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Fun Facts About Black Bears
Following are excerpts from the Black Bear NaturePod to give you a small example of the vast amount of information awaiting you.
black bear climbing a cherry tree
Black Bear Attributes
Black bears have a stocky build with short powerful limbs. Their feet consist of five toes and short, strong, recurved claws, primarily adapted for climbing.
Black bears are great tree climbers spending time in trees feeding, escaping and denning. They are not slow cumbersome creatures and have been clocked at 30 to 35 miles per hour over short distances.,?p>
This intelligent omnivore has good memory retention, some form of color vision, a keen sense of smell and hearing, moveable lips, a long, prehensile-like tongue, and toes that can be used for surprisingly meticulous purposes. All these attributes contribute to the black bears remarkable adaptability.
All bear species are plantigrade, that is, they walk on the bottoms of their feet like us humans. Black bears also are omnivores; their diet consists of a wide variety of food sources, both plant and animal.
Average summer weights for adult female bears in the Park are 90 to 120 pounds; female bears seldom exceed 175 pounds in summer. Adult males are larger; summer weights are 150 to 300 pounds. Fall weights are considerably heavier since black bears often add 25 to 35% more weight prior to the denning period.
back paw print from a black bear
Black Bear Sign
Black bears are typically shy secretive animals and difficult to observe in the thick vegetation of the Smokies. However, they leave obvious sign of their presence.
Spring is a good time to see freshly torn, rotten logs and flipped rocks as bears forage for invertebrates such as ants and grubs. In oak woodlands, patches of squawroot may be disturbed by bears feeding on the succulent seed pods.
In summer the nests of yellow jackets appear and bears seek these out to consume the larvae. Evidence of freshly dug nests are evident until late summer and early fall.
Perhaps the most visible sign is the classic bear mark tree. Bears bite and claw trees and leave visible scars at 5 to 6 feet high. These marks are a form of communication among bears.
black bear in hollow tree den in Great Smoky Mountains National Park
Winter Denning
When bears to into a denning mode, they no longer eat, drink, defecate or urinate during the entire period. Their gastrointestinal tract shuts down completely. Bears exhibit a slightly depressed heart rate and body temperature during winter denning. This is not true hibernation as is known for other mammals such as ground hogs.
After weeks of being immobile, a human would tend to lose bone calcium. Not so with bears. After being curled up inside a tree even for months, there is no calcium loss or bone deterioration.
After successful breeding, the development of the fertilized eggs is quickly arrested; the free-floating blastocysts remain as such until late November or early December when implantation occurs. This phenomenon is called delayed implantation. It frees the female from the encumbrance of developing fetuses during the critical feeding frenzy of fall. It allows for pregnancy to end if environmental conditions prevent the female from reaching a minimum threshold of body fat. And the short gestation period results in very small young who require less energy demands from the female during denning.
Missy nursing her cubs
Black Bear Babies
The normal litter size is two, but occasionally triplets or quadruplets are produced. The number of females producing cubs and the litter sizes depends on the previous fall acorn crop. The newborn are quite small, essentially hairless, blind and weigh only a few ounces. The birth weight to adult weight ratio is larger than any other mammal, nearly 1 to 300. In humans it is more like 1 to 20.
If a black bear ratio existed for humans, a 9-pound baby would have a mother weighing in at almost 2700 pounds! Looking at it another way, a 140 pound woman would give birth to a healthy baby weighing less than half a pound.
