Don’t let the cartoon image of the bumbling bear fool you. That’s only in Hollywood. Watch closely and you’ll see the ballerina-like fluidity of supreme efficiency.
To my eye, they seem to kind of flow from one spot to the next. But they can do over 30 mph over rough ground and have the kind of cat-like “hand” speed that would shame the best human boxers. They can kick a cougar off the deer or elk it just killed or tear bark from a living tree with their bare hands, for heaven’s sake.
Even though black bears are fully capable of stalking and killing prey, they don’t do it much. They aren’t picky about what they eat but generally consume less meat than most of us humans. New grass, flowers, tubers and berries provide over 80 percent of their diet. You may have seen them grazing like cows in spring meadows. When they’ve been eating a lot of spring grass their poops look just like smallish horse turds.
Meat usually comes in the form of carrion, freshly killed animals stolen from the “owner” or rodents dug out of burrows. According to recent research on our peninsula, it appears they don’t mind a fawn or two in spring. Ants and termites are relished, but might be eaten more for mouth entertainment than the calories. (Ants aren’t bad, actually. Try a few sometime. Pick them up with your fingers to keep from getting grit on your tongue.)
When you see one up close, surprise always makes them look huge, but black bear size varies wildly. Females weigh around 100-400 pounds, the males a little more at about 200-600 pounds. A 750-pound monster was hit by a car near Yakima a few years ago and a few a little over 1,000 pounds have been recorded. Around here in the Olympics though, a 250-pound bear is big.
Coloring over their range varies from coal black to cinnamon to white. In the Olympics virtually all the bears are black, while in the Cascades, various shades of brown and cinnamon are very common. On the central and northern coast of British Columbia about 10 percent of the black bears are white. Apparently these white black bears are measurably more successful catching fish than plain ol’ black bears.
Black bears are found throughout middle Canada and Alaska and in mountainous areas of the continental US and Mexico. They’re pretty adaptable and secretive when they want to be and their range seems to be expanding a little in some areas. In fact, the population of black bears probably exceeds that of all other bear species combined.
Habits, habitat
Black bears on our peninsula are tricky when it comes to winter habits. According to an Olympic Peninsula study by biologist Kim Sager-Fradkin, all the bears above about 1,500 feet elevation hibernated deeply, some not emerging until May. (Sometimes on weekends my teenagers don’t get up until June.)
However, as you might know, it’s not all that unusual to see lowland bears out and about in the dead of winter. I don’t know how that pencils out for them, but apparently they find enough road and winter-killed animals and other stuff to make ends meet.
Sometimes they’re desperate, not having put on enough weight the previous fall to make it through the winter. Kind of like raccoons, they’ll wait out nasty weather for days at a time in some cozy spot and then head back out.
Among people who argue about stuff like this, there’s still some fuss over whether bears are really true hibernators or not. Sacked out for the winter, their heart and breathing rates slow to just a few per minute, but their body temperatures don’t drop much, which for some people kicks them out of the True Hibernators Club.
Most experts now contend that the other metabolic changes that bears undergo (such as fecal, urine and protein retention) makes them very efficient hibernators. It probably just doesn’t make metabolic sense to reheat all that bulk when it’s time to wake up. (I once accidentally dug up a tiny hibernating jumping mouse on a mountainside construction job and it took the little guy almost three hours of unconscious shivering in my tool bag to finally come to.)
At any rate, bears do spend a lot of time being inactive in the winter. A nursing sow might lose 40 percent of her weight by spring; the boar maybe a third. By some mysterious protein-saving process (of great interest to people interested in long distance space travel), they don’t lose any muscle mass in the process, emerging skinny but still strong in spring. And seeing as how they haven’t pooped in several months, I imagine a little crabby as well.
The sow mates sometime during the summer for a birth of one, more commonly two, sometimes three and once in a while four cubs sometime in winter. The cubs are born blind, helpless and under a pound, spending the next few months pretty much affixed to a nipple, and the next year or so hanging out with Mom learning just what it means to be a bear.
Black bear mothers aren’t as insanely protective of their cubs as grizzlies are and it’s not at all uncommon for the cubs to be killed by predators (including male bears) during their first year. That doesn’t mean it’s OK to try for that awesome selfie of you petting one.
They’re smart enough to recognize easy pickin’s and sometimes become bold enough to raid camps, garbage and the like. A phenomenal sense of smell honed by thousands of years of hopeful sniffing for dead deer and elk also will lead them to those Life Savers in your pack at night or to the toothpaste in your tent. I once saw beer, bean and aerosol bug spray cans, fishing gear and incredibly a propane canister all fang-punctured and strewn about in what appeared to be a horse camp that was abandoned in a panic.
If you happen to catch one walking off with your things, don’t do anything rash. Bears’ sense of ownership resembles that of a human 2-year-old, as in “I believe that’s mine.” As far as the bear is concerned, possession is 10 tenths of the law, and a discouraging cuff from an annoyed bear is enough to knock the average human into next week.
Their hearing is superb, though, and some yelling and clanging pans will sometimes startle them into dropping your stuff.
Considering how many people enjoy the outdoors in bear country, attacks are vanishingly rare. Loose shoelaces pose a much greater threat. Consider yourself lucky to just see a bear. Stories of he-men grappling and besting bears in hand-to-“hand” combat are almost certainly fabricated by men with too much time on their hands, as the only survivors of such encounters, even if they did occur, are furry and can’t talk. They almost always shy away from humans.
However, I once strode arrogantly toward a large bear along a meadow trail, expecting it to take off at my approach like they usually do. He or she looked up from the task at hand and gave me an unmistakable “I ain’t movin’” glare. I said “Excuse me, sir” and made a very respectful detour.
Tom Butler has a degree in zoology from the University of Washington and is a lifelong student of nature. He lives in Port Angeles and can be reached at butlert@olypen.com.
