Sunny Bears

So feel I should fill you all in a bit more on the animals at the centre other than the wonderful orang-utans. Next in line for me are the Sun Bears - sadly there are only about 10,000 bears remaining in the world which makes them a hell of a lot more vulnerable even than the orang-utans. I'd never even heard of a Sun Bear before I arrived here, however am now a convert! There has been no major studies compiled about the bears which makes their rehabilitation all the more difficult, adding to this they don't breed very successfully which obviously isn't helping their numbers grow.
So the Sun Bears are fairly small and very cute - they have a dog likeness to them (albeit with 3 inch killer claws) and are brilliant climbers. One of my jobs here is to monitor the bears - there are two large enclosures each containing 4 bears - the 'hill bears' that are Gummi Bear (he has no teeth, either rotted or were pulled out before he arrived at Matang), Heather, Gabbi, and Wong - and the 'quarantine bears' who aren't actually in quarantine but the names stuck that are Bernie, Corrine, Situ, and Jo. Monitoring involves recording what the bears do every 2 minutes, half an hour for each bear - this may sound easy but keeping your eye on them when they go afar can be rather difficult. This research is probably the only of it's type happening in the world so feels pretty special to be involved with it.
A funny observation occurred while watching the quarantine bears. Every morning a coconut is hoisted 12 metres up one of the trees in the enclosure, Sun Bears in the wild are natural climbers and spend the majority of their time including sleeping time in the trees. Now all 4 bears can climb however Situ is leaps and bounds ahead of the others and can shimmy gracefully and expertly up the tree to get the coconut prize. Bernie, Jo, and Corrine can climb but not quite so elegantly or easily - saw old bear Bernie slide rather clumsily down a tree after attempting to reach a papaya fruit at about 3 metres. However Bernie is not stupid. I'm watching Situ descend down the tree with her prize and suddenly Bernie darts out of nowhere and is waiting at the bottom of the tree for Situ to come down. Just at this point my ipod shuffles onto Holsts Mars from the planets so have a perfect soundtrack for the upcoming war that is about to commence. At this time Corrine (fat bear) has also appeared at the base of the tree to welcome Situ. As she draws close on her descent she notices her greeting party and on landing tries to manoeuvre past the other bears to feast alone on her coconut. Nope sorry Situ, you've done the hard work but Bernie strikes out and grabs the coconut and runs to a feeding platform to indulge himself. Poor Situ leaves the only male to consume her prize hanging closely in the background looking really sorry for herself and not daring to intervene. The bears are solitary animals so 'sharing' is not a word that exists to them. Have to put my hands up to Bernie though as although the worst climber he's learned the best trick of letting the others do the hard work and reaping the benefits - one clever bear!!