Black Bear Days

Black bears habitually cover great distances in search of food, moving from one source of edible treasure to another throughout summer and fall. The animals often find our trails and primitive roads to be convenient travel routes, and the muddy spots that develop in rainy weather are an ideal medium for capturing their tracks. I recently found these tracks on a forest trail used by snowmobiles and ATVs. The direction of travel is to the left; the left rear print is at the lower left and the left front is at the upper right. Bear tracks, especially those of the hind feet, may remind you of barefoot human tracks, but beware–the largest toe lies on the outside of a bear’s foot rather than on the inside.

But even when there’s no mud, you can learn a lot about the daily lives of bears by observing the sign they leave. Bears love fruits of all kinds. The bear that climbed the shadbush trees pictured below probably knew they wouldn’t support its weight. But no matter, it was easier to eat the berries while standing on the ground anyway.

When apples start to ripen, bears climb the trees to get to the sweet fruits in the highest branches. The gouges in the photo below show how the bear’s claws slipped downward before they caught firmly enough for the animal to move farther upward. When feeding on apples or other fruit, bears sometimes break branches and leave them hanging in the tree or on the ground below. Smaller animals like raccoons and gray foxes also climb trees in search of fruit, but their claw marks are narrower and do not show the separation distances of one inch or more that are typical of adult bears.

Insects are a much sought-after source of protein, and bears dig up nests and tear open logs and stumps to get at grubs and larvae. Even whole tree trunks are not too much for a bear’s power. The snag in the photo below was dismembered by a bear. No other animal would have been able to break out the large sections of wood and scatter the fragments in several directions.

It’s not always possible to determine exactly what a bear was after, but in the case of the tree above the evidence–the remains of carpenter ant galleries shown in the photo below–was still present in the large wood sections. Carpenter ants don’t actually eat wood. Instead they use trees as nest sites, and the tunnels and galleries they create in dead wood serve to house their eggs and larvae. Once an ant nest is exposed by a marauding bear the adult ants flee, but the eggs and larvae, and probably a fair amount of wood, are scooped up and consumed en masse.

Bears are also concerned with the movements of other bears, and they keep tabs on each other through various kinds of messages. The bites which decorate the balsam fir shown below were made by a bear standing on its hind legs. To leave such marks a bear sets an upper canine tooth in the bark and draws the lower canine in. This leaves dot-dash patterns like those to the left of the debarked area. The debarked area itself resulted from repeated biting, and the weathered appearance of the exposed wood tells us that the marking had been going on for a number of years when the photo was taken. Such marks may be visible to bears at close range, but more importantly, they hold the scent of the animal which made them, and bears are famous for their keen sense of smell.

This was a large tree, and it must have been a magnet for every passing bear. It stood about twenty feet off of a seldom-used hiking trail, and between the trail and the fir tree there was a narrow passage with distinct step spots. These step spots were created when approaching bears walked toward the tree with an exaggerated swagger, planting each foot deliberately as if they wanted to leave as much evidence of their visit as possible. In the photo below the step spots show as brown areas of bared soil.

Bear sign, and sometimes tracks, can be very abundant, but unless there’s an artificial attractant (such as garbage or handouts) they’re seldom seen. But fortunately for us their strength and resourcefulness can be observed in their tracks and sign. We can even read, albeit on an elementary level, their messages to each other.