Black Bear Hunting Series
Re-Published with permission from
Virginia Chapter of American Bear Foundation
Follow them on facebook
https://www.facebook.com/VABearFoundation
https://www.americanbearfoundation.org/
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The Missouri Black Bear is a hunting/conservation group designed to build a real resource for the serious hunters of Missouri. The Missouri Black Bear is the icon species for conservation.
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This may not all apply to Missouri Black Bear hunting, so use your common sense for each series.
Black Bear Hunting Series
Re-Published with permission from
Virginia Chapter of American Bear Foundation
Follow them on facebook
https://www.facebook.com/VABearFoundation
https://www.americanbearfoundation.org/
These are a series originally done by Unbranded Outdoors and shared by Old Dominion Black Bears. It lays the basics for what the black bear is. The other parts of this series and the ones to follow are designed to help make you a better bear hunter by knowing the incredible animal we chase.
Part 1 of Series - Black Bear Biology and Behavior
Black Bear Biology and Behavior
The American Black Bear, Ursus americanus, is – quite simply – an extraordinary animal. Historically, it ranged from the subtropical and tropical forests of Mexico to the boreal forests of Alaska and northern Canada and throughout all habitat types and zones of North America except the open Great Plains. It was prevalent in every environment, making it the second-most widely spread Western hemisphere predator north of the equator, trailing only the cougar. Today, the Black Bear is still commonly found in all of those ranges with the exception of Mexico, where it is listed as endangered, and Prince Edward Island, Canada, where it was locally extirpated in the early 1900s. Globally, and certainly within the U.S. and Canada, the Black Bear is listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a “species of least concern”. Populations are stable across the range, except for Mexico, and growing in the vast majority of them, and current population estimates for the species across the U.S. and Canada at or near 1 million.
While in contrast to a species like whitetail deer, with population estimates far in excess of 30M, a population of 1 million black bear might seem small. It is in fact a large and very healthy population for a species with a much larger home range for each individual. Whitetail deer, for comparative purposes, will often have a home range of roughly 1 square mile and a core area of about 1/10th of that. Those figures are for the more wide-ranging bucks; a doe will average half that or perhaps less. Black bear home ranges are massive in comparison. A sow black bear will have a home range between 2.5 and 50 square miles with an average in this region (Virginia, Tennessee, etc.) of 7 to 15 square miles. A male – especially the older, larger boars – can have home ranges from 10 to more than 250 square miles, and in this region far in excess of 50 square miles. Black bear will shift around within these home ranges seasonally as food sources and cover types change.
Much of bear movement is dictated upon their nose and their stomach. Their nose, or more broadly, their sense of smell is unmatched. While bear do have excellent hearing, and far better vision than given credit for (including being able to see both colors and depths at least equal to humans, with the advantage of far superior night-time vision), their sense of smell is their primary sense and for great reason. Bear are credited with a sense of smell at least 7 times greater than that of a bloodhound. Considering that a bloodhound sense of smell is factored at roughly 300 times that of a human, a bear has approximately 2100 times the ability to detect scent as we do. To put that into perspective, if you can smell a scent faintly at the end of your outstretched arm, a bear can detect the same scent to at least the same degree from at least a mile. There are multiple reasons for this. The first is their nose and the interior surfaces of it; the surface area of the olfactory regions in a bear nose are at least 100 times greater than that of a human and on par with that of a bloodhound. This is combined with an organ found in the roof of their mouth called a Jacobson Organ, an area of the soft palate with an array of receptors and nerves that tie into the olfactory senses. When a bear sniffs, it often opens its mouth and licks out its tongue; doing so catches scent molecules that are then transferred to that Jacobson Organ – the bear is literally tasting the air. All of this is connected to the olfactory bulb in a bear brain that is five to seven times as large as the equivalent in a human brain (even though a bear has a total brain size roughly 1/3 of ours). This sense of smell is what a bear uses to detect danger, to find a mate, and especially to find food.
Black bear are creatures of their stomachs. They are an opportunistic omnivore with an extraordinarily broad diet. If it can be eaten and has caloric value, a bear will eat it. They also have an incredible long-term and geo-spatial memory for food sources and travel routes between them, returning again and again to areas in which they have found food before, often each year or several times per year throughout their lives – a significant problem when that food is found in or near human habitation and causing conflict. Here in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, roughly 70% of the diet of a black bear is vegetable matter. That includes roots, new growth on vines, grass, and forbs, buds and shoots of trees, berries of all kinds, agricultural crops like corn and fruits, and both hard (beech nuts, hickory nuts, acorns, etc.), and soft (cherries, pawpaws, persimmons, etc.) mast. Bear will focus on a plant-based food source while it is in season and feed on it until it is exhausted or until the next comes ripe. Of the remaining 30% that is not plant-based, roughly 2/3 of that is insect-based. Black bear are extremely adept at finding and feeding on ants, bees, grubs and larva of a myriad species of beetles and other insects, and termites. They also feed on smaller mammals, such as fawns during a roughly 2-3 week window before the young deer are mobile enough to evade and escape, rodents like mice, voles, and groundhogs, roadkill of any animal, and for boars especially, other bear cubs or even smaller bears.
For most of the year, a bear will feed and forage sporadically throughout the day or night, with an average caloric intake not dissimilar to the daily average for a human (2000-3000 calories per day). However, in the fall – and in this region, primarily mid- to late September through to late October or early November – black bear enter a period called hyperphagia. During that period of the fall, bear will increase their activity and their eating to an extraordinary level. Where previously a bear might have been active for 8-12 hours per day and take in 2,000-3,000 calories, they now are active for 20-22 hours per day and consume upwards of 15,000-20,000 calories or more. This results in a substantial increase in weight, as much as 35-40%, held almost exclusively in a huge fat layer between the hide and muscles. This period of hyperphagia is one of the two primary times of the year for increased bear-human interaction, including complaints as far as damage and being seen throughout their range.
The common misconception is that bear do this to prepare for hibernation. Black bear do not hibernate. Hibernation involves a state of almost suspended animation with the involved animal’s body temperature, heart rate, respiration, and functions dropping to near zero; they are barely alive and coming out of hibernation takes time. Black bears enter what is called torpor, a deep sleep that drops their body temperature by about 10 degrees and their heart rate and respiration by a marked degree. Yet, a bear can come out of torpor almost instantly. In the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, bears may only enter torpor for a few days in some areas (the Piedmont) to maybe a short period of weeks in others (like the Smokies), or not at all (coastal Carolina). What all bear do during the mid and late winters in this region, after that period of hyperphagia, is greatly reduce their travels and energy expenditure. Some may even shift considerably within their home ranges in preparation for this period of reduced activity and anticipation of early food sources.
What also happens during this mid- to late-winter period of decreased activity and torpor is that sows den up in ditches, brush or stump piles, under old buildings, in caves or rock piles, hollow logs, and many other "safe" places to give birth to cubs, normally one to four depending upon maternal health and other factors such as forage availability and quality and bear population social pressure. Cubs are born tiny and nearly helpless, weighing only eight to twelve ounces; not much bigger than a chipmunk or a small grey squirrel. They are entirely dependent upon the sow for the first few weeks to months of life, growing quickly on the milk she provides and the forage on which they will learn to feed and find throughout their life. Cub mortality for black bears across their range is roughly 20%, with the majority of predation coming in the first few days to weeks of life from owls, hawks, coyotes, bobcats, then later into the season and into their second year from adult male bears. Human interaction (hunting, and especially vehicular strikes) are also a source of cub mortality. Once a bear reaches their second summer, the sow or the breeding boars of the area will run the young away from the sow as she prepares to breed again. This happens during the bear breeding season of June to August in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic.
This dispersion is the primary source of expanding bear ranges throughout the region and the other main season of bear-human interaction, bear visibility, and human-bear conflicts as young bears on their own for the first time try to find an area to establish their own territory away from the more dominant bears in the area of their birth. While a young sow may remain in the same region as her mother, often overlapping territories and eventually perhaps even using the same den sites to give birth to her cubs, young males are often pushed many miles out from their early home ranges by adult sows and by larger boars.
Assuming that the young bear survives into adulthood, they have no predators in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast other than humans and larger bear. Bear are long-lived, with many making it into their teens or early twenties, and old specimens reaching as much as thirty. A sow will breed in her third or fourth year of life, and then on average every two years thereafter. The sow is bred in June-August, but the embryo does not implant until October, and then only based upon the health of the sow. This delayed implantation is a unique and remarkable adaptation. Boars will attack and kill young cubs both as a source of food, and because a sow who has cubs with her will not come into estrous and will not breed. If she loses her cubs, she will come into heat again and be ready to breed quickly, and a boar will kill cubs to force that cycle.
For an average black bear in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, their annual cycle “begins” with that period of reduced activity and torpor in December-February, through spring foraging in March-May, breeding season during June-August, and then the late summer to winter periods of hyperphagia from September-November. Understanding this cycle, the changes of their behavior and range utilization, and their biology and behavior is critical for those interested in learning more about black bear – whether hunters or not.
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