The Bear Necessities

What it takes to look after and enrich our moon bears.

In this blog I’m going to talk about looking after our two moon bears, or Asiatic black bears, Aroon and Mika, and delve into what goes on in a day for the bears and how we keep them happy.

What is Enrichment?

Enrichment is anything that enhances mental and physical health, provides stimulation and encourages natural behaviours. Enrichment is very important to us at Wingham Wildlife Park and essential for maintaining happy, healthy animals. Moon bears are very intelligent animals and require a lot of activity during the day to maintain a healthy lifestyle and avoid negative behaviours.

How do we Enrich our Moon Bears?

We have a large list of enrichment items suitable for the bears which we are always researching and adding to, below are a few examples.

Behaviours of bears that we want to encourage:

• Olfactory – their sense of smell is 2-3000 times more acute than humans! Great ways to encourage use of their nose are burying feeds in different substrates such as woodchip piles or under logs, this will get them to forage and spend time finding their food. New scents introduced into the enclosure are also great, this includes perfume, essential oils and compost from other animals.
• Foraging – moon bears will spend time foraging for fruits, berries, insects, small mammals and plants. To encourage this activity we provide different substrates to dig through including woodchip, leaf piles, mud piles, branch piles and rotten logs. Burying food and scattering the food throughout the day also encourages investigation of their enclosure. We also use trails of mashed fruit or spreads to increase enclosure use.
• Climbing – they are fantastic climbers and can scale trees with ease. To encourage this we often give high beam feeds to get them to use those muscles. We also hang items up onto high beams so they have to stand up to reach them. Use of spreads such as honey and peanut butter used along beams is also a great way to encourage climbing.
• Good swimmers – they enjoy spending time in the water, they can spend hours chilling in a pool! Aroon is a big fan our pool and can often be spotted enjoying it in the sun. We also like to put some floating treats in there for them to investigate.
• Tactile – anything involving touching the object and really getting their claws into. We use boomer balls which they can roll around and also float in the water. Tyres are a great material to sink their claws into and bounce around. Paper or hessian parcels are also great for the bears to rip apart. Branches in piles or spiked into the ground give a surface for the bears to roll around on and get
  those all-important back scratches.
• Puzzle feeders – different items can be used to increase the time it takes for them to eat their food, these include our self-scattering barrels. These are barrels with holes in containing feed items, they need to roll the barrels for them to release food. Stuffed tyres also work well, we put food items in the rims of tyres, then pack them densely with straw so they have to spend time pulling it out to retrieve the goodies. Ice blocks are a favourite summer time treat, we will either float them or hang them up to give a long-lasting food source. Bamboo is a great resource to use for bear enrichment as they can pull it apart with their strong claws or use them to more delicately retrieve the food items. We use all different sized bamboo cut into tubes in which we can hide feed items and also freeze to give out as ice treats.

Giving Out Enrichment

We have a numbered sheet of enrichment items which our team choses from and adds to the bear enrichment sheet – this ensures they get a huge variety over the week.

Designing New Enrichment

We strive to find new ways to make the bears happy and are always looking out for new ideas, we design these using our enrichment sheets.

Feeding

As they are so intelligent, they are capable of anticipating feeds and can tell the time well. This can lead to stereotyping if they are waiting for food at specific times. To avoid this we use a method which randomizes our feeds to create an environment which isn’t predictable and ensure their day is never the same!

We use a randomized feed schedule by rolling a dice, the number on the dice depicts the number of feeds given throughout the day. From a minimum of 3 feeds up to 8 feeds in the day. The time of the feeds are then randomly selected from a pot. The amount of food we give them is the same every day so they are always getting what they need, the dice and lottery just helps us to mix up the times and frequency of feeds.

Training

Training plays a really important role at the park by facilitating medical care and improving the mental and physical health of our animals. We do bear training sessions as often as possible as an additional form of enrichment. The bears are trained to help us with full body health checks such as ‘open mouth’ and presenting body parts for close inspection when needed. They are also learning to present their side flush to the mesh and allow hand injections. This is a really useful behaviour as it is less stressful for the animal as an alternative to darting. Aroon picks up behaviours very quickly and has proven to be a whiz when it comes to learning something new. Mika often needs a very high incentive like honey to get the cogs turning! But once she has mastered a behaviour she will never forget it.

They truly are a joy to work with and keeping them entertained is a rewarding job.