfare” never seem to exist about 20 years ago when I first came to Taiwan, to a conservation model country in Asia. Like my own experience in conservation, it all begin from bird watching and the efforts of “bird people” growing big and strong. I am honored and proud to be a family member of Bird Watching Club, which celebrates her 30^th anniversary last year. Today, bird watching no longer simply a “watching birds” activity. In stead, it has become an important starting point to promote conservation, improve environmental quality, and conserve wildlife and wildlife habitat. So next time when we do bird watching with a pair of binoculars or a spotting scope, make sure that we see more than just the birds in the scope. We should see what lies beyond the pretty birds; we should see the wildlife habitats, the environment, and future of their kind and our own kind and how can we do to bring a better future for ALL of us! Lastly, we all should take actions accordingly. We have only one planet, one life, and one time to make things right.

Please join me. Together, we can make a difference!

Tags: bird watching, conservation, Siew Te Wong, sun bear

One response so far