Rare Bear Visit Sees Farmer’s Chikoo Stash Snacked Upon

HYDERABAD: A sloth bear that wandered into Bhuvanagiri mandal on Thursday night, reportedly the first in more than a decade, found its effort worth its while as it found a perfect midnight snack in the process.“It was around 11.40 pm that the bear went into a ‘farmhouse’ in Nagireddypalli and chanced upon a carton full of chikoo fruit. It feasted on some of the fruit, smashed some, and left the place as quietly as it came,” deputy forest range officer Sreenivas said.The fruity theft came to light on Saturday morning when the owner of the 20-acre farmland, Alimineti Ravinder Reddy, went to his farmhouse, and discovered that someone had dipped into the chikoo harvest from his fields. Wondering if this was an act of some miscreants, he checked the footage from a CCTV camera in the premises and found that it was a bear.The farmer informed the local forest officials. “The farm has some chikoo and mango trees with the rest of the land used for paddy cultivation. The farmer picked the chikoos as they were ripening and kept them in a cardboard carton. No one stays there at nights so none was there to see what happened,” Sreenivas said.“Bears love fruit, and if there are some for the taking, they will, well take them,” said Dr M.A. Hakeem, chief veterinary officer of the Nehru Zoological Park. “They also love to feed on termites, tubers, fallen fruit, and even sugar cane. Of course, they really love honey when they find it,” Dr Hakeem said.“Actually, this one did not create any problem. It was a perfectly well-behaved bear. It came, it saw, it ate, and left. And no one was wiser until the CCTV footage was checked,” Sreenivas added.“We have not had reports of sloth bears in the area for a long time. They used to be more common around two decades ago in this area,” the Yadadri-Bhuvanagiri district forest officer Sudhakar Reddy said. “We are trying to figure out where it could have come from,” he said.



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