Black Bear
Black Bear
Black Bear Info
Black Bear Description
BLACK BEAR (ursus americanus)
Their colouration ranges from black to brown to cinnamon to the rare colours of grayish-blue or creamy white (The Kermode Bear is a white Black Bear and lives in very few areas of the British Columbia Coast).
Black bears have large round ears and a long nose; their hind end appears to be higher than their front end. Black bear are good climbers, swimmers and runners (up to 25 miles/40 km per hour).
Male Black Bear can reach six feet (standing on hind legs)and weigh from 130 to 600 pounds. Males live about 25 years. Mature female Black Bear weigh between 125 to 250 pounds. Mother bears start with their first offspring at age three to five years and have between one to four cubs every two or more years over their 20-year life span.
Life History
Both sexes scent mark their home ranges with urine. Adult males, especially, rub and scent mark “bear trees” before and during the mating season.
Mating occurs in early summer. This species exhibits delayed implantation, with the embryo not implanting in the uterus until November. Females give birth to 1-6 cubs (usually 2-3) in dens in January. Cubs weigh 0.4-1.0 pounds each at birth, the smallest newborns, relative to the mother’s weight, of any placental mammal. The short gestation and small size of the young are adaptive responses to reproducing during hibernation. Cubs weigh 4.4-11.0 pounds when they emerge with their mother from the den in the spring. Males do not participate in rearing the cubs. Cubs remain with their mothers until they are about 17 months old, at which time the mothers approach estrus and force the young to disperse. At dispersal, yearlings weigh 15-109 pounds, depending on food availability.
Females produce their first cubs at 2-9 years of age, depending on food availability, and mate usually every other year thereafter. They reach maximum size of about 520 lbs at about 6 years of age. Males become sexually mature at 3-4 years of age and continue to grow until 10-12 years of age, when they weigh up to 902 pounds and are dominant over younger, smaller males. Black bears can live more than 30 years in the wild but rarely live longer than 10 years because of encounters with humans, which account for more than 90 percent of deaths of individuals older than 18 months.
In the northern portions of their geographic range, black bears hibernate for up to 7 months. During winter sleep, bears defer eating, drinking, urinating, or exercising until emergence in the spring. Weight loss during hibernation can reach up to 40 percent of body weight in lactating females. In the north, metabolic rate can be reduced 50 percent. Heart rate drops from 66-140 beats per minute in summer to 8-22 beats per minute. Body temperature drops 1.8-12.6 Fairenheit, resulting in reduced circulation to the limbs and slowed reactions to disturbances. Still, mothers remain alert enough to tend to cubs and react to danger. Fewer than 1 percent of bears die during hibernation. Native Americans revered bears for their ability to survive for months without eating.
Black Bear Habitat
Throughout their range, prime black bear habitat is characterized by relatively inaccessible terrain, thick understory vegetation, and abundant sources of food in the form of shrub or tree-borne soft or hard mast.
In the southwest, prime black bear habitat is restricted to vegetated, mountainous areas ranging from 900 to 3,000 m in elevation. Habitats consist mostly of chaparral and pinyon-juniper woodland sites. Bears occasionally move out of the chaparral into more open sites and feed on prickly pearcactus.
There are at least two distinct, prime habitat types in the Southeast. Black bears in the southern Appalachian Mountains survive in a predominantly oak- hickory and mixed mesophytic forest.
In the coastal areas of the southeast, bears inhabit a mixture of flatwoods, bays, and swampy hardwood sites. In the northeast, prime habitat consists of a forest canopy of hardwoods such as beech, maple, and birch, and coniferous species. Swampy habitat areas are mainly white cedar. Corn crops and oak-hickory mast are also common sources of food in some sections of the northeast; small, thick swampy areas provide excellent refuge cover.
Along the Pacific coast, redwood, sitka spruce, and hemlocks predominate as overstory cover. Within these forest types are early successional areas important for black bears, such as brushfields, wet and dry meadows, high tidelands, riparian areas and a variety of mast-producing hardwood species.
The spruce-fir forest dominates much of the range of the black bear in the Rockies. Important nonforested areas are wet meadows, riparian areas, avalanche chutes, roadsites, burns, sidehill parks, and subalpine ridgetops.
information collected from animal diversity web of the university of Michigan
Black Bear Behavior
Black bears are a society of individuals that share surplus food with both kin and strangers with reciprocity. To manage this altruistic type of social behavior they have developed complex verbal and olfactory communication systems that allows them to manage social situations with a high level of emotion and intention. Bears demonstrate the ability to judge and punish which developed to manage their food sharing society. This form of cooperation formed as a result of the availability and distribution of food in their niche.
As large omnivores that have evolved in the northern hemisphere, they eat only the highest quality foods. These foods are unevenly distributed across their range, and are subject to annual and seasonal shortages and when they are available they are abundant and last for a short period of time.
No bear or group of bears could dominate a territory that could supply all of their food all of the time. Female bears have core home ranges which they share with their offspring in which kinship hierarchies develop to manage the sharing. Sharing with strangers is forced when surplus foods are only available in another bear’s home range. With the location of the surplus foods constantly shifting there are many opportunities to develop reciprocal relationships. Bears can live for as many as forty years allowing them long term benefit from relationships formed with fellow cooperators.
information gathered from Benkilham.com
States that offer Black Bear Hunting are
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Georgia
Idaho
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Montana
Nebraska
New Hampshire
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
Oregon
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
Tennessee
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
