Juvenile Bears move to new Bear Field

Little bears become big bears, we all know that. What we didn’t know was how fast they become big… Bouncer the three legged Asiatic Black bear who was rescued over a year ago has developed into a large sub-adult. His weight is now close to one-hundred kilos and although having only three legs he does know how to get around.

Together with Pinda, Pepper, Jeffrey and Jessie, Bouncer had been sharing the medium sized enclosure next to Phimai’s group. We felt it was time to move them to a bigger enclosure. Bouncer can never go back to the wild and therefore we wanted the best (sized) enclosure possible for him.

Without any funding from bear foundations we thought we could not build something very big, however with the help of a large group of volunteers we were able to finish the first part of the (pretty large) enclosure within three months.

The new bear fields will be of resp. 2000 and 3000 square meters; one for the Asiatic Black Bears and one for a group of Malayan Sun Bears. Each enclosure has enrichments such as climbing constructions, tunnels and large pools. Connected to both enclosures are medium sized inside cages for feeding and to lock up the bears when maintenance has to be done or enrichments have to be changed.