Panamanians, and Colombians call it macho de monte, and in Belize, where the Baird's tapir is the national animal, it is known as the mountain cow.

It prefers secondary growth forests, when available, due to increase in understory plants for foraging and protection.

[8] The Baird's tapir has a distinctive cream-colored marking on its face, throat, and tips of its ears, with a dark spot on each cheek, behind and below the eye.

For the first week of their lives, infant Baird's tapirs are hidden in secluded locations while their mothers forage for food and return periodically to nurse them.

It forages for leaves and fallen fruit, using well-worn tapir paths which zigzag through the thick undergrowth of the forest.

It generally leads a solitary life, though small feeding groups are not uncommon, and individuals, especially those of different ages (young with their mothers, juveniles with adults), are often observed together.

Baird's tapirs often lie down for cleaning, and also present tick-infested areas to the cleaner birds by lifting its limbs and rolling from one side to the other.

Guanacaste (Enterolobium cyclocarpum), Sapodilla (Manilkara zapota), and Encina (Quercus oleoides) have all found to be sometimes passable through the tapir digestive system.

They commonly feed in enormous tree falls or secondary forests because of the great thickness of understory plants which are for, the most part, exceptionally digestible and have not many protective poisons.

The absorption of nutrients in light of the huge volume and extreme diversity of recognizable plant parts in their excrement is by all accounts poor.

In 2006, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Echandi, the former Costa Rican Minister of Environment and Energy, was attacked and injured by a Baird's tapir after he followed it off the trail.

There are many contributing factors in the decline of the species, including loss of habitat from deforestation, forest fires, and large scale industrial projects.

In certain areas, poaching, disease transmission from domesticated animals, pollution of native water bodies, and the developing effects of climate change all threaten this species.

Though the animal is only hunted by a few humans, any loss of life is a serious blow to the tapir population, especially because their reproductive rate is so slow.

In Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Panama, hunting of the Baird's tapirs is illegal, but the laws protecting them are often unenforced.

[21] Conservationists are urging for thoughtful approaches to breeding programs that focus on maintaining genetic diversity.

In a remote video-monitor, a spectacled bear was captured attacking an adult tapir perhaps nearly twice its own body mass.