50 Fun Facts About Bear Trivia for Kids

How many kinds of bear are alive in the world today?

Wild bears live in the Americas, Europe and Asia. There are none in Africa, Australia or Antarctica.

Which is the biggest kind of bear alive today?

A big male can be as long as a small car and weigh as much as ten grown men. It is also the largest meat-eating land animal on Earth.

Which is the smallest kind of bear?

It lives in the rainforests of Southeast Asia and is about the size of a big dog. It has a golden patch on its chest that looks like a rising sun.

What do giant pandas eat almost all day long?

A panda munches for many hours a day because bamboo is not very filling. It has to eat between 9 and 14 kilograms of it every day.

Which country do giant pandas come from?

Wild pandas live in mountain forests, mostly in a province called Sichuan. Zoos around the world borrow pandas from China.

A panda has a special extra 'thumb' on its paw. What is it for?

It is not a real thumb but a stretched wrist bone. It works like a hook so the panda can grip a stalk while it eats.

What colour is a polar bear's skin under its fur?

The dark skin soaks up warmth from the sun. The fur only looks white because it has no colour and bounces the light back.

What is a polar bear's favourite food?

Polar bears wait by holes in the sea ice for a seal to pop up for air. They eat the fatty blubber, which gives them lots of energy.

Where in the world do polar bears live?

Polar bears live at the very top of the world. There are no polar bears at the South Pole, and no penguins at the North Pole.

Polar bears are excellent swimmers. What does their scientific name Ursus maritimus mean?

One study found polar bears swim for more than three days at a time, covering about 154 kilometres. Their big front paws do the paddling.

How many babies does a mother polar bear usually have at once?

The babies are born in a snow den in the middle of winter and stay inside with their mum until spring.

Which sense do bears use most to find their food?

A bear's nose is even better than a dog's. Bears can smell food from several kilometres away and remember where they found it before.

What do many bears do for the winter when food is hard to find?

This long winter sleep is called hibernation. Bears eat lots in the autumn to get fat, then live off that fat while they snooze.

Baby bears are called what?

They are born tiny, blind and almost hairless, and depend on their mother to keep them warm.

Which bear has a big hump of muscle on its shoulders that helps it dig?

The hump is one way to tell a grizzly from a black bear, which does not have one. Grizzlies also have a dished-in face and short round ears.

In Alaska, big brown bears stand at waterfalls to catch which fish jumping upstream?

When there are lots of fish, the bears eat only the fattiest bits, like the eggs and skin, and leave the rest for eagles and foxes.

Which continent is home to the spectacled bear, the only bear that lives there?

It lives in the Andes mountains and gets its name from the pale rings around its eyes that can look like glasses. Paddington is a spectacled bear.

Which is the only bear species that eats mostly plants and hardly any meat?

Most bears eat a bit of everything: berries, nuts, insects, fish and meat. The polar bear is the big meat-eater and the panda is the big plant-eater.

Which bear from India slurps up ants and termites with its long lips like a vacuum cleaner?

Its babies ride on their mother's back when she walks or climbs. The wise bear teacher in The Jungle Book was probably one of these.

Which bear has a pale crescent-moon shape on its chest and is nicknamed the moon bear?

It lives in Asia and is very good at climbing trees. In Thailand it is called the buffalo bear because of that V-shaped patch.

Black bears in North America are not always black. Which of these is a real colour some of them come in?

They can be white, blonde, cinnamon, brown or jet black. A few white ones in Canada are called spirit bears, and they are not albinos.

Which is the most common bear in the world, with more of them than all the other bears put together?

They live all across North America, and there are hundreds of thousands of them. They love climbing trees.

Bears have how many claws on each paw?

Bear claws cannot be pulled back in like a cat's. They use them for digging, climbing and tearing food.

Bears walk with their whole foot flat on the ground, just like people do. What is the word for that?

Cats and dogs walk on their toes. Because bears put their weight on their back feet, they look a bit lumbering when they walk.

Which type of bear is the animal called a Kodiak bear, one of the two biggest bears alive?

Kodiak bears live only on some islands in Alaska. Islands sometimes make animals grow extra big, and a male Kodiak can weigh 680 kilograms.

Which cuddly Australian animal is often called a bear even though it is not one?

Koalas are marsupials that carry their babies in a pouch, and they sleep up to 20 hours a day.

Which president gave the teddy bear its name?

On a hunting trip in 1902 he refused to shoot a bear that had been tied to a tree. A toymaker in New York called his stuffed bear 'Teddy's bear'.

Winnie-the-Pooh was named after a real bear that lived at which zoo?

The real Winnie was a Canadian black bear brought to England by a soldier during the First World War. Christopher Robin Milne loved visiting her.

Which city was the real bear Winnie named after?

Lieutenant Harry Colebourn bought the cub for 20 dollars from a hunter and named her after his home town in Canada.

Where do Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends live?

It was based on a real forest in England near the author's country home, called Five Hundred Acre Wood.

Which of Christopher Robin's other toys became a character in the Pooh stories?

Piglet, Kanga, Roo and Tigger were real toys too. Owl and Rabbit were made up by the author.

Paddington Bear travelled to England from which country?

He is a spectacled bear from 'darkest Peru'. He was found at Paddington railway station by the Brown family, who gave him his name.

What is Paddington Bear's favourite food?

He keeps a spare one under his hat for emergencies. The author bought a lonely teddy bear as a Christmas present in 1956 and the idea grew from there.

Which bear teaches Mowgli the Law of the Jungle in The Jungle Book?

In the book he is described as a sleepy old brown bear, but experts think he was really based on an ant-eating bear from India.

Smokey Bear is a famous cartoon bear who reminds people to prevent what?

His posters have been around since 1944, the longest-running public service campaign in America. A real orphaned cub rescued from a fire became the living Smokey.

Which cartoon studio created Yogi Bear?

Yogi is 'smarter than the average bear' and spends his time pinching picnic baskets in Jellystone Park.

A famous group of stars in the night sky is called the Great Bear. What is its Latin name?

Its seven brightest stars make the shape called the Big Dipper or the Plough. Two of them point the way to the North Star.

During the Second World War, a real brown bear named Wojtek was made a soldier in which country's army?

Wojtek carried ammunition boxes for the soldiers in Italy and was promoted to corporal. After the war he lived at Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland.

Which sense do bears NOT have that cats and dogs do?

Bears are the only meat-eating mammals without touch-sensitive whiskers on their snouts, but their noses may be the best of any mammal.

Which are the very best tree-climbers among all the bears?

A sun bear's paws turn inwards and it has big curved claws, so it spends lots of time up in the trees looking for honey and insects with its very long tongue.

Which country do the world's Kodiak bears come from?

They live on the Kodiak Islands off the coast of Alaska, and have been cut off from other bears since the last ice age.

Which words come from an old Greek word for bear, via the Great Bear constellation in the northern sky?

Arktos meant bear in ancient Greek. So the Arctic is 'the land of the bear' and the Antarctic is 'the land opposite the bear'.

What colour is a giant panda cub when it is first born?

Newborn pandas are also blind and toothless, and nurse from their mother up to 14 times a day.

How big is a newborn giant panda compared with its mother?

At just 90 to 130 grams, a panda cub is proportionally the smallest baby of any placental mammal.

About how much bamboo does a giant panda eat every day?

Bamboo has very little energy in it, so pandas have to eat a huge amount and it passes through them very quickly.

The sun bear gets its name from what marking on its body?

Its scientific name Helarctos comes from Greek words for sun and bear, and it is also called the honey bear because it raids honeycombs.

Which Swiss city's name is said by legend to come from the German word for bear?

Bear names are everywhere: Bernard means 'bear-brave', and the boy's name Urs, from the Latin for bear, is popular in Switzerland.

What does the girl's name Ursula mean?

It comes from the Latin word ursa, meaning she-bear; the bear family's scientific name Ursidae comes from the same root.

What is special about a polar bear's long outer guard hairs?

The hairs are also scaly on the outside; underneath is a thick layer of underfur about 5 centimetres long.

Before settling into its den for winter, how much food can a brown bear eat in a single day?

That is around 41 kilograms, letting the bear gain 2 to 3 kilograms of fat every day to live off while it sleeps.