Asian black bear

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Asian black bear, Ursus thibetanus, can have its hind legs broken and still climb a tree with little trouble. It is a medium-sized bear, and it goes by several names, among them moon bear, Asiatic black bear and white-chested bear. Its home stretches from southeastern Iran and Pakistan along the Himalayas into mainland Southeast Asia. From there it reaches the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, mainland China and the Russian Far East, and finally the Japanese islands of Honshu and Shikoku. The IUCN lists it as vulnerable. This documentary asks what shaped a bear that lives so much of its life above the ground. It asks how such an animal copes with tigers. It asks why mountain communities from Japan to Taiwan have treated it as something close to a person or a spirit. And it asks why the same species is nearly gone in one country and a growing worry in another.

  183

• 2. Built for Climbing

  ›

  Against its black fur, the Asian black bear wears a whitish or creamy patch on the chest, sometimes shaped like a V. The muzzle is light brown. The ears are bell shaped, proportionately longer than those of other bears, and they stick out sideways. The tail is a stub of about 11 cm. An adult stands 70-100 cm at the shoulder and measures 120-190 cm in length. Males weigh 60-200 kg, averaging about 135 kg, while females weigh 40-125 kg, with large ones reaching 140 kg. The build resembles a brown bear's, only lighter, and the lips and nose are larger and more mobile.

  Most of the strength sits in the front half of the animal. The upper body is powerful for climbing. The hind legs are relatively weak, and shorter than those of the brown bear or the American black bear. This is the most bipedal of all bears, able to walk upright for more than a quarter of a mile. The heel pads on the forefeet are larger than in most bears. The claws are hooked and larger than those of the American black bear, and they serve for climbing and digging.

  A ridge of bone called the sagittal crest runs low and short along the skull, never exceeding 19-20 percent of the skull's length. A brown bear's can reach 41 percent. The skull as a whole is small but massive, especially in the lower jaw. Although the species eats mostly plants, its jaw is less specialized for that diet than the giant panda's, with much narrower zygomatic arches.

  In the Ussuri territory of the Russian Far East, these bears spend up to 15 percent of their time in trees. Another account holds that they spend half their lives aloft, which would make them one of the largest tree-dwelling mammals. They climb to feed, rest, sun themselves, escape enemies and hibernate. Some older bears grow too heavy to climb. While feeding in a tree, a bear breaks branches and twigs and tucks them beneath itself. Over time this leaves nest-like platforms at the tops of many trees in its range. Bears also rest briefly in such nests, in trees fifteen feet or taller.

  Asian black bears are active by day, but near human settlements they turn nocturnal. They walk in a procession, largest to smallest. Hearing tops out at 30 kHz, and eyesight is poor, though the senses are still sharper than a brown bear's. The voice is varied, with grunts, whines, roars and slurping sounds while feeding. A wounded, alarmed or angry bear makes "an appalling row". Warnings come as loud hisses, and fighting bears scream. When approaching one another, they make "tut tut" sounds, thought to be the tongue snapping against the roof of the mouth.

  The Old Shekarry, a British sportsman, shot one in India. He judged it weighed no less than 363 kg, going by how many people it took to lift the body. The heaviest on record allegedly weighed 200 kg. Zoo-kept animals have reached 225 kg.

  521232248

• 3. Ancient Lineage

  ›

  Seventy-four chromosomes mark the Asian black bear, a count nearly identical to the karyotypes of the five other ursine bears. Of the Old World bears it is considered the least derived. In its body, the tree-climbing specializations later pushed further by sloth bears and sun bears are just beginning. Its ancestry has two candidates. It may be a surviving, modified form of Ursus etruscus, the early small variety from the Middle Villafranchian. Or it may descend from a larger form of Ursus minimus, an extinct species. Apart from the age of the bones, remains of Ursus minimus are often hard to tell from a modern Asian black bear's. A newborn cub's skull even looks much like an adult sun bear's.

  The earliest known Asian black bear specimens come from the early Pliocene in Moldova. The American black bear is its sister species, closer to it than to any other bear, though genetic evidence for how they split is inconclusive. The oldest American black bear fossils, found in Pennsylvania, greatly resemble the Asian bear. Sequences of mitochondrial cytochrome b point to a later split between mainland and Japanese populations. It may have happened about 500,000 years ago, when bears crossed a land bridge between the Korean peninsula and Japan. That date agrees with the fossil evidence.

  The species is divided into seven subspecies that differ in coat and size. The Formosan black bear of Taiwan and the Japanese black bear both lack the thick neck fur of their cousins. The Balochistan black bear of Iran and Pakistan is small, with short coarse hair that is often reddish-brown instead of black. The Himalayan black bear has longer, thicker fur and a smaller, whiter chest mark. In fall, fattening for hibernation, it may reach 181 kg, and in winter it descends as low as 1500 m. The Ussuri black bear of southern Siberia, northeastern China and the Korean peninsula is the largest.

  Until the Late Pleistocene, two more subspecies lived in Europe and West Asia. Ursus thibetanus mediterraneus ranged over Western Europe and the Caucasus, and permjak over Eastern Europe, especially the Ural Mountains. In the Middle Pleistocene and early Late Pleistocene, the species as a whole reached from the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans to the Urals.

  The bear can also occasionally produce young with other bear species. Jack Hanna's Monkeys on the Interstate describes a bear captured in Sanford, Florida. It was thought to be the offspring of an escaped female Asian black bear and a male American black bear. A 1907 paper by Scherren, Some notes on hybrid bears, mentioned a successful mating with a sloth bear. In 1975 at Venezuela's Las Delicias Zoo, a female shared an enclosure with a male spectacled bear and produced several hybrid descendants. In 2005 a possible hybrid with a sun bear was captured in the Mekong River watershed of eastern Cambodia. As of 2010, the China Moon Bear Rescue, run by the Animals Asia Foundation, housed a hybrid of an Asian black bear and a brown bear. The animal had been taken from a bile farm.

  67281617

• 4. The Bear's Calendar

  ›

  In April and May, an Asian black bear lives mostly on the pine nuts and acorns left over from the previous year. When food runs short, it drops into river valleys for hazelnuts and for insect larvae inside rotting logs. From mid-May through late June it adds green vegetation and fruit. From July to September it climbs for bird cherries, pine cones, vines and grapes. Dead fish at spawning time are a rare extra. The full menu is much longer, running from termites, grubs and honey to mushrooms, eggs, carrion and garbage.

  Meat appears too. In the 1970s, bears in Nepal were reported killing and eating Hanuman langurs. They also kill ungulates fairly regularly, including livestock. Wild prey can include muntjacs, serow, takin, Malayan tapir and wild boar. Adult water buffaloes die from a broken neck. The bear is an opportunist, more plant-eating than the brown bear and more carnivorous than the American black bear. It gorges on whatever high-calorie food is in season, stores the excess as fat, and hibernates when food is scarce.

  In Japan the bears live mainly on acorns all year. Their energy balance falls from May to June, rises from August to October and falls again in November. In poor mast years, the nut and acorn crop fails, and a male's energy intake turns negative in February, during hibernation. It does not climb above zero until August. Good mast years leave both sexes in better condition.

  Across most of its range the Asian black bear does not hibernate at all. In the colder north some do, and others simply move to lower elevations. Nearly all pregnant sows hibernate. Dens are prepared in mid-October, and the sleep runs from November until March. A den may be a dug-out hollow tree as high as 60 feet above ground. It may also be a cave, a hole in the ground, a hollow log or a steep sunny slope. Sometimes they take over an abandoned brown bear den. Females leave dens later than males, and mothers with cubs leave later than females without.

  In Sikhote-Alin, breeding runs from mid-June to mid-August, earlier than for brown bears. Males court with clucking sounds. As with brown bears, implantation is delayed. By late December the embryos weigh only 75 grams, and birth comes in mid-January after a gestation of 200-240 days. Pregnant females make up about 14 percent of a population.

  A newborn cub weighs 13 ounces. It starts walking at four days old and opens its eyes three days later. Litters hold 1-4 cubs, two on average. Growth is slow, and cubs reach only 2.5 kg by May. They nurse for 104-130 weeks and become independent at 24-36 months. A sow has her first litter at about three years old and waits 2-3 years between litters. Wild bears live about 25 years on average, and the oldest in captivity died at 44.

  5345465021

• 5. Tiger Country

  ›

  Jim Corbett once watched a fight between a tiger and the largest Asian black bear he had ever seen. The bear drove the tiger off even though half its nose and scalp had been torn away. Twice he also saw bears carry off tiger kills while the tiger was away. Such stories are rarer than the opposite outcome. In Russia, hunters have found bear remains in tiger scats and bear carcasses bearing signs of tiger predation. Tigers go mostly for young bears. One fatal attack on a juvenile is recorded in Jigme Dorji National Park, and bears are usually safe from tigers once they reach five.

  The escape route is a trunk. A threatened bear rushes up a tree and waits for the tiger to go. Some tigers pretend to leave and wait below. One Siberian tiger was reported to have lured a bear by imitating its mating call. Still, black bears are probably less vulnerable than brown bears, because they shelter in hollows and close-set rocks.

  Other animals share the range. The sloth bear overlaps in central and southern India, the sun bear in Southeast Asia and the brown bear in the southern Russian Far East. Himalayan brown bears seem intimidated by black bears in direct encounters. They also eat fruit that black bears drop from trees, being too large and cumbersome to climb. Ussuri brown bears, by contrast, may attack black bears.

  Leopards prey on cubs younger than two years, and wolf packs and Eurasian lynxes are potential cub predators too. Against Amur leopards, black bears usually dominate in heavily vegetated areas, while leopards come out on top in open ground. The outcome depends largely on the size of the individual animals.

  David W. Macdonald theorizes that sharing a range with tigers made the Asian black bear more aggressive toward people. Brown bears of Eurasia and American black bears are less so.

  5455565848

• 6. A Savage Reputation

  ›

  Brigadier General R. G. Burton wrote that "The Himalayan black bear is a savage animal, sometimes attacking without provocation". He said it goes for the head and face with its claws and uses its teeth on a victim who is down. Men with scalps torn from their heads were not an uncommon sight.

  Not everyone agreed. Robert Armitage Sterndale wrote in his Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon that a wounded bear will sometimes fight but usually tries to escape. A reader replied in a letter to The Asian on the 11th of May 1880. He called that description incorrect and the bear "about the most fierce, vicious, dangerous brute" in the hills or plains of India. He insisted that a brown bear never charges, however desperately wounded.

  Black bears were rarely hunted for sport in British India. Their fur was poor, their hearing was weak, and they were easy to stalk or shoot in trees. One book, The Great and Small Game of India, Burma, and Tibet, called it "merely potting a black thing in a tree". The danger lay with wounded animals. Burton wrote that many sportsmen were killed after failing to make direct hits.

  At the turn of the 20th century, a hospital in Srinagar, Kashmir, treated dozens of bear victims every year. A bear rears up and knocks its victim down with the front paws. It bites an arm or leg, then snaps at the head, the most dangerous part. Attacks in Kashmir have risen since the Kashmir conflict. In November 2009 in Kulgam district of Indian-administered Kashmir, a bear that found four insurgents in its den attacked them and killed two. In the Chamba District of Himachal Pradesh, attacks rose from 10 in 1988-89 to 21 in 1991-92.

  Elsewhere the record varies. Russia has no records of the bear preying on humans, and Taiwan has no documented conflicts. Attacks were reported in 2005 from Junbesi in Langtang National Park, Nepal, in villages and in the surrounding forest. In Japan, nine people were killed between 1979 and 1989. In September 2009, a bear attacked nine tourists at a bus station in the built-up area of Takayama, Gifu, and seriously injured four. In 2016, four people were killed in Akita prefecture in May and June while picking bamboo shoots. In August of that year, a safari park worker in Gunma prefecture died when a bear climbed into her car.

  Most attacks come when bear and person meet suddenly at close quarters. For that reason the species counts as more dangerous than the brown bear, which lives in open country and is less often surprised. Bears also attack to protect food.

  Farmers in the Himalayan lowlands once feared bears above any other pest. They built platforms in the fields, where watchmen sat at night beating drums. Some bears grew used to the noise and came anyway. In Bhutan, of 1,375 livestock kills examined, bears accounted for 8 percent. Losses peaked in summer and autumn, when animals graze in pasture and forest and are less closely guarded. In Himachal Pradesh, livestock killed by bears rose from 29 in 1988-89 to 45 in 1992-93. When natural food is scarce, bears attack bullocks, either killing them outright or eating them alive.

  In the remoter parts of Japan, bears eat cultivated bamboo shoots in spring. They take plums, watermelons and corn in summer, and persimmons, sweet potatoes and rice in autumn. About 3,000 beehives are damaged each year. From watermelons or pumpkins the bears eat only the seeds, which harms later harvests. Stripping bark for sap can girdle and kill trees. Evidence suggests that even 70-year-old conifers, the ones that fetch the highest prices, have been stripped.

  8278808386

• 7. Spirits and Spectacle

  ›

  In Kituarahara-gun in Niigata, local folklore says the mountain spirit, yama no kami, gave the bear a silk-wrapped amulet. The white mark remained after the amulet was taken away. Japanese tradition links the bear to that spirit. It is called mountain man, mountain uncle, mountain father, but also a loving mother and a child. Because it lives alone, it is also seen as a lonely person, sabishigariya. The bear features little in lowland folklore and strongly in upland Japan, which is thought to reflect its greater economic value there.

  Buddhism, once introduced in Japan, forbade killing animals, and hunters compromised. People in the Kiso area of Nagano Prefecture banned bear hunting altogether. Others developed rituals to placate the spirits of killed bears. Among matagi huntsmen in Akita Prefecture, a bear without the white chest mark was called minaguro or munaguro. It was thought a messenger of yama no kami. A hunter who shot one offered it to the spirit and never hunted again. In Nagano the entirely black ones were nekoguma, cat-bears. Matagi believed that killing a bear in the mountains brought a bad storm, since bear spirits could affect weather. Expeditions began with rituals and could last up to two weeks, and after a kill the matagi prayed for the bear's soul. They called such hunts kuma taiji, bear conquest, and taiji is the word folklore uses for slaying monsters and demons.

  For the Atayal, Taroko and Bunun peoples of Taiwan, bears behave almost like humans. Killing one unjustly is therefore the same as murder, and it invites disease, death or crop failure. The Bunun, who see bears and humans as sharing common ancestry, also call the animal aguman or duman, meaning devil. A Bunun hunter who accidentally traps a bear must build a cottage in the mountains and cremate the animal inside it. He then stays alone, away from the village, until the millet harvest ends, since the killing is believed to burn the millet black. In the Tungpu area, bears are animals of the third category, those most remote from humans and kept outside settlements. A bear entering a village is an ill omen, and the community must either kill it or move. The Rukai and Paiwan may hunt bears but believe it curses the hunter, and the Rukai expect disease. Children may not eat the meat, which may not enter homes. In the 21st century the Formosan black bear has also become a symbol of Taiwanese nationalism. It is often pictured against the panda, standing for the PRC, or against Winnie-the-Pooh, standing for Xi Jinping.

  In Hindu mythology, the bear Jambavantha, also called Jambavan, is believed to have lived from Treta Yuga to Dvapara Yuga. In the Ramayana he helps Rama find his wife Sita and fight her abductor Ravana. Thai people call the animal mi khwai, buffalo bear, after the V-shaped patch of fur under its neck, which resembles a buffalo's. A Thai idiom, grumbling like a bear eating honey, describes someone muttering discontent. It comes from the murmuring sound a bear makes while eating honey in a tree. Yann Martel's novel The Life of Pi briefly mentions the bears, which the narrator's father counts among the most dangerous animals in his zoo.

  Gary Brown, in The Influence of Bears on Humans, called Asiatic black bears "the comedians of the performing bears". He wrote that they seem to enjoy applause and deliberately arrive late to their position to win laughter. Along with sun bears, they are the species most often used where bears perform or are kept as pets. They learn outstandingly well in captivity and are among the most common circus bears. They tame easily and can be fed rice, maize, sweet potatoes, cassavas, pumpkins, ripe fruit, animal fat and sweets. In Pakistan, capturing cubs for bear dancing and baiting in streets and villages, especially for tourists, was historically a main threat. Bears are also popular pets in Vietnam. In China, keeping captive bears is popular, thanks to a belief that milking the gall bladder leads to quick prosperity.

  2572737492

• 8. Vanishing and Returning

  ›

  By the early 1990s, the area where Asian black bears lived in China had shrunk to one-fifth of what it was before the 1940s. Overcutting was the main habitat threat. In regions of Shaanxi, Gansu and Sichuan where bears live, the human population rose above 430,000. Between 1950 and 1985-27 forestry enterprises were built there. Hunting did further damage, since the paws, gall bladders and cubs carry great economic value. In Heilongjiang Province, 1,000 bears were harvested each year in the 1950s and 1960s. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, purchased furs had dropped by four-fifths, even nine-tenths. Liaoning province now holds about 100 bears, spread over five counties.

  Chinese hunters have taken the bear for body parts since the Stone Age. In the 19th century its fur was prized little, and in British India the only practical use of a carcass was grease. Village bears were favored because they were fatter than forest ones. Today bile is the draw. It is supposed to cure various diseases, treat blood pooled beneath the skin and counter poisons. Bone glue and fat are also used in traditional medicine and as a tonic.

  Russia has protected the bear since 1983, yet poaching continues, driven by growing demand for bear parts in Asian markets. Workers of Chinese and Korean origin, supposedly employed in the timber industry, take part in the illegal trade. Some Russian sailors reportedly buy parts from local hunters to sell to Japanese and Southeast Asian clients. Logging cuts the cavity trees where bears den, forcing them onto the ground or into rocks where tigers, brown bears and hunters can reach them. Legal harvests run at 75-100 bears a year, against a reported 500 taken illegally. Most of the local scientific community supports a movement to legalize hunting.

  India lists the bear in Appendix I of CITES and Schedule I of its Wildlife (Protection) Act, with a 1991 amendment. Even so, prosecuting poachers is hard, because witnesses are few and there are no wildlife forensic labs to identify confiscated parts. Borders with Pakistan, Tibet, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar run through mountains and are hard to police. Gall bladders and skin are what poachers want.

  In Pakistan, the bear's range fell from 11,807 square kilometers in the 1950s to 7,925 in 2014. Logging, plantations, agriculture, roads and dams took the habitat. A recent review counted roughly 50 to 100 Himalayan black bears killed by humans between 1998 and 2023. Its authors say this is greatly underestimated, because such killings are often concealed.

  The Wildlife Trust of Bangladesh surveyed 87 places between 2008 and 2010. It found small isolated bear populations, mainly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Conservationists fear they will vanish. In Vietnam, about 1000 square kilometers disappear every year from 87000 square kilometers of natural forest. A 1989 decision banned hunting and exporting the bears. In Taiwan, the Formosan black bear has been listed as endangered since the 30th of January 1989. Its population is estimated at 200-600, and steel traps set for wild boar sometimes catch bears by accident.

  In southern and southeastern Iran, climate change is pressing the bears. Being large, they cannot use micro-climatic refuges such as hiding in grass to regulate their temperature. A drop of thirty to forty percent in numbers over thirty years has been reported, alongside a ten percent loss of suitable habitat since 2016.

  South Korea shows both sides of the story. Poaching, habitat destruction and eradication during the Japanese occupation had wiped out the bear there by the 1990s. In 2004 the government began a reintroduction program in Jiri Mountain National Park. As of April 2018-56 bears lived wild on Jirisan, and in 2021 the park's population appeared to have reached its carrying capacity. Yet South Korea is one of two countries where bear bile farming remains legal. In 2009, about 1,374 bears lived on an estimated 74 farms, kept for slaughter. Fewer than 20 lived at the Jirisan Restoration Center.

  Japan has the opposite problem. In the 1970s and 1980s, large-scale spring culls aimed to stop bark stripping on cedar and cypress plantations, and the population fell sharply. In 1991 five regional populations, among them Shikoku and Kii, were listed as endangered in the Japanese Red Data Book. In 2000 the Ministry of the Environment issued a management manual capping the annual capture rate relative to estimated population. As quotas fell and hunters aged, numbers climbed from approximately 15,000 in 2012 to around 44,000 in 2023, according to the Mammal Society of Japan. Poor mast production linked to climate change joined that recovery, and injuries and deaths from bears jumped around 2023 and reached a record in 2025. In 2024 the government revised its conservation plan toward more proactive management through hunting, and many bears are again targets for culling.

  3637343268