American black bear
In Yosemite National Park, only 9 percent of American black bears are actually black. The other 91 percent are brown or blonde. The American black bear, Ursus americanus, is the smallest bear in North America and also the most widespread. It lives in forests from Alaska down into northern Mexico, and it eats whatever the season puts in front of it. Its name hides as much as it reveals. How did a medium-sized bear outlast the larger predators that once shared its continent? How does it sleep through months of winter without eating or drinking? And why do some bears wander into human communities while others disappear from whole regions? The answers start in deep time.
Genetic studies place a common ancestor of the black bear, the brown bear and the polar bear about 5.05 million years ago. All three now live in North America, yet the black bear is not a close relative of the other two. Its nearest kin is the Asian black bear. Their ancestors diverged from sun bears 4.58 million years ago, and the American and Asian lines parted 4.08 million years ago.
A small, primitive bear called Ursus abstrusus is the oldest known North American fossil member of the genus Ursus, dated to 4.95 million years ago. It may be the direct ancestor of the black bear. The earliest black bear fossils come from Port Kennedy, Pennsylvania, and date to the Early Pleistocene. They look much like the Asian species, although later specimens grew as large as grizzly bears.
Those early black bears lived alongside the giant short-faced bear, Arctodus simus, and the lesser short-faced bear, Arctodus pristinus. They also shared the continent with the Florida spectacled bear, Tremarctos floridanus. The short-faced bears are thought to have been heavily carnivorous, and the spectacled bear more of a plant eater. The black bear stayed an omnivore that climbed trees, much like its Asian ancestors.
Through the climate and vegetation changes of the last Ice Age, only the black bear among these three lines survived. One explanation points to its generalist habits, which let it use a wider range of foods. That idea is not airtight, because Arctodus and Tremarctos had both come through several earlier ice ages. When the Pleistocene ended, black bears, brown bears and polar bears were the only bears left in North America. Even the size of those ancient black bears is argued over, since some researchers think the species has shrunk since the Holocene while others say problems with dating the fossils undermine that claim.
Sixteen subspecies of American black bear are traditionally recognized. A 2015 genetic study, however, did not support treating some of them, such as the Florida black bear, as distinct. Coat color is where the variety shows most clearly. Individuals range from white, blonde, cinnamon and light brown to dark chocolate brown and jet black, with many shades in between. Roughly 70 percent of all black bears are black, but in the Rocky Mountains the figure is only 50 percent.
Humid country favors dark fur. Black coats predominate in Maine, New England, New York, Tennessee, Michigan and western Washington. Gary Brown tallied the pattern in his book The Great Bear Almanac. Michigan, New England, New York and Tennessee were each 100 percent black, and Minnesota was 94 percent black. Washington split in two. Coastal bears there were 99 percent black, while inland only 21 percent were, with 79 percent brown or blonde.
Some color forms carry their own names. The cinnamon bear has brown or reddish-brown fur and lives in places such as Colorado, Idaho and western Montana. The glacier bear, also called the blue bear, roams southeastern Alaska with silvery-gray fur that shines blue along its flanks. The Kermode bear, or spirit bear, lives on the central coast of British Columbia. About 10 percent of them have white or cream coats because of a recessive gene, and the other 90 percent look like ordinary black bears.
Pale black bears in northwestern North America are sometimes mistaken for grizzlies. A true grizzly can be told apart by its shoulder hump, larger size and broader, more concave skull. In autumn 1986, a bear shot in Michigan was big enough, with a large skull, that some people suspected a black bear and grizzly hybrid. DNA testing could not settle whether it was an oversized black bear or a grizzly.
A black bear weighing 120 lb was once observed flipping flat rocks of 310 to 325 lb with a single foreleg. That strength comes with dexterity. These bears can open screw cap containers and work door latches. They run at speeds of 25 to 30 mph, and they swim well, both for pleasure and to catch fish. They also climb trees to feed, to escape enemies and to hibernate, although this skill fades with age.
Their minds have been tested too. In experiments, black bears learned visual color discrimination tasks faster than chimpanzees and just as fast as domestic dogs. They also quickly learned to tell small triangles, circles and squares apart. Their keenest sense is smell, which is about seven times more sensitive than a domestic dog's.
Adults measure 120 to 188 cm from head to body, and stand 63 to 103.5 cm at the shoulder. Males typically weigh 60 to 300 kg. Females average a third to a half less, at 40 to 150 kg. Weight swings with the seasons, and in autumn a bear's pre-den weight runs about 30 percent above its spring weight.
Place matters as well. Adults on Kuiu Island in southeastern Alaska, where nutrient-dense salmon are easy to find, averaged 115 kg. Near Lake Tahoe in Nevada, males living close to urban areas averaged 138 kg, against 115.5 kg for their wildland counterparts. The biggest wild black bear on record was a male shot in New Brunswick in November 1972. It weighed 409 kg dressed, an estimated 500 kg in life, and measured 2.41 m long.
Captivity has produced even heavier animals. At the North American Bear Center in Ely, Minnesota, a male named Ted weighed 431 to 453.5 kg in the fall of 2006. A female named Honey weighed 219.6 kg in the fall of 2007. Both weights were recorded in the season when bears are busy fattening up for winter.
Bears enter their dens in October and November, carrying up to 30 lb of added body fat. In the far south, including Florida, Mexico and the southeastern United States, only pregnant females and mothers with yearling cubs den at all. Elsewhere, hibernation lasts three to eight months, depending on the regional climate. Dens might be tree cavities, spaces under logs or rocks, caves, culverts or shallow depressions, though most are dug by the bear itself.
Biologists once hesitated to call black bears true hibernators. Then they learned how the animals stay dormant for months without eating, drinking, urinating or defecating. The heart rate falls from 40 or 50 beats per minute to 8, and the metabolic rate can drop to a quarter of normal. Body temperature stays near 35 degrees Celsius, so the bear remains somewhat alert. Its circadian rhythm keeps running, and the temperature changes caused by the sun's position tell it when the season is turning.
The bear's body resists the damage that inactivity usually causes. A hibernating bear loses only about half the muscular strength of a well-nourished but inactive human. Its bone mass does not change in geometry or mineral composition. Waste stays in the colon as a hardened fecal plug, and the hormone leptin suppresses appetite. The bear also becomes more insulin resistant in winter, after being hypersensitive to insulin during its fattening phase.
Breeding takes place in June and July, but fertilized eggs do not implant in the womb until November. After a gestation of 235 days, litters arrive in late January or early February. A litter holds one to six cubs, typically two or three. At birth a cub weighs 280 to 450 g and measures 20.5 cm, with fine gray down and underdeveloped hind quarters. Cubs open their eyes after 28 to 40 days, walk at about five weeks, and stay dependent on milk for 30 weeks. They become independent at 16 to 18 months.
Emergence follows a pecking order. Mature males leave the den first, then immature males and females. Mothers with cubs come last, and those with yearlings appear before those with newborns.
Up to 85 percent of a black bear's diet is vegetation. Fresh from the den, bears look for carrion from winter-killed animals and for newborn ungulates. They then turn to new grasses, wetland plants and the tender shoots and buds that help rebuild muscle and skeleton. Summer brings berries and other soft fruits. In autumn, feeding becomes a full-time job, and a single bear may eat hundreds of hazelnuts, acorns or whitebark pine nuts in a day. Some bears even raid the nut caches of tree squirrels.
Insects supply most of the animal portion of the diet, including bees, yellow jackets, ants and beetles. Honey is a favorite, and bears will gnaw into a tree to reach a deep hive. On northern coasts, especially along the Pacific, bears fish for salmon at night, because their dark fur is easy for salmon to spot by day. Spring fawns of mule deer and white-tailed deer are also taken, since a bear can sniff out a hidden one. Once a fawn reaches about 10 days old, it can outmaneuver the bear.
Bears have also been recorded taking elk calves in Idaho and moose calves in Alaska. One male killed two bull elk over six days by chasing them into deep snow banks. In Labrador, with little edible plant life and few rival carnivores, black bears live largely on caribou and rodents such as voles.
Other animals shape the bear's choices. Kodiak and grizzly bears dominate black bears, which avoid them by being active in the daytime and staying in denser forest. Black bears often steal from cougars. In Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, both bear species visited 24 percent of cougar kills and took over 10 percent of the carcasses. Wolf packs, for their part, have killed black bears without eating them, typically while the bears were hibernating. At least one jaguar has been recorded attacking and eating a black bear. It was El Jefe, famous as the first jaguar seen in the United States in over a century.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the black bear as a species of least concern, with a population estimated at twice that of all other bear species combined. Surveys in the mid-1990s counted between 396,000 and 476,000 black bears in seven Canadian provinces. The United States was estimated at 339,000 to 465,000 in 2011, though several states were missing from that survey. In 2017, California held an estimated 25,000 to 35,000, the largest population in the contiguous states.
Numbers can climb quickly. Great Smoky Mountains National Park held about 1,500 bears in 2020, roughly two per square mile. In western North Carolina, the population rose from about 3,000 in the early 2000s to more than 8,000 in the 2020s. Bears have also turned up in Ohio, Illinois, southern Indiana and western Nebraska. In 2019, biologists confirmed a bear living year-round near Decorah in northeastern Iowa, the first resident there since the 1880s.
Absence is part of the record too. Black bears have been extirpated on Prince Edward Island since 1937, and they rarely visit the southern farmlands of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Mexico is the only country where the species is classed as endangered, and the East Mexican black bear is listed as critically endangered.
The bear's preferred habitat explains much of this pattern. It favors rugged terrain, thick understory and plenty of edible mast, from 400 to 3000 m in elevation. This love of cover may date to the era when it lived beside bigger, bolder bears and beside predators such as Smilodon and the American lion. Ranges vary widely. Males on Long Island off Washington average 5 square miles, while on the Ungava Peninsula they can average up to 1000 square miles. Knowledge of Mexico's bears outside four known areas has not been updated since 1959.
In 1902, Richard Steiff made the first teddy bear under Margarete Steiff's felt goods company. The toy gained mass popularity in the United States after a newspaper told how Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a black bear cub tied to a tree. Winnie-the-Pooh took his name from Winnipeg, a female cub that lived at the London Zoo from 1915 until 1934. Smokey Bear, the mascot of the United States Forest Service, was represented by a cub caught in the Capitan Gap Fire in the spring of 1950.
Indigenous traditions give the bear weightier roles. One tale says the Great Spirit created the black bear and the Evil Spirit created the grizzly. Among the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian, people first learned to respect bears when a girl married the son of a black bear chieftain. Michigan's Sleeping Bear Dunes carry the name of a legend in which a mother bear waited on shore for two cubs that drowned crossing Lake Michigan.
Hunting is nearly as old as the people of the Americas. At Lehner Ranch in Arizona, a Clovis site, archaeologists found the teeth of a three-month-old cub in a roasting pit, dated to 10,940 years before the present. Settlers later hunted bears in the thousands for meat, fat and fur. In 1799, 192,000 skins were exported from Quebec. General Wade Hampton attended 500 successful bear hunts and killed 30 or 40 bears with only a knife. Today 28 American states hold black bear seasons, and more than 481,500 hunting licenses are sold each year. New Jersey approved a six-day season in November 2010, and 53 percent of voters polled supported it if bears were destroying private property.
Attacks are uncommon, and most are mock charges. The worst on record came in May 1978, when a bear killed three teenagers fishing in Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. In August 1997, a starving bear at Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park in British Columbia killed a mother and a man who tried to help. That bear had depended on a garbage dump that had closed. In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 1,028 aggressive incidents were logged from 1964 to 1976, and 107 caused injury, mostly where tourists fed the bears. Where dumps closed and handouts stopped, the incidents fell.
Wild black bears average 18 years of life, and the oldest wild one reached 39. The longest-lived captive bear reached 44. Their deaths are mainly human-caused, through legal hunting, poaching, trapping and car collisions. A Nevada study showed the contrast starkly. Annual mortality in wilderness populations was 0 percent, while in developed areas it rose to 83 percent.
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Common questions
How big is the American black bear?
Adult American black bears measure 120 to 188 cm in head-and-body length. Males typically weigh 60 to 300 kg and females 40 to 150 kg. The largest wild bear on record was a male shot in New Brunswick in November 1972 that weighed an estimated 500 kg.
Are all American black bears actually black?
No. Roughly 70 percent of American black bears are black, but coats also come in cinnamon, brown, blonde, white and silvery-gray. In Yosemite National Park only 9 percent are black.
How does the American black bear hibernate?
The American black bear enters its den in October and November and stays dormant for three to eight months. Its heart rate falls from 40 or 50 beats per minute to 8, while its body temperature stays near 35 degrees Celsius.
What does the American black bear eat?
Up to 85 percent of the American black bear's diet is vegetation, including shoots, berries, acorns and hazelnuts. It also eats insects, honey, salmon, carrion and occasionally the young of deer, elk and moose.
How many American black bears are left in the wild?
The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the American black bear as least concern, with a population about twice that of all other bear species combined. The United States was estimated at 339,000 to 465,000 bears in 2011, and Canada at 396,000 to 476,000 in the mid-1990s.
When did the American black bear split from other bears?
The American black bear shares a common ancestor with the brown bear and polar bear from about 5.05 million years ago. It split from the Asian black bear about 4.08 million years ago.
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