EYE SEE
A bear’s eyes are as good as a human’s, but they are fairly nearsighted. This helps them focus on small things like berries and insects.
A GOOD NOSE
Bears have an excellent sense of smell. A bear’s nose can pick up a scent for many miles. It can even smell an animal that passed by several hours earlier!
A BEAR’S HOME IS BIG!
Bears’ home ranges can be as big as 2500 km2 (965 mi2). As the seasons change, they follow their noses to find a mate and places where there’s lots of food.
AS HUNGRY AS A BEAR
A bear can eat up to 20,000 calories in 24 hours. That’s like eating 40 hamburgers and 40 sundaes in one day! Grizzly bears can eat as many as 100,000 berries a day!
BEARS ARE SPEEDY
Bears may look slow and clumsy, but they can run up to 60 kilometers per hour (40 mph) – that’s twice the speed of the fastest sprinter! They can run uphill or downhill and even sideways.
BEAR MESSAGES
Bears rub their backs on trees and scratch the bark to let other bears know they were there. They also will grind their feet into the ground to mark a trail. Sometimes other bears will step into the same footprints year after year, making them deeper and deeper.
SPEAKING BEAR
Bears “speak” to each other by making sounds, touching, seeing and smelling. This helps keep mothers and cubs together, and lets other bears know how close they can get to each other. It is helpful to understand their language because bears communicate to people in the same way.
A bear standing on its hind legs is checking things out. It is simply trying to smell or get a better look at something interesting.
Bears make many sounds. Bears can make low throaty noises and blowing sounds when they are worried. Bears also make low sounds when they are near each other. Cubs will cry when separated from their mothers. Mom will often talk to her cubs by making popping noises. She could be telling them to climb a tree or that she is nervous.
Often sounds are used together with body movements.
Making sounds towards people usually means a worried bear. Black bears will swat the ground and grizzlies might run towards you. Often they are simply bluffing. Bears will rarely actually touch a person because they don’t really want to get hurt themselves.
Body talk. When a bear wants to show another bear that it does not want to fight for dominance, a fishing spot or a mate, it will move away, sit or lie down. If a bear walks or runs toward another bear, it could be trying to show who’s boss.
Smelly messages. Bears learn about each other by sniffing footprints and droppings. They leave messages for other bears by rubbing against or biting trees and bushes.
Bears communicate by playing and touching. Even adult bears have play fights. ‘Friends’ sometimes greet each other with rubbing and sniffing. Mothers and cubs are constantly touching, playing or nursing.
Some ‘beary interesting’ stuff
Did you know?
A bear’s teeth keep on growing all his life! To find the age of a bear, scientists remove a tooth, cut it in half and count the rings – the same way they find the age of a tree.
Bears have been around way longer than people! Fossil records of ‘Ursavus Elemensis’ date back 20 million years ago to the Miocene era.
Bears don’t get lost! Bears have an amazing ability to find their way around – day or night. But, no one knows exactly how they do this. Bears have a keen sense of smell and are extremely intelligent. Some people say that bears can sense the earth’s magnetic field. Others believe that they keep imaginary maps in their brains. You could say that bears have an inbuilt ‘sat-nav’!
Bear populations grow very slowly. A male and female black bear born this year could grow into a population of 15 bears in 10 years. During the same time, a pair of grizzlies might only produce 8 bears. However, two white – tailed deer could become 1,400 deer in 10 years.
Bear cubs are born while their moms are hibernating, during the coldest months of winter – January and February. They are the only mammals that do this. The cub’s nurse, sleep and play in the den until it’s time to come out in the spring.
A newborn human baby weighs 10 times more than a baby bear! At birth, bear cubs are barely the size of a squirrel. Human mothers weigh only about 15 times more than their babies, but mother bears are 300 to 500 times heavier than their cubs.
Written for The Bear Club by Evelyn Kirkaldy of the Get Bear Smart Society (www.bearsmart.com)
www.thebearclub.co.uk
With the 31st October fast approaching, it’s time to get creepy with this month’s competition and our Halloween Theme!
For your chance to win two Halloween Teddy Bears, all you need to do is upload a blog with a spooky theme: This could be your teddy bear in a Halloween costume, a spooky poem, a scary story…. or anything else you can think of to fit our theme.
Congratulations to Adre for winning last month’s competition with this photo of his bear buddy Cheli.
New Features
Remember…. the photo must be taken outside.
Making teddy bears is a hobby that I discovered in the autumn of 2005 and since then I’ve been trying to learn everything about this creative craft. I have gotten so much positive feedback from people around the world and I’m so happy that people have opened their hearts and homes for my bears!
How my bears get their names is a process that goes on during making. It’s easy to have a sketch on paper or a picture in your head of what you want your bear to look like, but more often than not your bear turns out to be the opposite. So you never know before hand what personality your bear will get.
For those of you who are interested, it was published in 1990 by Guild Publishing and there are plenty of used copies available on 
thebearclub 
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