Of the planet’s rarest species, the Himalayan brown bear. Picture: Supplied.
Deep in the heart of the Himalayas, a groundbreaking mission by South Africans is under way to help rescue one of the planet’s rarest species, the Himalayan brown bear, from the edge of extinction.
The Himalayan Brown Bear Project is led by Francois Deacon, of the University of the Free State (UFS), and Willem Daffue, a Kroonstad veterinarian and world-famous mountaineer and explorer, in a collaborative effort with Pakistan to safeguard the omnivore that is found only in the rugged Himalayas.
In September, Daffue darted and collared two of the bears, while rangers in Pakistan darted and collared a third.
Deacon, an associate professor in the department of animal science at UFS, said this was a huge achievement because the bears would “face extinction without us knowing how to protect them or their remaining habitat. We do not really know what they eat and what threatens them most.”
Deacon and Daffue assembled and took a team to Pakistan after they were invited by conservationists Vaqar Zakaria and Anis ur Rahman, of the Himalayan Brown Bear Foundation and members of Pakistan’s ministry of environmental affairs, together with Ume Habiba from the Islamabad Wildlife Management Board.
They spent three weeks in July and early August with veterinarians, trekking through the vast expanse of the Deosai National Park, an alpine plateau, to put GPS collars on the bears without success. It was only when Daffue returned to Pakistan alone in September to dart and collar the bears.
The team members included Johan Marais, the head veterinarian of Saving the Survivors, a conservation nonprofit that sponsored the collars, veterinarian Richard Burroughs and Hadrien Haupt from Africa Wildlife Tracking (AWT), which made the collars for the project.
The mission was not just about collaring the little-known bears, according to Saving the Survivors. “It was about understanding their world, decoding their behaviours, and ultimately, ensuring their survival.”
The initial project was under the caretaking of the Himalayan Brown Bear Foundation, gaining momentum after Deacon and Daffue’s visit to the Himalayas last year.
“During our three weeks this year, we saw just eight bears, with all the rangers and drones at our assistance and only got two chances to dart a bear, which were unsuccessful,” Deacon said.
If it wasn’t for the drones, they would probably have spotted only three or four of the bears.
“And, if you do see them, sometimes it’s four, five kilometres away in the mountain terrain on the other side of the valley. Then you have to stalk the bear so they don’t see you. We attempted twice to shoot them in those meadows on the hill slopes.”
He recalled how, on last year’s expedition, a bear came into their camp and “you could actually hear it walking on the ice past the tent”. This year they set up a bait station with chicken and fish to entice them closer. But that didn’t work either.
“To go and look for the bears during the day is extremely difficult at an altitude of 4 500 metres to 5 500 metres and steep slopes. It is nearly impossible to navigate that terrain as the Deosai National Park is huge. We waited for ages to see a bear at the baiting station and only slept for about three hours a night,” said Deacon.
Coping with the harsh altitude was difficult. “None of us function well because … every 1 000m above sea level, you lose 5% of oxygen. Us Free Staters were really struggling there to keep up with the bears and the altitude,” he laughed.
Pioneering rediscovery
In 1991, Daffue “rediscovered” the bears, which were believed to be extinct, while he was mountain-climbing in a remote section of the Himalayas. Daffue went to the closest town, Skardu, reporting to locals that the bears were still in existence.
“They couldn’t believe that the bears were still there. That’s why they named one of those peaks after him; it’s called William’s Peak.”
In 1993, the government of Pakistan designated the area as the Deosai National Park, with the primary aim of protecting the Himalayan brown bear.
Daffue then came to the UFS to discuss the possibility of researching the bears with its zoologists, OB Kok and Hennie Butler.
“They [the zoology department] went over and did behavioural studies on the bears — what their daily activities involve and their general ecology. The results were published in 1993-94. And those were the last studies until this new initiative to get something going again,” Deacon said.
Few people in South Africa have ever heard of the Himalayan brown bear, he added. “Even at my own university, I tell my colleagues that I’m going to the Himalayas to go search for brown bears, and that I hope to get the opportunity to dart them and collar them, then they’re like ‘ja, ja, it’s just another Francois Deacon expedition’. No one takes it seriously … people think you’re crazy.
“And then you get to the Himalayas and stand in front of K2, which is the second highest mountain in the world, and you realise the enormity and how few people ever get to see that … and have the experience of going on a trek and spending three weeks in the Himalayas, searching for bears,” said Deacon, who said he felt like an explorer from 200 years ago.
Locals estimate there may be 66 of the bears left, but Deacon and his team suspect the real figure hovers at 35 or lower. The park’s rangers are now acquiring a thermal drone to help obtain a more accurate population count.
Habitat loss, fragmentation, poaching and bear baiting are among the biggest threats. Deacon said nomadic herders called Gujjars graze their livestock in the areas around the unfenced park.
“The bears can move in and out of the park freely. The thing that pushes them out of their own national park is that the Gujjars have 5 000 heads of livestock — goats, sheep and cattle — and they feed on exactly the same diet as these bears.
“There’s limited areas for the bears to feed because not the entire park is available for the bear’s diet and now the livestock is eating that,” he said, noting that 70% of the scats and faecal samples the team analysed is purely plant material.
Gaining insights
The collars will help provide more answers about where the bears roam, hibernate and eat, when they eat and where they move outside boundaries or into neighbouring countries.
“These collars will now assist us in studying the animals and monitoring the few remaining brown bears in their natural environment, how they function and survive, and for us to then study and understand that environment and help to protect them from becoming extinct,” Deacon said.
“No one that we’ve encountered in Pakistan knows where these bears go for hibernation. We don’t know if they go into caves, or do they go to the lowland areas and hide in forest areas,” he said. The AWT’s collars are designed in such a way that when the bears hibernate, the collars, too, “go into hibernation so that we don’t waste battery life”.
Apart from collaring the bears, the aim of the visit was to help Pakistan with training sessions on how to deal with animal husbandry, tranquilising equipment and medicine, dart-gun training, drone surveys and the fitting procedure of GPS collars on species such as leopards, pangolins and the Himalayan brown bear.
“We told the minister and the park rangers and park managers that we are going to train you to do it yourself,” Deacon said. “The last bear was darted by the rangers and that shows the confidence we’ve built into the rangers there.”
Daffue added: “The biggest accomplishment is that you’ve got a small group of people on the Deosai plateau that can now dart the bears themselves, put the collars on and do the work themselves.”