The Real Paddington

Unlike its literary and cinematic cousin, South America’s only bear species endures harsh conditions, covering a wide range of habitats and altitudes – all in aid of finding a decent meal.

- James Fair

Some years ago, while exploring a remote area of Ecuador, known as the Llanganates, a young botanist called John Clark and I spent five days tramping across boggy moorland known as paramo.

We teetered along knife-edged ridges that disappeared into thick fog and stumbled through elfin forests composed of stunted, thorny trees no more than a few metres high, and which looked like something out of a dark, disturbing fairy tale.

It practically never stopped raining. I might as well have been wearing tissue paper rather than my supposedly highperformance rain jacket – the Llanganates National Park ranks as one of the most brutal and unforgiving places I’ve ever been.

Apart from John’s botanical finds, these crumpled mountains, which tumble down the eastern side of the Andes into the steamy Amazonian rainforest below, appeared to harbour almost no wildlife. Nothing we saw, anyway, but then visibility was rarely more than 50m in any direction.

On the last day, the clouds lifted, the sun came out and, across the scrubby moor, some 100m or so away, John spotted something moving. “What’s that?” he said, and then, betraying his North American roots, “Some kind of coyote or something?” “No,” I replied, almost too gobsmacked to respond.

“It’s a bear.” Of course there were bears – Andean bears – up there. If any species I’ve encountered would happily endure the testing conditions of the Llanganates, it would be them. As Dr Susy Paisley – who studied the species in the almost equally demanding environment of the Apolobamba mountains in northern Bolivia – once said to me, “Bears kick ass. They can put up with anything.”

Wilderness wanderers