Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
PURR-FECT FOR PUMAS AND PADDINGTON!
You can always rely upon one animal to get into mischief, and that’s a bear called Paddington. And the spectacled bears of Peru, on which the beloved children’s character is based, proved true to type.
When the film crew for the South America episode set camera traps to film these elusive creatures remotely, their expensive equipment did not last long. ‘These bears are very naughty, curious and destructive,’ says assistant producer Sarah Whalley. ‘Once they caught sight of their reflection in the lenses, they wreaked havoc. We had to come up with ways to stop them chewing the cameras to bits.’
Fortunately, the camera traps weren’t needed because, though spectacled bears (also known as Andean bears, and the only bear to be found in South America) are notoriously difficult to film in the wild, the team picked the perfect time and place to watch them. Their favourite food is the small, olive-shaped fruit of the pacche tree, and when the fruits appear the bears trek down from the cloud forest high in the Andes where they live to feast on this delicacy. They climb the trees, performing acrobatic leaps to get into the best position, and then chew off the branches so they can reel in the fruit at the tips. When they’ve stuffed themselves for a couple of hours, they make a nest from the branches and settle down to sleep off their blowout.
The crew couldn’t believe their eyes. ‘Andean bears are very rarely seen, but Sarah really hit the jackpot,’ says cameraman Bertie Gregory. ‘On our first day we saw five, on another day ten. The expert who was advising us didn’t believe us at first, but then we saw three large adults together in a single tree.’
Sarah’s favourite animal though was Sarmiento, a puma living in the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine on the southern coast of Chile. She was hoping for a feast of her own as she taught her three growing cubs to hunt guanaco – an ancestor of the domestic llama that is basically a camel without a hump. The big cat had to be brave, because the badtempered guanaco are twice her size... and born fighters. When the males battle for mating rights, they try to bite off each other’s testicles. You don’t mess with a guanaco. Sarmiento wasn’t afraid though, and the crew tracked her efforts for days. ‘She’s such a fierce and attentive mother, there’s a special place in my heart for her,’ says Sarah. Vying with the vibrantly coloured macaws of the Amazon for most flamboyant creature on the continent must be the cotton-top tamarin, a tiny monkey with a wild white moptop. Their variety of whistles and chirps is so varied that scientists regard it as a language. But they are critically endangered – their habitat in the coastal rainforests of Colombia is being poisoned by mercury pollution washed down from the goldmines upstream.
Elusive bears, cheeky monkeys and a very brave big cat – from the Andes to the Amazon, South America has more species than anywhere else