Tan-Tan’s Enthusiastic and Playful Nature in the Forest​

Text and Photos by Chiew Lin May

Tan-Tan came to BSBCC weighing 4.9kg after getting rescued from being sold in the remote region of Paitan. After months of hard work by our team, Tan-Tan has grown fast, healthy, and active and can go back to the forest where she belongs! She greatly enjoys going to the forest where she is free to run, dig, climb and play! Sun bears are forest dependent species. Tan-Tan should live her life completely in the forest and not be kept as a pet. ​

Tan-Tan making her way through the forest

​During the walk in forest, Tan-Tan interacts with the natural environment by experiencing different sights, smells and sounds. She also comes into contact with a variety of trees, plants and animals. As the youngest sun bear cub at the Centre, she is quite a character with a strong sense of humor.

Soon Tan-Tan is going to be 5 months old, she is growing fast!

She is small but she is an incredibly great climber. She really is an arboreal little bear. Tan-Tan loves to climb. There is no limit to how high she will climb. She is skilled at climbing high in the canopy, eating wild food and taking a nap on trees. Tan-Tan has used a large amount of effort in search of invertebrate food items to meet her energy requirements.

Tan-Tan immediately explore her new home by climbing the trees

Tan-Tan climbs her FIRST tree!

Tan-Tan was given the chance to experience one of life's simple pleasures

This is what pure joy looks like!!

A young and active bear full of enthusiasm

Truly amazing - she is well adapt for arboreal living and is excellent climber that love spending time in trees.

She likes to spend much of her time top of the tree canopy

She tends to climb high to find her preferred foods

Finally learning what is means to be free in forest

Midday nap...

A quick snooze after tired of foraging

Tan-Tan surprised us and broke the record that at only 4 months old she was able to build her first tree nest at 8 meters off the ground! The nest is built entirely from green leaves and branches, but it is not completely done. We observed that she tried to test and sit on the comfortable nest. She took a nap and laid back in her newly built nest. It was great to see that Tan-Tan still has the instinct to build a nest. She will surely develop the nest-building skill.

Being the youngest bear at the Centre, she shows a great skills at climbing tree and nest building !

Sun bears are omnivorous and she will eat anything edible that she can find in the forest. Beetles, termites and other forest insects are some of the sun bears’ favorite food sources. A sun bear’s sense of smell is tremendous, and because of this it enables Tan-Tan to locate where the insects are! Tan-Tan eats insects and uses her powerful small claws to break into decayed woods to get easy access to them. She has a long, narrow tongue which is perfectly suited for getting at honey and insects inside trees.

She loves digging decayed wood keep her busy all the time

She is digging for termites and sniffing out bees nests

Tan-Tan spend every walking moment digging, puliing, tearing at everything -just like a wild bear

She stick her long tongue out after wake up from a long nap

One special thing we observed from Tan-Tan during a forest walk was when she was digging soil from the trees, she vocalized by making a suckle sound. Sun bear cubs will suckle to seek comfort. If Tan-Tan’s mother was around, she would nurse Tan-Tan. Tan-Tan probably thought her mother was inside the tree hollow or den. We will never know exactly what happened, but we do know her mother would have been unlikely to abandon her cub so easily. Mothers teach their cubs everything they need to know in the forest including what foods they can eat, how to avoid predators, resting in the same tree, travelling with her and how to build a sleeping nest. All are must needed skills for Tan-Tan to survive in the wild.

Female sun bears den in the hollowed tree trunk or cavities of huge trees in the forest when they give birth and nurse their baby

Sleepy face...

Tan-Tan is happy, healthy and enjoys her free life at BSBCC. It is good that Tan-Tan still has her natural instinct behavior which we can all learn from her. As Tan-Tan becomes a skilled climber, nest builder and forager, we hope she will be a likely candidate to release into the wild. She deserves better, we need to do all we can to help her thrive!

Tan-Tan, enjoying the true forest!!