ROVIN’ AND RAVIN’ WITH MIKE
Copyright © 2000 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
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The Black Bear Facts
After writing about the indigo snake last week, I realized that there is another of our animal neighbors here in the Southeast that we are in danger of losing, the American black bear (Ursus americanus). In Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, that means the Florida black bear, one of eighteen subspecies of black bears in North America. Of course, when we think of Florida, the animals most likely to come to mind are dolphins, manatees, and a certain rodent with big ears, but bears are a part of the environment throughout the Southeast.
In fact, along some of the older highways through less developed areas of Florida there are signs warning about bears. Like bear subspecies throughout North America, however, the Florida black bear is in trouble. People, together with their cars and highways, are leaving bears fewer places to roam, forage, and reproduce.
Bears are unique among North America’s big mammals because they can walk on their hind legs. This makes them seem somewhat more like us, but at the same time, it makes them seem larger, scarier. As I prepared this article, I found recorded weights of adult females ranging from 150 to 200 pounds, of males, from 300 to 380 pounds. Still, it is reassuring that there is no record of the death of a human as the result of an attack by a black bear. In fact, unless a bear has cubs or is cornered, it will do its best to avoid contact with human beings.
Bears eat mainly plant matter, such as nuts, betties, roots, and grasses, but they are omnivorous and opportunistic. The bear’s appetite for honey is legendary; but it has a similar appetite for bees, ants, and other insects. In general, it eats what it can find—seeds in birdfeeders in Florida, nectar in hummingbird feeders in Colorado. Birds and their eggs, small mammals, carrion, and of course, the contents of picnic baskets are accepted. Polar bears make nuisances of themselves around garbage dumps in Alaska, and black bears become pests in campgrounds. But, a tough old movie critic probably would be declined.
Bears are pretty opportunistic about environments as well, wet or dry, upland or low. They will make a den of anything they can find—a hollow tree trunk or a log, a cave, a hole in the ground. The main problem faced by bears today is, a bear needs a lot of environment. The females can get along with about ten square miles, but the males need more than sixty square miles.
To maintain a genetically healthy breeding population, then, requires hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory. It is thought that bears may follow some sort of instinctive corridors linking their basic territories, but if so, it is likely that this ursine interstate has been severely disrupted by the human highway system. It is not so much the loss of territory as the loss of links between territories that has led to the loss of some three-quarters of the bear population in the southeast. Since females mate only every other year and rarely produce more than two cubs, population growth, even under optimal conditions, is slow.
Yet, despite all of this, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does not classify the black bear as endangered or even threatened, although it has identified territories where individual populations are at risk. Since linking bear territories, unfortunately, is not as easy as linking Internet sites, bears in isolated environments face the dangers of inbreeding. Some researchers are tracking bears with electronic collars to see whether there might indeed be some traditional routes the bears can still use today.
Extinction is an ongoing story of which the alligator and the black bear are recent, contrasting chapters. The alligator has returned from near extinction to be a nuisance in much of its natural range, now crowded with human beings, while the black bear may be losing its struggle for survival. Like the western mountain lion and the Florida cougar, the Florida black bear is a large animal needing a large habitat in an area crowded with people. In fact, it is the largest surviving wild animal in the Southeast, and there may not be enough room for the bears and the people to live together.
In many stories of the native people of North America, Bear is a wise spirit, a healer, a teacher, and of course, he was one of the characters in Joel Chandler Harris’s politically incorrect retellings of African-American folk tales. Although it may be hard to see much wisdom in the poor, crowded out raiders of campground trashcans, Bear still brings a nobility deeper than noble thoughts to our environment and to our lives. Indeed, this scrappy, adaptable old spirit of the woods, eking out an existence in our garbage heaps, may be giving us a warning.
You can enjoy a charming Florida Black Bear Slide Show.
There is a great site chock full of bear links and other information, Bears on the Internet. You can get to know Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, and on Angelfire, one of the providers of free web space, there is a very well designed and informative site on South Georgia Wildlife that includes an informative page on our bear. I even bumped into an unexpected black bear in Georgia.
Keep your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and a little compassion (literally, a feeling with) for the neighbors who were here before us.