SHIRLEY Bentley is not your average 80-year-old.

Instead of the more sedate birthday celebrations favoured by most people who reach their ninth decade, she decided to party at 10,000ft to raise money for a cause close to her heart - threatened Asiatic black bears.

Mrs Bentley took the tandem leap - her first ever parachute jump - at Peterlee Parachute Centre at Shotton Airfield, near Peterlee, east Durham, because it was only club that would accept an octogenarian jumper.

She was joined in her daring venture by Matt Hutt, the chief executive of the Australian non-profit organisation called Free the Bears.

Money raised through the jump will go toward a new enclosure for a bear called Champa, who lives in a sanctuary in northern Laos and is the first bear in the world to have undergone brain surgery.

Speaking after her jump Mrs Bentley said: “It was absolutely exhilarating.

“We jumped from 10,000ft into cloud at first and were freefalling for about 5,000ft.

“Then the sun came out and you could see the lighthouse of Whitley Bay. We made a perfect landing.

“It is something I always wanted to do.”

Mrs Bentley of Hayfield, Derbyshire, met Champa during a visit to Laos, where her son Mike Bucklehurst was running a Free the Bears rescue centre at the time.

She said: “I spent a month there. I learned so much poaching and about the way Chinese take bears and use gall bladder for medicine. They die in agony.

“I once went with my son into the countryside to try and find a village where he had been told they were cutting off bears paws and fermenting them in whiskey and then selling the whiskey for virility.

“The bears in the sanctuary have been through so much. None of them had been untouched by human cruelty.”

Champa was brought in from the jungle three years ago, having been abandoned as a cub.

She was hand-reared, but it was realised she had hydrocephalus, or water on the brain.

Mrs Bentley was there when went Champa underwent brain surgery – filmed as part of the BBC Operation Wild series.

She said: “She is still stunted in growth, but not in pain and her sight has come back.

“She can never be rehabilitated and will have to be kept for the rest of her life.

“She is living in as natural a habitat as she could, but her enclosure needs an upgrade.

“I thought I would do something like a skydive to raise money for Champa.”

About £1,500 has been raised toward the £2,000 target.

Contributions can be made to http://www.justgiving.com/Matt-Hunt5