132 Fun Facts About Bears

Which so-called bear is really a marsupial?

Koala: despite the 'koala bear' nickname it is a pouched marsupial, and its closest living relatives are not bears at all but the wombats.

On which continent did the Atlas bear die out in the 19th century?

Africa: the Atlas bear, a brown bear of the mountains of Morocco and Algeria, was the continent's only bear in modern times, and its loss left Africa with no bears at all.

The sun bear's nickname, 'honey bear', owes much to which unusually long body part that reaches deep into bee nests?

Tongue: a sun bear rips a nest open with its claws, then extends its exceptionally long tongue to draw out the honey and insects inside.

In which animated film does a witch's spell turn a Scottish queen into a bear?

Brave: Princess Merida's mother, Queen Elinor, is the one transformed, and the pair must undo the spell before she is caught by the kingdom's keenest bear hunter, her own husband.

Polar bears live only in the far north, so which famous cold-climate birds do they never meet in the wild?

Penguins live almost entirely in the Southern Hemisphere; the North Atlantic once had a flightless seabird of its own, the great auk, until hunters killed the last known pair in 1844.

The giant panda's diet consists almost exclusively of what plant?

Bamboo is nearly all a giant panda eats, yet it still has a carnivore's digestive system, so it must spend up to 16 hours a day feeding to get enough from it.

Baloo, the bear who befriends the 'man-cub' Mowgli, first appeared in which work by Rudyard Kipling?

The Jungle Book: Kipling wrote Baloo as the 'sleepy brown bear' who teaches wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle, a sterner figure than the carefree 'jungle bum' of Disney's 1967 film.

On the stock market, a 'bear market' is one in which share prices are doing what?

Falling: the term is usually traced to the proverb about selling the bearskin before catching the bear, since a 'bear' sells stock he does not yet own, betting the price will drop.

What sets a bear's 'hibernation' apart from a ground squirrel's?

Their body temperature does not drop as dramatically: a denning bear cools by only a few degrees and is readily roused, which is why some physiologists don't count it as true hibernation.

Which reproductive strategy lets a female bear control when her cubs are born?

Delayed implantation: after mating the embryo floats undeveloped for months before it implants, so nearly all of a cub's growth is squeezed into the last weeks of the pregnancy.

When do female grizzly bears give birth to their cubs?

In the winter den while hibernating: grizzly cubs arrive in January or February, which leaves them big enough to follow their mother out just as spring food returns.

What do biologists call the late-summer and autumn feeding frenzy in which bears gorge themselves to fatten up?

Hyperphagia: a bear's appetite soars and it eats and drinks to excess for weeks, laying down the fat it will live on until spring.

If a surprised grizzly makes contact in a defensive attack, what do US park rangers advise you to do?

Play dead: lie on your stomach with your hands clasped behind your neck, because a grizzly defending itself or its cubs usually leaves once it decides you are no threat.

Which sounds do bears use as a warning when agitated or feeling threatened?

Growls or huffs are the warning: a stressed bear huffs, snorts and blows air, then escalates to growls, roars and bellows in aggressive encounters.

Polar bears are the most carnivorous of all bears; which animals make up most of their diet?

Seals, above all ringed seals: a polar bear will wait motionless beside a breathing hole in the sea ice, sometimes for hours, and strike when a seal comes up for air.

The sloth bear's specialised mouthparts are adapted for feeding on what primary food source?

Termites and ants: a sloth bear rips a mound open with its claws, closes its nostrils to keep the insects out, and sucks them up through its long, mobile lips.

Yogi Bear spends his days swiping picnic baskets from visitors to which park?

Jellystone, a play on Yellowstone: Hanna-Barbera modelled Yogi's hat, tie and patter on Art Carney's Ed Norton from the sitcom The Honeymooners.

Which Alaskan island lends its name to the giant brown bears that rival polar bears as the largest of all?

Kodiak: cut off from other bears on their archipelago for about 12,000 years, Kodiak bears became a subspecies of their own, with big males weighing up to 1,500 pounds.

In what condition are bear cubs born?

Blind, helpless and nearly hairless: a newborn cub weighs only about half a kilogram, so it depends entirely on its mother's body heat and fat-rich milk.

Which confectioner introduced the gummy bear in 1922, inspired by the trained bears of street fairs?

Haribo: founder Hans Riegel of Bonn launched his 'Dancing Bear' sweets in 1922, and the company's name is built from the opening letters of Hans, Riegel and Bonn.

Paddington Bear is famously fond of sandwiches filled with what?

Marmalade: the habit is so fixed that when a 2007 advert had Paddington try Marmite in his sandwiches, his creator Michael Bond wrote to The Times to apologise.

Which bear species is nicknamed the 'moon bear' for the pale crescent marking on its coat?

Asiatic Black Bear: the creamy crescent gives it the nickname, and it is a strong climber that goes up into the trees to feed on nuts and fruit.

In A. A. Milne's stories, Pooh Bear and his friends live in and around which wood?

Hundred Acre Wood: Milne modelled it on Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, the countryside around his family's home south of London.

Which of these bears is native to South America?

Spectacled Bear: also called the Andean bear, it is South America's only bear, a nimble climber that builds platforms of branches up in the trees for eating and sleeping.

During hibernation, bears experience a significant drop in which physiological process?

Heart rate: a hibernating bear's pulse slows from roughly 55 beats per minute to as few as 9, cutting its metabolic rate by up to three-quarters.

In 2016 the IUCN moved the giant panda from Endangered to which category?

Vulnerable: the downgrade followed a Chinese survey that counted 1,864 pandas outside captivity, a recovery credited to China's work restoring their forest habitat.

What sound do bear cubs make when they are comfortable or nursing?

A motor-like humming: cubs keep up the pulsing hum as they nurse, and it is not only a baby sound, because grown bears have been heard humming too.

Which sense do bears rely on most to locate their food?

Smell is the sense bears find food by: their noses are extremely keen, and a good memory then leads them back to the places that fed them before.

Compared with brown bears, what is true of an American black bear's claws?

They are shorter: a black bear's claws are short and curved for gripping bark, which makes it much the better tree-climber, while a grizzly's long claws are built for digging.

Small bumps on the pads of a polar bear's huge paws help it to do what?

Grip slippery ice: the rough bumps on the footpads act like the tread of a boot, and the fur growing around them is there to keep the feet warm as much as to stop them sliding.

The sun bear takes its name from a golden patch of fur on which part of its body?

Chest: the orange-yellow crescent there is said to look like the rising sun, and no two are alike, so each bear's patch is as individual as a fingerprint.

What is the main product harvested from bears kept on farms in China and Vietnam?

Bile: thousands of bears are kept in cages on farms across Asia so that their bile can be drained through a catheter or an open wound and sold as traditional medicine.

Zoologists call bears 'plantigrade' animals; what does that term describe?

Walking on the soles of the feet: a bear sets its heel down as people do, where dogs and cats walk on their toes, and that flat-footed stance lets it rear up and stand on its hind legs.

What is the primary diet of the spectacled bear?

Mostly plants and fruit: it is probably the most plant-eating of all bears after the giant panda, with powerful jaws for crushing tough bromeliads and palms, and meat is only a small part of its diet.

Most polar bears stay active all winter, so which ones spend it in a snow den?

Pregnant females: they dig into a snowdrift in autumn and stay until spring, living off their fat, while the rest keep roaming the sea ice through the dark months.

What does the IUCN Red List name as the main threat to polar bears?

Habitat loss due to melting sea ice: polar bears depend on the ice as a platform for hunting, so as it shrinks they are stuck on land for longer and their numbers are expected to decline.

What feature common to brown bears, including grizzlies, aids their digging?

A muscular shoulder hump: it is a mass of muscle that drives the forelimbs when a grizzly digs for roots and burrowing animals, and since black bears lack one it is a handy way to tell the two apart.

Bears are solitary, so apart from a mother with her cubs, when are two adults most likely to be found together?

During courtship a male may shadow a female for days or weeks to test whether she is ready to breed, and some Asian species wrestle and mock-fight as part of it.

Cubs of which bear routinely ride around on their mother's back?

Sloth bear cubs cling to a shaggy saddle of fur on their mother's back for their first six to nine months, a habit thought to keep them out of reach of predators.

What is the traditional collective noun for a group of bears?

A sleuth: nothing to do with detectives, whose word comes from the Norse for a trail; this sleuth is an old English word for slowness or laziness.

What is an adult male bear called?

A boar: adult males are boars and females sows, the same words used for pigs, and a boar moves on soon after mating and takes no part in raising the cubs.

What lets a grabbed sun bear twist round and bite its attacker?

Loose skin around its neck: tigers are among the few animals that prey on sun bears, and one that clamps on finds the bear turning inside its own baggy hide to bite back.

Which bear species is by far the most numerous in the world?

American Black Bear: it is thought to outnumber all the other bear species put together, and despite the name plenty of them are brown or cinnamon.

Which US sports nickname is an old storybook word for a bear, literally 'the brown one'?

Bruins: 'Bruin', Middle Dutch for 'brown', was the bear's name in the medieval Reynard the Fox fables, and it suited Boston's hockey team, which first took the ice in the brown and yellow of its owner's grocery chain.

Before DNA settled the matter, some zoologists grouped the giant panda with which animals?

Raccoons: the giant panda shares features with raccoons and with bears, and the argument ran for decades until molecular studies showed that it is a true bear after all.

The giant panda's famous 'thumb' is actually what?

A modified wrist bone: the panda's 'thumb' is an enlarged wrist bone under a fleshy pad, and it pins stems against the five true fingers so the animal can hold its food much as a hand would.

At Alaska's Brooks Falls, brown bears gather each summer to catch which fish?

Sockeye salmon: the fish have to leap the falls on their way upstream to spawn, and in July, at the height of the run, the bears crowd in to catch them as they jump.

In Greek myth, which nymph was turned into a bear and then placed in the sky as Ursa Major?

Callisto: a huntress of Artemis sworn to stay unwed, she was loved by Zeus and turned into a bear, by Zeus to hide the affair or by an enraged Hera or Artemis, depending on the telling.

Knut, the polar bear cub who became a worldwide celebrity in 2007, was born at which zoo?

Berlin: born at the city's zoo in December 2006 and rejected by his mother, Knut was bottle-fed and raised by his keeper, Thomas Dörflein, to whom he stayed closely attached.

What illness triggered the seizure that made the celebrity polar bear Knut collapse and drown in 2011?

Encephalitis: exhaustive tests for an infection found nothing, and in 2015 researchers showed that Knut's own immune system had attacked his brain, a disease until then known only in humans.

Wojtek, the bear enlisted in the Polish army in WWII, was acquired as a cub in which country?

Iran: Polish soldiers evacuated from the Soviet Union took in the orphaned cub near Hamadan in 1942, and he was later enrolled as a private so that he could sail with his unit on a troopship that barred pets.

At which 1944 battle is the soldier-bear Wojtek said to have carried ammunition crates?

Monte Cassino: during the 1944 battle Wojtek's 22nd Artillery Supply Company moved shells to the guns, and the story of the bear carrying crates led the unit to adopt a bear with a shell as its emblem.

The real bear behind the Pooh stories, a London Zoo favourite, was named after which Canadian city?

Winnipeg: Canadian army vet Harry Colebourn bought the cub for $20 at an Ontario railway station in 1914, named her after his home city and later left her with London Zoo.

In 1964 the US Post Office gave Smokey Bear his own what?

ZIP code: so many letters were arriving for Smokey that the Post Office gave him 20252, a personal code said to be matched only by the president's.

In which state was the cub who became the living Smokey Bear rescued in 1950?

New Mexico: firefighters found the cub clinging to a charred tree after a 1950 blaze in the Capitan Mountains, his paws badly burned, and he went on to live at the National Zoo in Washington as the real Smokey.

In 2001 Smokey Bear's slogan swapped 'forest fires' for what word?

Wildfires: in 2001 the slogan became 'Only You Can Prevent Wildfires', after fires in grasslands and other non-forest areas showed the old 'forest fires' wording was too narrow.

The teddy bear grew out of a 1902 hunt in which state, where a president refused to shoot a tethered bear?

Mississippi: Governor Andrew Longino had invited the president to hunt near Onward, and when his guides tied a bear to a willow tree for him he refused the shot as unsportsmanlike.

Which US president's refusal to shoot a captive bear in 1902 gave the teddy bear its name?

Theodore Roosevelt: Clifford Berryman drew the scene for the Washington Post, and Brooklyn shopkeeper Morris Michtom then named a stuffed toy 'Teddy's bear' after him.

Which name is given to the rare white-coated black bears of Canada's Pacific coast?

Spirit bear: also called the Kermode bear, it is no albino but an ordinary black bear carrying two copies of a recessive gene, which is why two dark parents can produce a white cub.

A polar bear's liver is poisonous to people because it is loaded with which vitamin?

Vitamin A: it builds up in the liver from the animals the bear eats, to levels that can poison a person, so northern peoples who eat the meat have long left the liver alone.

Beneath its pale fur, a polar bear's skin is what colour?

Black skin under translucent fur is how a polar bear soaks up heat; the coat only looks white because its hollow hairs scatter light.

Which Canadian town is famous for a 'polar bear jail' that holds nuisance bears?

Churchill: bears gather on the Hudson Bay shore each autumn waiting for the ice, and problem bears are held in the town's Polar Bear Holding Facility until freeze-up, earning Churchill its 'Polar Bear Capital of the World' tag.

Which Shakespeare play contains the famous stage direction 'Exit, pursued by a bear'?

The Winter's Tale: the bear chases off Antigonus, who has just abandoned the baby Perdita on a remote shore, and kills him offstage.

Which island, the last refuge of the woolly mammoth, holds the world's densest cluster of polar bear dens?

Wrangel Island: it is a World Heritage Site partly for having the highest density of polar bear dens anywhere, and mammoths hung on here until about 4,000 years ago.

Which country holds the world's largest brown bear population?

Russia: more of the world's roughly 200,000 brown bears live there than anywhere else, from its western forests to Kamchatka, where dozens can gather at a single salmon river.

The Marsican brown bear survives in a national park in which country?

Italy: only about 50 Marsican bears survive, in and around the Abruzzo national park in the central Apennines, and poisoned carcasses are among the things that have killed them.

The mazaalai, a brown bear with only a few dozen left, survives in which desert?

Gobi: Mongolia's mazaalai cling on around a few desert oases, where feeding stations stocked with pellets have been set up to help them through the lean times.

The Sankebetsu brown bear incident of 1915, a week of attacks on a pioneer village, took place on which Japanese island?

Hokkaido is the only one of Japan's main islands where brown bears live; the bear that terrorised the settlers' village killed seven people before hunters tracked it down and shot it.

'Night of the Grizzlies' recalls two fatal attacks on one August night in 1967 in which Montana national park?

Glacier National Park: two young women, Julie Helgeson and Michele Koons, were killed by different bears the same night, prompting an overhaul of how parks handled garbage and bears.

Timothy Treadwell, subject of the film Grizzly Man, was killed in 2003 in which Alaskan park?

Katmai National Park: Treadwell had spent 13 summers among its coastal brown bears before a 28-year-old male killed him and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard in October 2003.

Monarch, a grizzly captured in 1889, is said to be the model for the bear on which US state's flag?

California: press baron William Randolph Hearst had him caught to promote his San Francisco Examiner, the self-styled 'Monarch of the Dailies', and the bear spent the rest of his life on show in the city.

The coat of arms of Greenland shows an upright polar bear on a shield of what colour?

Blue: the silver bear stands on a blue shield with its left forepaw raised, where heraldic beasts usually raise the right, in a nod to the Inuit belief that polar bears are left-handed.

Which Swiss city has kept live bears, its heraldic animal, on public show since the 15th century?

Bern: legend says its founder, Duke Berthold V, named the city after the first animal he killed on a hunt, a bear, and it has paid to keep live ones on show for more than 500 years.

Madrid's coat of arms shows a bear reaching up into which kind of tree?

Strawberry tree: the story goes that the bear began rearing up against a tree after a 1222 settlement gave Madrid's council the local woods and its clergy the pastures; a statue of the pair stands in the Puerta del Sol.

Which English queen was a keen spectator of bear-baiting?

Elizabeth I: thirteen bears were baited at one show put on for her in 1575; the Puritans later banned the sport, it returned once their rule ended, and Parliament outlawed it for good only in 1835.

What is the active ingredient in bear spray?

Capsaicin, the compound that makes chili peppers hot: the spray has to be fired as a cloud for a charging bear to run into, and it does nothing if rubbed on a tent or pack as a repellent.

Paddington Bear arrived at a London station from 'darkest' which country?

Peru: Michael Bond's bear, first published in 1958, arrives at Paddington station with a label reading 'Please look after this bear. Thank you', having stowed away from darkest Peru.

Chi Chi, a London Zoo giant panda, inspired the logo of which organisation?

WWF: its founders wanted a symbol that would be understood in any language, and found it in Chi Chi, whom the naturalist Peter Scott drew for the first panda logo.

After Nixon's 1972 visit China gave the US two pandas; what did the US send in return?

A pair of musk oxen: the exchange followed a Beijing dinner at which Pat Nixon told Premier Zhou Enlai how fond she was of giant pandas, and he promised to send some.

A newborn giant panda weighs about as much as which of these?

Stick of butter: at about four ounces the cub is the smallest newborn, relative to its mother, of any placental mammal, because nearly all of its growing is done after birth.

Gus, the Central Park Zoo polar bear, became a 1990s celebrity for doing what up to 12 hours a day?

Swimming obsessively: Gus swam figure-eights in his pool for up to 12 hours a day, and the zoo paid a behaviourist $25,000 to treat him with toys, games and Prozac.

Cave bears lived alongside early modern humans; about how long ago did they vanish?

25,000 years or so: cave bears vanished around the coldest point of the last Ice Age, leaving their skulls, paw prints and sleeping hollows in France's painted Chauvet Cave.

Sloth bears lack which teeth, leaving a gap they can suck their food through?

Upper incisors: with the two top front teeth missing and a long lower lip that stretches up over the nose, a sloth bear's mouth becomes a tube that works like a vacuum hose.

Admiralty Island's Tlingit name, 'Fortress of the Bears', gave English which word for liquor?

Hooch: the island's Tlingit name, Xootsnoowú, was anglicised as 'Hoochinoo', and the strong liquor distilled by the people who lived there carried the shortened name into English slang.

In which 2015 film is frontiersman Hugh Glass mauled by a grizzly and left for dead by his companions?

The Revenant: Leonardo DiCaprio plays a real trapper who was mauled in 1823 and, the story goes, dragged himself some 200 miles to the safety of a fort.

The Great Bear Rainforest runs along the coast of which Canadian province?

British Columbia: under a 2016 deal between the province, First Nations and industry, 85% of the Great Bear Rainforest's forest was put permanently off-limits to industrial logging.

The Old Norse word berserkr, root of the English 'berserk', is usually read as meaning what?

Bear-shirt is the usual reading, for a warrior who fought in a bearskin; an older reading, 'bare-shirt', for one who fought without armour, is now largely rejected.

In the UK, the seven brightest stars of Ursa Major are commonly called what?

The Plough: North Americans know the same seven stars as the Big Dipper, and the two at the end of its bowl, the Pointers, lead the eye straight to the Pole Star.

On which Norwegian archipelago are people leaving town advised to carry a rifle against polar bears?

Svalbard: anyone leaving the settlements must carry the means to scare a polar bear away and is advised to take a firearm as a last resort, since the protected bears can turn up anywhere on the islands.

What is the scientific name of the polar bear?

Ursus maritimus, 'sea bear': Constantine Phipps described it as a species in 1774 after a voyage north, and the name fits an animal that lives out on the sea ice and is classed as a marine mammal.

Which small bear is Yogi Bear's constant companion on his picnic-basket raids?

Boo-Boo: the cautious conscience of the pair, he warns Yogi off each new scheme and then, reluctantly, goes along with it anyway.

A hibernating bear does not urinate for months; what happens to its urea?

Recycled into amino acids: a hibernating bear neither urinates nor defecates for months; gut bacteria break down urea and the nitrogen is rebuilt into protein, sparing its muscles.

Which feature of an American black bear's head appears larger, longer and more pointed than a grizzly's rounded ones?

Its ears stand taller and more erect, while a grizzly's are small and rounded against its broad, furry head; a wet grizzly's can seem bigger, though.

Side-on, an American black bear's face runs straight from forehead to nose; a grizzly's profile is described as what?

Dish-shaped, or concave, from between the eyes to the tip of the nose; a grizzly's eyes also sit closer together and deeper set than a black bear's.

When an American black bear stands on all fours on level ground, which part of its body usually sits highest?

Its rump, or the middle of its back, is the high point, which sets it apart from a grizzly; a slope or a lowered head can still fool the eye.

Which spice gives its name to the reddish-brown colour form of the American black bear, also classed as a subspecies?

Cinnamon bears are black bears in all but colour and breed freely with their darker neighbours, which is why a brown coat alone never proves a bear is a grizzly.

An American black bear's front paw print is rounded; compared with it, a grizzly's front track has what overall shape?

More square: a straight edge laid across a grizzly's front track, just ahead of the pad, misses the toe on the far side, but on a black bear's it crosses that toe.

If an American black bear attacks and there is no escape, what does the US National Park Service advise?

Fight back with anything to hand, aiming kicks and blows at the bear's face; the first choice, though, is to reach a car or a building.

When a grizzly or American black bear rears up on its hind legs near people, what is it usually doing?

Getting a better look, or a better sniff: a standing bear is usually curious rather than threatening, so rangers say to stay still and talk calmly.

Which reaction to meeting a grizzly or American black bear do US park rangers warn strongly against?

Running away invites pursuit, because bears chase fleeing animals much as dogs do, and they are quick both uphill and down.

Why does the US National Park Service tell hikers not to go up a tree to escape a grizzly or black bear?

Both can climb, though a grizzly's weight and claw shape make it the clumsier of the two, so a tree is no refuge from either.

Why does the US National Park Service advise people to hike in groups in grizzly and black bear country?

Bears notice them sooner, because a group is noisier and smellier than a lone walker, and most bears slip away from people they detect in time; a group's combined size is intimidating too.

The spirit bear's white coat comes from a mutation in MC1R, a gene linked in humans to hair of which colour?

Red hair and fair skin in people are tied to the same gene, MC1R; in the bears the variant stops the fur making dark pigment at all.

Because its skin and eyes are normally pigmented, the white spirit bear is wrongly assumed to be which thing?

An albino would lack pigment everywhere, but a spirit bear keeps it in skin and eyes; only the fur is pale, and closer to vanilla than pure white.

The spirit bear's white coat is a recessive trait, so a white cub must inherit the gene from whom?

Both parents must pass on the gene, yet neither has to be white: two black bears that each carry one hidden copy can produce a white cub.

Along with neighbouring Gribbell, which island on Canada's Pacific coast is the spirit bear's best-known stronghold?

Princess Royal Island, where about one black bear in ten is white; on little Gribbell, just to the north, the share rises to roughly one in three.

Researchers found that by day the spirit bear's white coat gives it an edge over black-coated bears in which activity?

Catching fish: by day white bears succeed on about a third of their attempts and black bears a quarter, perhaps because a pale shape overhead alarms the fish less.

By Gitga'at tradition, how did coastal First Nations keep the white spirit bear hidden from fur traders?

Never speaking of it, even at the dinner table, kept word of the white bear from trappers, and taking one was taboo even when black bears were hunted for the fur trade.

The spirit bear's formal name, Kermode bear, honours Frank Kermode, who was the director of what kind of institution?

A provincial museum was run by Kermode, who researched the bears; his colleague William Hornaday, the zoologist who first described them, gave them his name.

A lone spirit bear drawn to a Canadian rainforest river was filmed for which David Attenborough series of 2023?

Planet Earth III showed a lone female spirit bear in Canada's temperate rainforest, in the same episode as a male tragopan dancing for mates in China.

Which author, who raised a black bear called Buffy for 26 years, wrote the 2001 novel 'Touching Spirit Bear'?

Ben Mikaelsen called Buffy a 750-pound member of his family, and the bear inspired both the book and its sequel.

Besides 'spirit bear', the white Kermode bear of Canada's Pacific rainforest is also nicknamed which kind of bear?

Ghost bear is the other name: the animals are black bears made white by a recessive gene, and most of their close kin in the same forests are black.

Which Canadian province or territory lost its last American black bears by 1937 and has had none since?

Prince Edward Island is the gap in the map: black bears hold much of their original Canadian range, though they are scarce in the southern prairie farmlands.

American black bears may have taken to forests because bigger bears like the grizzly dominated what kind of ground?

Open terrain suited the grizzly, which relies on size and aggression to protect its cubs, while the black bear kept to thick cover and to trees it could scale.

Researcher Stephen Herrero found that in most fatal American black bear attacks on people the bear was doing what?

Acting as a predator described the bear in 88 per cent of fatal cases; black bear mothers, unlike grizzlies, seldom attack people who come near their cubs.

In autumn, American black bears fatten up chiefly on 'hard mast', a forester's term for which kind of food?

Acorns and nuts, such as hazelnuts, can be eaten by the hundred in a day by one bear, and the supply may even shape where the species lives.

In Yellowstone, grizzlies and black bears take carcasses killed by which pack hunters, who rarely drive a grizzly off?

Wolves try to defend their kills but usually fail to chase a bear away, though a mother grizzly with cubs seldom manages to take one.

Grizzlies and American black bears both raid squirrel hoards for the fatty seeds of which high-mountain tree?

Whitebark pine seeds are a rich food before the long sleep, and the bears let squirrels do the harvesting, then dig the cones out of their middens.

In the far south of their range, American black bears are occasionally ambushed and killed by which spotted big cat?

Jaguar kills are suspected from fur in droppings and a sow's punctured skull: the cat's method is an ambush and a crushing bite to the back of the head.

Which Appalachian national park says it has America's densest black bear population, about two bears per square mile?

Great Smokies bears number roughly 1,900, and many pass the cold months high above ground inside standing hollow trees, an unusual habit.

Which US state names a black bear subspecies whose strongholds include Ocala National Forest and Big Cypress?

Florida black bears survive in seven groups that are cut off from one another, mostly on or near public land such as national forests.

Grizzlies and Eurasian brown bears share the scientific name Ursus arctos, which combines Latin and Greek to mean what?

Bear bear is the literal meaning, since ursus is Latin and arktos is Greek for the same animal; Linnaeus gave the species the name in 1758.

Grizzlies and brown bears are one species; in North America the name 'grizzly' usually means a bear living where?

Away from the coast is the rule of thumb: the same species is simply called the brown bear in coastal Alaska and across Eurasia.

Which pair of American explorers wrote about the grizzly in their expedition journals, spelling its name 'grisley'?

Lewis and Clark wrote 'grisley', leaving it unclear whether they meant grizzled or grisly, the word for something that inspires fear.

The 'grizzled' look that gives the grizzly its name comes from which feature of its coat?

Pale-tipped hairs grow mainly on the back and forequarters, so from a distance a grizzly seems to have a lighter top half and darker legs.

Grizzlies head to high Rocky Mountain slopes in summer to feast on which insects, up to 72 per cent fat by weight?

Moths of the army cutworm migrate from the plains to alpine slopes, and gram for gram they are richer in calories than elk or deer.

Adult brown bears have almost no natural enemies; which big cat sometimes kills them in the forests of the Far East?

Siberian tiger attacks on bears were recorded 32 times between 1944 and 1959, when the cats' usual hoofed quarry ran short, and bear hair turns up in their droppings.

The brown bear is the national animal of which Nordic country, home to roughly 2,000 of the animals?

Finland made the bear its national animal, and Croatia showed one on its 5 kuna coin until the euro replaced the kuna in 2023.

Grizzly 399, a much-photographed mother bear killed by a vehicle in 2024, lived mainly in which national park?

Grand Teton's most famous resident was followed by as many as 40 wildlife photographers at a time, and she lived to the age of 28.

Bruno, thought to be the first wild brown bear on German soil in 170 years, was shot in 2006 in which state?

Bavaria's premier branded him a 'problem bear' after he raided sheep, chickens and beehives; the previous bear seen in Germany had been shot there in 1838.

American black bears evolved in North America, but brown bears crossed from Eurasia over which Ice Age landmass?

Beringia let brown bears cross in several waves timed to the glacial cycles, long after the black bear's ancestors had settled the continent.

Where their ranges overlap, American black bears avoid competition from bigger brown bears by being more active when?

In daylight the smaller bear is less likely to meet its rival, and it also keeps to denser forest; clashes in Yellowstone have even so killed black bears.