Spectacled bear is the only representative of the glorious bear family on the South American continent. He prefers to settle mainly in the humid forests of the Andean highlands, but some individuals wander into the lowlands. Sometimes it can be found at an altitude of about two hundred meters above sea level. Spectacled bear has an unconventional diet for his family: he
predominantly vegetarian, although sometimes not squeamish and eating fell. Among the bears, a big “pacifist” than him is only a panda that feeds exclusively on bamboo shoots.
The animal got an unusual name because of the peculiarity of the color: around the eyes there are light rings resembling glasses. According to them, the bear got its name. True, these features of hair pigmentation are far from all representatives of the species.
The spectacle bear is inferior in dimensions to its relatives: its length is not more than one hundred eighty centimeters (not counting the seven-centimeter tail), the height at the withers is up to seventy-six centimeters, and the mass is up to one hundred and forty kilograms. Like most other members of the family, a spectacled bear climbs trees well and builds its own lair. True, he does not want to hibernate, and uses the lair exclusively for raising offspring. Indeed - why sleep when there is so much food around?
The mating season for spectacled bears lasts from April to June, and the pregnancy lasts eight months. One to three tiny cubs weighing from three hundred to six hundred grams are born. But the cubs grow quickly, and already at the age of the month they roam for their mother when she is busy looking for food. Sometimes they use their parent as a mount, climbing on her back during such trips. And in half a year they become completely independent and leave the bear, because the spectacled bear is a solitary animal.
Bears eat everything that comes under their paw. But the main diet is plant food: grass, palm branches, various fruits. They give particular preference to plants of the Bromeliad family, which comprise up to half the amount of food they eat. The most famous representative of the bromeliads is the well-known pineapple. A lip is not a fool for a South American bear!
Finding a large accumulation of fruits on the top of the palm tree, the bears climb there and, having built themselves something like a nest or a stove bench, live, not descending to the ground, until they eat everything around them. A spectacled bear is genetically a predator and theoretically in a hungry year it can devour small animals, but in practice this is extremely rare. Why, in the tropics, but not to find plant foods! Spectacled bears are not particularly agile. The speed of movement is simply unnecessary. The speed of the bear from the clones of the Andes does not very much reach the speed of its Siberian counterpart, whose running speed can reach sixty kilometers per hour.
In practice, the predation of a spectacled bear is limited to the ruin of termite mounds and the eating of their inhabitants. He also annoys the South American peasants, as he often spoils their fields, devouring young shoots of corn and sugarcane. Cases of bear attacks on livestock have also been reported, but this does not happen often. Peasants taught animals to stay away from their private property. But pictures of bears are popular in the countryside of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela - in places of the greatest distribution of animals. Peasants decorate their poor homes with them.
