Imagine that Freddy Krueger was not only real, but a whole race of Freddy Kruegers existed. And imagine that they were 800 pound monsters with brown fur who didn’t bother with the whole dream-invading nonsense. That’s what a nervous silverback gorilla faces the moment he steps into battle on a windy Alaskan mountaintop or a circular clearing in the jungle (the location for the fight hasn’t been determined yet).

It’s easy to understand a bear’s massive size from photographs, but its claws are often underestimated. They are each 4 inches long, primarily designed for digging roots, but also fighting. A brown bear’s claws are like 4 kitchen knives strapped to their fingers.

Meanwhile, gorillas have only fingernails like us. Their fingers are more designed for picking fruits from the jungle. Bears pick berries, certainly, but use their flexible prehensile lips instead. Their claws are fully fitted weapons of mass destruction which a gorilla would have to duck and dodge with 100% accuracy if he’s going to stand a chance. Just one impact of a bear’s claws could finish the gorilla, ripping his skin open.

Furthermore, gorillas haven’t evolved to withstand claws. They’re more focussed on dodging poisonous snakes and neon-coloured frogs. Leopard attacks happen, but they’re too rare to exert evolutionary pressure. The bear would just pick the gorilla off, and get back to its salmon stream.

Part of the reason for those overcocky gorilla supporters is that bears look fat and lazy from a distance. They are fat, yes, but this is only hibernation fuel. Beneath the blubber is massive, insane knots of muscle, but the blubber itself provides a 5 inch thick armour against attack. No matter how strong a gorilla is, its assaults would just bounce off the bear. The gorilla’s only hope would be relentlessness, to inflict so many smaller wounds that the bear finally gives up.

Gorillas are the opposite. There’s no thick layer of blubber defending them. A bear would only have to land one accurate slash with its claws to rip the gorilla open. Like all primates, they have very thin skin which bleeds easily, and this blood loss would mean that a single bear paw wound could cause the gorilla to gradually lose energy. The moment that happens, the gorilla would lose its edge in the nimbleness stakes, and with its smaller size, nimbleness is what a gorilla relies on. If a bear got tired, it could still do massive damage with a clumsy swipe or stumble.

Gorillas may have such a fearsome bite that the mere sight of their skull triggers superstitious nightmares, but how would that work in a practical situation? For an instant kill, the gorilla would have to pierce the bear’s neck with a 100% accurate shot. If it misses by an inch, then Samuel Silverback is well and truly trapped. He’s in the enemy’s lair, and a million sledgehammer bear strikes would immediately rain down on his back.

But wait a minute. What the bear fans may underestimate is the advantage a gorilla’s intelligence gives it. People are still debating whether dolphins and chimpanzees are more intelligent, but gorillas are another contender – it’s just less visible intelligence, focussed towards social structures rather than war.

These days, gorillas are smart enough to disarm poaching traps in the jungle. While brown bears are smart enough to move a plastic bucket in order to access a tasty treat hanging from a wire, and arguably one of the smartest large mammals, no biologist would seriously argue that their intelligence approaches a gorilla, let alone outstrips them.

Koko the gorilla, a good friend of Robin Williams, could paint, play music and turn on the TV herself to watch cartoons. She was skilful at sign language, and in a fight, a gorilla might quickly identify the weaknesses of its lumbering opponent. It would identify that its sharp fangs would be best placed in its neck, or might deploy tools like a nearby tree log, which would be as light as feather for the gorilla when swung in the grizzly’s face.

A gorilla might have the wits to manipulate its surroundings, like crossing a log bridge over a river which it knows is too heavy for a bear. Bears are far from dumb brutes, but in a fight, their only modes are wrestle, bite and smash – there’s no 3D thinking. A bear’s one advantage is superior tree climbing skills, but neither are great at it, and the gorilla would have the wisdom not to attempt it.

If the two contenders were duelling on a rocky plain, only the gorilla would have the smarts to notice a nearby boulder, pick it up, and hurl it at the bear’s head. When you look a gorilla in the eye, your gut instinct tells you that there’s a lot going on in there.

Furthermore, the gorilla has more strength in relation to its body size than any animal other than insects, such as the leafcutter ant. Gorillas are perfectly capable of lifting cars, and while the strongest human alive can bench press 750 pounds, a gorilla maxes out at 4000 pounds. That’s an insane display of strength.

Sure, grizzly bears have been seen rolling boulders out of the way on mountainsides. They can upturn garbage dumpsters to get at the sweet, sweet garbage juice inside, whereas it would take two people to merely budge it, but the gorilla is an evolutionary wonder. Its density of fast twitch muscle fibres is second to none, the type of muscle tissue most significantly linked to strength.

A bear’s muscle mass is larger, but less effective per square inch than a gorilla’s. Imagine what a straight punch to a bear’s face would do. Even human beings have scared bears away with a punch on the nose before (and great white sharks). It could knock the bear out of the fight right there, causing it to flee into the forest holding its nose. Not to mention that a gorilla can pick up heavy items like boulders and hurl them at the bear. A bear would struggle to capture a gorilla in its bear grip to deliver the finishing move. The gorilla would burst outwards with an almighty display of strength.

Being huge doesn’t mean that a bear is perfect in every way. Usain Bolt, for example, is the fastest human being of all time, with a top recorded speed of 27.8mph. Yet even he wouldn’t claim to be the strongest human, or have the hardest punch. Biologists once found that when not angered, gorillas are 4.5-9 times stronger than a human, while a bear is just 2.5-4 times stronger. Gorillas are a uniquely strong animal where normal rules don’t apply.

Not even the most avid bear fan can deny that the silverback gorilla has a stronger bite force than an adult male grizzly. PSI is the commonly accepted measurement for the amount of force a jawbone can exert on its prey. Humans clock in at 162, while the Nile crocodile has the highest on earth, at 5000. A brown bear is respectable at 1150 PSI, which is sufficient to bite through a tree branch, a frying pan, and thick human bones. However, a silverback gorilla just edges it out at 1300PSI, which is the strongest in the primate kingdom.

You can’t underestimate the impact this would have on a fight. A gorilla would only have to sink its teeth into a brown bear’s paw for it to yelp in pain and instantly lose 50% of its stomach for the fight. If it got several nips all over the bear’s body, it would be in big trouble.

There’s no doubt that an accurate strike to the bear’s jugular vein would end its life, as the gorilla’s teeth are easily long and sharp enough. In fact, bearing its fangs in a war pose might be enough to spook the bear itself, giving the gorilla a psychological advantage. As for the bear, its jaws are strong, but a gorilla’s forearm is strong. A focussed gorilla with reflexes at the top of its game could grab an approaching bear jaw, put its feet in the perfect position for leverage, and calmly wrench the bear’s jaws apart again. The bear would stagger back, shocked at this rare challenge.

Just look at their sharp fangs. They don’t need them for eating meat. No, they need them for fighting! Bears are no exception – if they stray into the gorilla’s jungle domain, then there’s a colourful gorilla target on their back. A bear might be blubbery, but a gorilla’s fangs are 2 inches long.

What if the bear tried the same jaw wrenching trick itself? With the bear’s body structure, it would never be able to do the same thing regardless of strength, because its forelimbs have the wrong positioning. They’re designed for swiping, digging and wrestling. They’re too stiff compared to a gorilla’s flexible arms, which have a lot in common with our own.

This is a wider advantage for the gorilla too. Look at a gorilla’s arms – they are very similar to humans, just furrier and thicker. This gives them far more possibilities in a battle. A bear can swipe, but it cannot punch you in the face. A bear trying to punch is like King Charles trying to rap. No matter how hard it tries, it just can’t do it, but a gorilla can make use of sticks, rocks, and punches. A particularly skilled gorilla could even run at a swinging vine, clutch on to it, before swinging back in the other direction and kicking the bear in the head like Tarzan.

Meanwhile, a bear lacks the body structure. Gorillas are also more nimble, with a lower centre of gravity. They could dodge plenty of a bear’s blows, get around a bear’s back. Just picture humans taking on a woolly mammoth. We may have had spears, but the concept of a lumbering beast whose body is overexposed remains true with the gorilla.

Part of it is perception. People in the USA or Canada have a non-stop series of bear mauling stories every year to reinforce their reputation as a ferocious animals. Bears have been getting free PR for years, and they’re not objecting. Meanwhile, gorillas are the underdog, waiting in the jungle with a wry smile, knowing they’ll be underestimated when the day comes.

Bears may be killing machines, but they feel fear in a battle, the urge to retreat. Remember that they’re more scared of you than you are of them! Bears don’t have an on-off fighting switch, and an educated gorilla could exploit this, delivering tactical blows to play with the bear’s emotions.

Bears are born with decent predatory instincts, and hone them further with 2-3 years of training by their mother. They watch her hunt massive elk and moose, and wait by the dens of arctic ground squirrels.

Meanwhile, gorilla babies are not taught by their mothers to hunt. Their training involves picking the correct fruit, social skills, and tricks for their nomadic lifestyle. A gorilla is no slouch at defensive fighting, the fang bearing display you see, but the only meat gorillas eat is insects crawling along leaves. When faced with a 1000 pound grizzly bear, he won’t have a clue what to do. There’s no automatic instinct to go for the neck with his teeth, the gorilla’s best choice, or the ability to sense weakness in its prey and press home the advantage.

In fact, if a bear was bleeding and staggering around the rainforest, the gorilla probably wouldn’t sense it. He might keep baring his teeth in a show of aggression, while if a bear was winning, it would undoubtedly sense it, and activate an all out final flurry of bear limbs and teeth which the gorilla couldn’t withstand.

Bears skills are also well honed by fighting each other for the best salmon spots, and they’ve learned to sense fear and submission. A bear is a born killing machine. What gorillas don’t realise is that bears are part of the evolutionary order of carnivora, like wolves and seals. Until 20 million years ago, they were almost completely meat eating, until primitive bears decided to try berries for the first time, but the old evolutionary layer of hunting instincts remain.

A fight in the wild lasts 1-2 minutes, but each second matters, and a brown bear would cram much more predator instinct into those seconds than a silverback gorilla. Gorillas are only separated by humans on the evolutionary tree by 10 million years. We may like meat, but when was the last time you saw a cow and suddenly slipped into a hyperfocused tunnel vision state where you knew precisely which body parts to strike to kill it?

One hard fact that gorillas lovers cannot deny, no matter how hard they try, is that they can’t see in the dark. Gorillas are primates and they have similar night vision to us – they barely see in the dark at all. Bears, on the other hand, have a layer which re-reflects the minute quantities of light entering their eyes, multiplying its strength several times over. Dogs also have this, and it’s why both dogs and bears’ eyes turn white when photographed at night.

The myth that bears have poor eyesight is just that, a myth. If the battle was taking place with the sun setting, as all great battles should, and a wispy cloud went in front of the sun for a minute, the darkness could spook the gorilla.

A bear’s speed is also inarguable. Bears can reach 35mph with ease, and 40mph is possible for freaky specimens which we’ve never observed. Meanwhile, gorillas top out at 20-25mph. Their half-walking, half standing body structure isn’t well suited to running. In fact, with Usain Bolt reaching 27mph, gorillas are slower than human beings.

The rule of this battle is a fight to the death – one animal must die – but if a bear ran away to get a breather, the gorilla wouldn’t be able to stop it. A gorilla would be caught up effortlessly, before receiving a slash on the back. It would have to commit itself to the big bear battle once and for all, whereas the bear can be more flexible in its approach.

With adrenaline surging through the gorilla’s body nonstop, its reactions might start to go haywire, costing it the highly precise punches and bites which would be essential for victory. It seems like all the odds are stacked against the gorilla. Billy bear can be clumsy and still win, while Samuel Silverback needs everything to go right. He can’t afford any mistakes.

Despite everything we’ve said, one fact is undeniable in this debate – bears have been witnessed being killed by smaller animals in the wild. Bears are tough cookies, undeniably, but there’s a perception from Hollywood that they’re unstoppable beasts whose eyes glow red and who’ll remember you if you dare to throw a frying pan at them, and deliberately come back for revenge the very second you blow out the candles on your birthday cake next year.

The fact is that a Siberian brown bear weighs 600 pounds on average, while a male Siberian tiger averages at 450 pounds. Overall, they are reasonably evenly matched, yet the tiger emerges victorious in a slightly majority of cases, 65% versus 35% for the bear in one study. Why? Because Siberian tigers know how to kill. This is the angle that the gorilla would go for, intelligently using the advantages it possesses instead of brute size and strength.

Some say that as herbivores, they lack the predatory instinct of bears, but if they’re so meek and incapable of fighting, what’s the point in all that muscle? Bear fanatics might say it’s purely for intimidation and that a gorilla hasn’t been in a fight in its life, but gorillas are capable of taking out lions in the African savannah.

It’s often pointed out that leopards prey on gorillas. This is true; a 1965 book called One Traveller’s Africa has a quote saying “A terrible black leopard has appeared and killed 4 gorillas – four that we know of“. But this is partly because gorillas sleep on the floor like humans in their beds. They also have poor night vision, meaning that most leopard kills are sneaky pounces rather than the 1 on 1 fight we’re discussing.

Overall though, putting a brown bear against a gorilla is like an AK-47 versus a water pistol. It’s like a dog versus a tabby cat. Gorillas are powerful animals, but bears are in another league. We might admire their strength, but thinking they can beat brown bears isn’t just wishful thinking – it’s delusion. A bear is so overpowered that if they fought 100 times, the gorilla wouldn’t win once.

Even if gorillas are freakishly strong, they’re far lighter at 400 pounds, and a bear’s strength would be more than sufficient to swat the gorilla aside and send it flying towards a tree. The size also gives the bear an advantage without trying. How is a gorilla supposed to get to a bear’s neck to inflict the killer blow when they stand 8-10 feet tall and a gorilla is only the height of a normal human? A gorilla would have to climb up the bear’s body like a ladder, before realising that it lacks the predatory instincts of a Siberian tiger, which evolved with one purpose in mind: to pierce its prey’s jugular vein in a single pounce. It would be hard for a gorilla to get close.

Here, the gorilla’s intelligence would work against him, because he would see those claws and instantly feel a spike of fear. It would make him very cautious to approach the bear.

Even when he made his play, aiming for the bear’s neck with his teeth, his body would be screaming to flee and he would be torn between the two instincts rather than moving in full attacking flow. His head wouldn’t be fully in the game.

In the wild, many victories in battle are achieved with a final burst of no holds barred aggression, and the gorilla wouldn’t be able to access those higher gears. A bear can rip the bark cleanly from a tree just by scratching an itch on its back.

Verdict: the brown bear wins.

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Hibernation is part of who brown bears are. They can’t stop the process – it’s embedded in their bear DNA, and the reason is the severe lack of winter food in their frigid northern hemisphere habitats.

The yearly cycle starts in early summer, when a brown bear enters hyperphagia, the manic phase of insatiable hunger when it tries to pack on as many pounds as bear-manly possible. A bear might spend all its waking hours scavenging berries and hunting elk, or it might walk down to a local salmon river, catch up on bear friends from years gone by, fight a few others, and begin eating 30 fish per day. During summer, a brown bear can pack on 3 pounds in weight per day and eat 20,000 calories.

Slowly, as autumn draws in, salmon become less plentiful and berry crops wither and die. Having fattened up to walrus proportions, a bear will choose its denning site, and spend 4-7 months in lockdown, half asleep. Unlike a hibernating squirrel, the bear won’t eat or drink for the entire time. They live solely off their immense reserves of energy accumulated during the summer.

A bear will lose 15-30% of its body weight while hibernating, mostly fat. Most bears reappear in late March, but in unseasonably warm weather they might leave in February, or even late January, particularly male bears. Then they start the cycle of fattening anew, eating steadily in spring, before accelerating when the summer salmon season rolls around.

It’s not just the winter cold, but also the scarcity of food in November that triggers a bear’s hibernation instinct. Zoo bears don’t hibernate at all when given plenty of food, although they do become sleepier and more lethargic than usual. Dwindling light probably helps to trigger the instinct as well.

In Spring meanwhile, it’s definitely the warmer weather that triggers their awakening. January 2020 was a record breaker for warmth in the US, and that March, far more grizzlies were seen roaming Yellowstone park out of season. A study on western Canadian bears found that autumn food supply and spring temperatures were the number one triggers respectively.

Pregnant females are normally first to enter their dens in late November, followed by lone females, and then females with cubs. Males enter their dens last and are the first to leave. In warmer coastal regions, dominant males may not hibernate at all, having become extra fat due to dominating all the best fishing spots. In a study of Terror Lake (don’t worry, it’s just a name) on Kodiak Island, 25% of males had at least one year where they didn’t bother hibernating.

A hibernating bear loses vast quantities of body fat, but despite spending months immobile, they lose only 20% of their muscle. A sleeping bear’s muscles enter random cycles of contractions, to keep them active and strong.

Bears also have extensive systems for amino acid recycling, including conversion from urea, the toxic waste product of protein metabolism from the kidneys. Not all is understand, but scientists have identified a handful of muscle genes that suddenly rev up as bears hibernate. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that humans would lose 80% of their muscle if they lay around motionless for 4 months.

Their skeletons are a similar story. In humans, bones are constantly being reformed and destroyed by cells called osteoblasts. This cycle is affected by exercise – activity accelerates it, but doing nothing slows it. Long-term coma patients can have 25% thinner bones when they wake up, while astronauts are theorised to lose 2% of their bone mass for every month in space. Yet hibernating bears don’t have this problem – they have the ability to recycle the calcium in their bloodstream during hibernation. Over 3-5 months, their skeletons don’t weaken at all.

Bears have been dubbed “super hibernators” by some scientists. During hibernation, an adult brown bear will take 1 breath every 45 seconds compared to its usual 6-10 per minute. The brown bear’s oxygen intake falls by 50%, and its metabolic rate falls by 50-60%, although this is actually less than a black bear’s at 75%.

Its heartbeat will fall from 40-50 beats per minute in the height of summer to just 8-19bpm. For 4-7 months, the bear won’t go to the bathroom once: that includes number 1 and number 2.

Under an x-ray, a hibernating bear would appear to be on the precipice of a life-ending heart attack, as its cholesterol doubles to a level where gallstones and clogged arteries would be guaranteed in humans. But the brown bear’s liver secretes a special substance which dissolves young gallstones, and their arteries stay mysteriously clear. Bears also become completely insulin resistant. Insulin is the energy summoning hormone found in humans and all animals which breaks down stored fat, meaning that insulin resistance makes a bear’s energy reserves last for longer. In essence, bears make themselves diabetic, for cunning strategical reasons.

Bear hibernation is such an impressive phenomenon that NASA is now studying the various tricks they use. The goal – to allow human astronauts to hibernate on the way to Mars!

The average brown bear spends 37 backbreaking days constructing its winter den, by relentlessly digging through the frozen soils of the mountainside, shifting tons of solid Earth. For this, they have specially adapted 5 inch claws, compared to the 2 inch claws of black bears (who prefer to hibernate in old tree logs). The increasingly sleepy grizzly will drag in wild bedding materials such as tree branches, grass, lichen and mosses, covering not just the entrance, but the floor too. This gives the bear both comfort and insulation, to trap its body heat as it dozes for 4 months straight.

Of course, that’s if a bear decides to make a den at all. Sometimes, a bear will hit the jackpot and find a comfortable cave or rock fissure to hibernate in, while others will lie down beneath a fallen spruce tree.

In Yellowstone Park, dens tend to be built on the colder north-facing slopes. You’d expect a hibernating bear to seek out warmth, but with less sun exposure, the deeper snow pack provides extra insulation. Bears know what they’re doing!

The weather also manipulates a bear’s thinking, as according to one study, northern Kodiak bears entered hibernation on November 5th, versus November 19th for the warmer southern reaches.

The typical bear den has a tunnel leading to the main chamber, which averages at just 2 feet tall and 3 feet wide (although there’s probably one somewhere with a palace fit for a king). Sometimes, bears dig their tunnels upwards through the soil, to allow warm air to rise upwards. Others take the lazier option and dig a downward sloping tunnel. Bears are commonly unhappy with the unfinished result, and dig more than one den until they’re satisfied.

From 2014 to 2017, Alaskan researchers tracked 33 bears using GPS collars. They noticed that the grizzlies preferred significantly steeper slopes for their dens, with an average angle of 31 degrees, most likely for stability and drainage (meltwater accumulation would not be fun).

The den’s entrances are normally high and thin, only just large enough for an adult bear to squeeze through. The bear’s goal is for the entrance to become covered with the winter snowpack, for perfect natural insulation. Every April, the newspapers have a ball when dozens of awakening brown bears poke their heads out of the snow and become the perfect photo opportunity. Nicole Grangon spent 8 years trying to capture some footage, before finally succeeding in March 2020. Part of a bear’s denning wisdom is taught by its mother, but another portion is pure animal instinct.   

The style of dens varies by location. For example, Kodiak Island is weird for having almost no natural rock caves. So instead, the bears dig their dens into snowy hillsides or steep mountainsides. In the more mountainous north, the average den height is 665 metres above sea level, to guarantee hard frozen ground. But in the southwest, the average height is 447 metres, and the bears prefer thick bushes of alder, where the spider’s web network of roots stabilises the soil perfectly.

When summer rolls around, the unoccupied dens collapse in their hundreds, which is why bears nearly always dig a fresh den each year. However, they do return to the exact same mountainsides. Female bears dig their new dens an average of 2.3km away from the old one, while males average at 3.7m. Males are more adventurous than females, and some have extra adventurous personalities. One bear built a den 31km away from the previous winter’s, and the next year’s den was 45km away.

That said, some spots are too perfect for bears to ignore, such as Bear Cave Mountain in Canada’s Yukon province. These infamous slopes are home to 50 hibernating bears alone, winter after winter.

When spring arrives and the snow is finally melting, a bear doesn’t burst out of its den and charge around Alaska attacking elk instantly. The first two weeks are what’s called “waking hibernation”, when a bear is walking around, able to scan for food, but still sluggish, with a reduced body temperature and heartbeat. Most newly awakened bears return to their dens several times before leaving for good, particularly mothers with vulnerable cubs.

For two weeks, if a bear gets lucky and kills some prey, they’ll usually spend more time sleeping on the carcass than eating it, because their metabolism hasn’t fully revved up yet. The first thing a newly awakened bear looks for is the corpses of elk or bison calves which have died during the winter.

Very occasionally, bears might leave their winter den for no reason other than a relaxing stroll. It depends heavily on the climate and food availability. Inland grizzlies are much more dependent on berries and foliage which quickly withers and dies, and consequently, north Alaskan grizzlies can hibernate for 7 months. But on Kodiak Island, hikers have reported seeing bear tracks in the snow multiple times, as the weather there can get surprisingly toasty. Coastal bears usually hibernate for 3-5 months.

Brown bears have something called delayed implantation, where a mother is impregnated in May or June, but keeps the embryo in stasis for months without it growing. If a mother fails to pack on enough pounds during summer, then the pregnancy will spontaneously abort just prior to hibernation.

If she does eat enough, then the ovum will attach to the uterine wall in late November, and 2-4 cubs will be born during a mother bear’s hibernation, usually in January. The newborns will be the size of a squirrel, weighing 1 pound and completely blind, hairless and helpless. The cubs spend the rest of hibernation (and 1 year in total) drinking milk from the mother, who occasionally grooms and rearranges them too. 2-3 months later, when the cubs leave to lay eyes on the world for the first time, they normally weigh 6-8 pounds.

Leaving the den too early is a big no-no, as food is in short supply. Freakishly warm Marchs can lead to newborn starvation, as the awakening instinct gets confused. Nearly 50% of brown bear cubs don’t make it to adulthood. 

After 2-3 years together, things turn ugly: the mother bear forces her offspring away from her denning turf. This is great because it prevents bear inbreeding, but it forces a lonely odyssey of several years where cubs have to find their own denning slope to call home. 

Officially, bears are a hibernating animal, but they never enter the minimal consciousness of true hibernation like a hedgehog or a bat. Instead, a bear’s hibernation is “torpor”, a long period of rest without a fully dormant state, where the animal can be woken within minutes if suddenly disturbed.

Hibernating bears aren’t motionless statues: they commonly curl up to preserve heat and shift position in their dens. Pregnant mother bears can wake up to give birth and fall back to sleep within minutes. Protecting her cubs is her top priority, and if the mother bear subconsciously detects danger then she can wake up again, whereas hedgehogs have no need to because the species doesn’t breed in its den.

For example, a news story did the rounds in 2012 when a 12 year old Finnish boy had the terrible luck to ski into a brown bear’s den by accident. This was January, but the bear was alert enough to claw his back and thighs, before fleeing and leaving her cubs helpless.

A hedgehog’s body temperature falls to 3 degrees during hibernation, but a bear only falls to 33C, 5 to 6 degrees below its core body temperature. Bears also reduce their metabolism far further than squirrels and hedgehogs. Their massive bulk and thick rug of fur means that they need to generate far less body heat themselves.

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In an unfortunate fact of nature that some argue is a dark symbolic omen for the future World War 3, brown bears commonly eat eagles when they get the chance. Eagles might be ruthless hunting machines with their beaks and wings, but a bear has the advantage of being a bear, not to mention weighing ten times more.

A bear can break a eagle’s back with a single swipe of its paw and that’s what happened in 2016, as captured by 63 year old wildlife photographer Fred O’Hearn. The bear was defending a whale carcass by the shores of Kodiak Island, Alaska, and overcompensated slightly when two bald eagles arrived. One eagle was knocked to the ground, still alive, but unable to move due to skeletal injury. O’Hearn wished he could have crept forward and put the eagle out of its misery, but the sow was just too furious.

This youtube video shows a blond mother bear sneaking up on an eagle’s nest while its three cubs watch on curiously. She appears to be hungry for eggs, or maybe adult eagle meat itself, but is thwarted at the last minute when mother and father eagle fly free from the nest, soon to have a frank and honest discussion about the wisdom of buildings nests on the floor. The cubs just look confused, and it’s not clear whether the mother does find the nutritious eggs she seeks.

Until the 1960s, the bear laws were a lot looser in Yellowstone to put it mildly. The bear lunch platform was launched around the time of World War 1, where scores of bears would dine on scraps of old bacon while a guide on a horse rambled on about Yellowstone’s history. In 1915, cars were allowed inside Yellowstone park for the first time, and this marked the dawn of “holdup bears”, who saw massive hunks of moving steel and assumed that they contained just as many tasty treats as the garbage cans they raided.

Drivers were fine with this chance to see bears up close, and it gradually evolved into a tradition: before entering Yellowstone proper, parents and their children would stock up on Twinkies to toss from their car windows. The grizzlies and black bears gobbled them down in their hundreds. Peanut butter sandwiches and cheetos were more treats, until rising numbers of injuries (including one guy who kicked a grizzly and somehow lived) forced feeding bears to be banned outright.

Did Twinkies become the staple purely by chance? Maybe not, as there’s 350 calories per 100 grams, most of which are carbohydrates. To grizzlies, they probably taste like the world’s rarest type of berry, not least because of their soft, creamy insides.

Around 80 years ago, British troops were battling their way towards Rome, pushing back the waves of Axis troops as bullets flew over their shoulders in the battle of Monte Cassino. What’s weird is that for decades after this battle, the veterans swore to their families that they’d seen a large bear carrying artillery shells to the front line. It sounds like a hallucination under battle stress, but how could so many soldiers have the same delusion at once?

This bear was Wojtek, the Polish soldier bear, a Syrian brown bear who was rescued as an orphan and became the Polish army’s mascot. He slept in tents with soldiers, play wrestled with soldiers, and alongside swallowing cigarettes whole, one of his favourite foodstuffs was beer. Wojtek initially copied the hard-boozing habits of his soldier companions, before coming to love the beverage himself.

Instead of sipping it like a gentlemen, Wojtek used to gulp down the entire can in one go and peer into its metal depths to see if there was any left. He never once got drunk, despite drinking dozens of cans in one go. One time, the unit was stationed in Palestine, and when Wojtek walked into the munitions store, he frightened a thief into screaming, who was later caught. Wojtek’s reward was a bottle of beer. “For him one bottle was nothing, he was weighing 440 pounds” said his former comrade Wojciech Narebski.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a pelican, a moose, or the last surviving stegosaurus that nobody has noticed. If a food is rich in protein, then a grizzly bear will eat it, and that applies with full force to earthworms. Despite being slippery and elusive, grizzly bears have been recorded eating earthworms multiple times, most notably in the two-season TV series Yellowstone Live broadcast on National Geographic back in 2018. It showed a mother bear scooping at the earth while her cubs watched and imitated her, learning from their teacher, before one struck slimy gold and swallowed it.

For years, this was a mysterious question. A study in Yellowstone from 1977 to 1992 spotted grizzlies eating earthworms 20 times, and a 2002 study suggested that worm-loving grizzlies do all their feeding before June, when the soil is still soft from the melting snowpack. Similarly, the bears hunted for worms more in months with higher rainfall.

Earthworms are 60-70% protein, and at 2 digging sites which scientists monitored at Yellowstone, there were 120-170 earthworms per square meter. That translates to 4000-7900 worms across the feeding ground. Bears are well accustomed to strenuous digging for roots such as American sweetvetch – that’s what their massive muscular hump and longer claws are for.

Bears love apples, and unlike humans, they eat the entire thing, including the seeds, before doing their bit in the circle of life and spreading them around. There’s no taking two huge bites and thorwing the rest over your shoulder straight into the bin.

Apples are so popular with brown bears that they’re being used to save the Marsican version from extinction. This central Italian subspecies numbers 60-80 and local villagers have taken to pruning the local apple trees. Firstly, this helps by keeping bears away from sheep and honey and preventing an inevitable bullet to the head. Secondly, and more simply, it gives the bears some extra calories, to prevent death from starvation during hibernation (Italy isn’t exactly a salmon capital). As we speak, volunteer task forces with the grizzled appearance of SAS soldiers are marching around Italy with shears in hands.

Likewise, the endangered Cantabrian brown bear of northern Spain gets 15% of its calories from apples in the autumn, and a huge tree planting campaign is being mobilised. The 15,000 trees are set to include apple, cherry, alder buckthorn, and chestnut trees.

Black bears love apples as well. See this video from the Kilham rescue centre in New Hampshire, with 5 black bears sitting around a gigantic pile of applies looking like a McDonald’s ball pit (but with less snakes). The bears are moaning with joy.

There are few places on Earth bleaker than the Gobi desert, where nothing grows and nothing survives and no noises can be heard except perhaps the very faint scuttering of spiders. The Gobi desert lies in Mongolia and is a cold desert where the average January temperature is -26.5C. There are no elk and absolutely no salmon, but a rare species of bear called the Gobi bear lives here, sharing its terrain with camels. It’s one of the smallest subspecies, and is perfectly adapted to desert life, starting with its soil-coloured fur, and continuing with an obsession over wild rhubarb.

Gobi bears spend much of their time digging through the soil to unearth this plant’s starchy roots, as it’s one of the few plants that prospers in the bleak Gobi landscape. It’s a lot of work compared to the salmon buffet of Kodiak island, but the Gobi bear has no choice, and wild onion roots are another staple, which are far smaller than the table onions which make you cry when you cut them.

These hardy plants are supported by inaccessible underground desert springs, and a tiny trickle of precipitation that makes it over the Himalaya each summer during monsoon season and fizzles out over the Gobi desert’s southern half. Gobi bears also eat lizards, beetles and wingless grasshoppers.

In our article on interspecies conflict, we discussed how Siberian tigers and the Ussuri brown bear subspecies commonly come to blows in east Asia. Another fun fact is that when bears win, they commonly devour the tiger’s carcass. In a 1973 study on 12 brown bears, they ate every tiger they slew without fail, including adult males, adult females and cubs. It works in reverse as well, as tigers love to feast on the fatty sections of a bear’s body.

No footage exists of these events, due to the vastness of the Russian taiga and elusive nature of the Siberian tiger. But supposedly, a Siberian tiger gets 2.1% of its yearly calories from brown bears (also including Asiatic black bears). Additionally, 35% of tiger kills are stolen in some form by bears, whether entirely or as small parts in a token peace offering. It’s almost certain that after leaving their hibernation dens, Ussuri brown bears eat the defrosting carcasses of tigers which have died of old age over the winter.

These confrontations only happen in one narrow region, the far north-east of China and southeast of Russia, the only place on Earth where tigers and brown bears naturally overlap.

To a grizzly bear, stumbling on a field of dandelions is like finding a magical forest where candy grows on trees. Many human beings are steaming wild dandelions these days as new data emerges showing that they’re rich in carotenoid antioxidants, but bears are well ahead of the game. Yellowstone is a particular buffet, according to a study released in 2014. It found that since the 1970s, the average Yellowstone grizzly’s garbage consumption has plummeted to zero. In its place, the main foods are now plants like grasses, clovers and dandelions, followed by hooved animals.

Alaska meanwhile, has 9 different species of dandelion, 5 of which are found in Denali national park, a hotspot of brown bears (with a strangely high proportion being blond). The only one which shouldn’t be there is Taraxacum officinale, the common dandelion, which is an invasive species in Denali and the focus of an annual “dandelion demolition” where 100s of pounds are uprooted.

With only 25 calories per 100 grams, bears will never spend the entire summer eating dandelions like they do with berries and salmon, but it’s common to see both grizzly and black bears mindlessly eating these universal flowers. The yellow petals are particularly nutritious. This video shows a Yellowstone grizzly in full dandelion-munching action.

Storm clouds appeared in 2020 when the federal government announced that several bear hunting techniques were to be loosened, with control handed back to the Alaskan state government.  The barbaric practises included breaking into mother bears’ winter dens, blinding bears with spotlights, and luring grizzlies to baiting stations with doughnuts covered with bacon grease in order to shoot them at point blank range.

This doughnut recipe is a favourite among hunters. It’s a time-tested, reliable method, and with the donuts being sweet, it has the advantage of attracting bears but not being stolen by meat-exclusive wolves. This bombshell of a bait recipe was legalised back in 2005 to help boost the moose population, which bears preyed on, before the Obama administration outlawed the recipe in 2015.

Donut holes are equally popular, the portion cut out of the middle and sold separately. In 2017, a man was fined 2000 Canadian dollars and slapped with a 6 month restraining order (forcing him to stay 164 feet from bears) after he posted loveable footage of himself feeding bears along the Alaska highway. The bears appeared to love the donut holes so much that they didn’t take 2 of the man’s fingers with them. Then there was an intelligence study, where the bears were tasked with grabbing a donut dangling from a clothes wire, by repositioning a plastic box beneath it.

Not long ago, the widely respected (and feared) don of Arizona bears was Albert the rescue bear, who resided at the Lions, Tigers and Bears centre. He was rescued from a roasting concrete pit in North Carolina alongside his sister Cherry Bomb, in cruel scenes more typical of an Iranian zoo than America.

Albert displayed many skills in his new forever home, including cracking coconuts open against the rocks to extract the sweet water within. He had a habit of ripping open his Christmas presents with his snout and looking like he had wrapping paper for skin. But Albert’s biggest love was easily peanut butter sandwiches, and over the years he kept his guests entertained by the dozen as his feeders fed them to him. Albert died in 2019, but his playmate sister Cherry Bomb lives on.

Outside the grizzlyverse, a black bear made global headlines when it sat down at a picnic bench in Arizona, and a camouflage jacketed guy rushed over with his knife and began carving out a peanut butter sandwich. He even warned the bear to be patient, which sat down at the table as though part of the family. This love of PBJ sandwiches seems universal among bears, although social media warned that the black bear was addicted to human food and had a strong chance of being shot one day.

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Polar bears are gigantic in a way that you cannot understand until you’ve seen one looming over you in the flesh, yet they’re also weaker than their more ancient grizzly cousin. Polar bears have dramatically more powerful hind legs and rear quarters, used to pull seals out of the ice once they’ve captured them in their mouths. Bearded and ringed seals form 90% of a polar bear’s diet, so this rear strength is utilised day in day out. However, grizzly bears have something that polar bears lack – a  fully developed hump, a vast knot of muscle structures. This elevates their forelimb strength to another stratosphere.

Brown bears also have superior muscle insertions, and a more compact and robust structure than the polar bear, whose body has adapted to running lightly on sea ice. They don’t quite match a silverback gorilla or a leafcutter ant when it comes to disproportionate strength feats, but bears have been observed carrying 700 pound dumpsters like beach balls. A brown bear can upend a mountain boulder blocking its path with barely a second thought.

The hump is also designed to give a brown bear extra strength for digging, something which a polar bear never needs to think about. There are no situations in the wild where a polar bear needs to exert massive strength. This is one reason why grizzlies almost always emerge victorious from confrontations in northern Canada. 

Both polar bears and grizzlies lack the special rounded claws needed for ultimate tree climbing. Black bears are able to almost run up trees, whereas brown bears are much more slow and cumbersome – hence the common advice to take refuge on high branches when being pursued by one. Nevertheless, a brown bear can get the job done if push comes to shove.

Polar bears, meanwhile, have never been witnessed climbing trees, except for the cubs. Firstly, their bodies weigh 2000 pounds, of finest quality arctic blubber. The laws of physics step in here – no amount of skill can prevent branches from cracking underfoot. Most importantly though, polar bears never encounter trees in their natural sea ice habitat, for 4-6 months of the year. There’s no evolutionary pressure to evolve an ability, or even retain the modest abilities that brown bears had.

They seem to inherently lack the skills for it; in the videos of cubs climbing trees, their progress is as halting as a guy trying to handstand. Even if their bodies are physically capable, the instincts just aren’t there. So that’s what you have to do – if pursued by a marauding polar bear across the ice cap, pray that you find the floating arctic forest which David Attenborough has missed all these years.

The polar bear is so adapted for underwater life that in 2021, one was observed swimming 400 miles in a single journey. Their first special ability is a slight webbing of the toes, not comparable to a duck or penguins, but enough to give each stroke added paddle power. Unlike a brown bear, the polar bear’s fur is water-repellent, with an oily sheen. This prevents the fur from ever getting matted and allows polar bears to shake themselves off instantly after leaving the ocean. Their layers and layers of body fat keep them afloat, and best yet, each one of a polar bear’s millimetre-thick hairs is hollow, adding even more buoyancy.

This is why polar bears are officially classified as a “marine mammal” under federal law, alongside whales and seals. That’s right – they’re the world’s one and only ocean bear. From 2004 to 2009, Alaskan scientists placed collars on 52 female polar bears (with the males’ necks being too thick). In the Beaufort sea north of Alaska, 50% of the bears embarked on “marathon swims” with the top bear travelling 220 miles. The average swim was 96 miles on the frigid ocean surface without stopping.

As for brown bears, they’re also excellent swimmers, achieving speeds of 6mph (versus 2-3mph in humans) and occasionally spotted swimming 25 miles from the Alaskan coast to Kodiak island. They too rely on the old blubber buoyancy method. Yet overall, their polar cousins have the edge.

You’d have to be pretty idiotic not to realise that grizzly bears are brown while polar bears are white (although the fur is actually translucent). However, another difference is that beneath all that fur, a polar bear’s skin is black. The purpose is simply to absorb the sun’s rays to keep the bear warm, as black absorbs all colours of the light spectrum. It’s the opposite to houses in Spain and Portugal, which are uniformly pale, since white surfaces reflect all colours of light.

As for grizzlies? Again, they couldn’t keep things simple and stick with their fur colour – their skin is pink, both in adulthood and as a cub.

Their colour scheme makes the polar bear the ultimate Arctic survivor. The fur enables them to blend in with the icecap to sneak up on unsuspecting seals, while the skin below is superior at absorbing tiny traces of sunlight. Up to 145 days, a polar bear cub will be pink, before a slow transformation to black starts. One rumour is that on a clear day on the Arctic ice cap, a polar bear’s black nose can be seen through binoculars six miles away.

Not only are polar bears superior long distance swimmers, but they also own brown bears in the murky depths of the underwater. Specifically, polar bears have a nictitating membrane. This is a clear inner eye lid, a translucent membrane which permits them vision, while protecting the inner portion of their eyes from irritation and pain caused by salt water. Camels also have this special feature, but in their case, it’s to protect their inner eyes from the harsh blowing sands of the desert.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to have one of these? It’s like the bear’s version of swimming pool goggles, but completely natural and automatic. Another purpose is preventing the polar bear’s eyes from the intense glare of arctic light.

Brown bears have no need for a third eye lid. What for? There are no sandstorms in Alaska, and unless they’re a full-throttle adventure bear who wants to reach his cousins in Kodiak island, they only have to swim across rivers.

Bonus fact: humans have a remnant of the third eyelid, called the Plica Semilunaris, which forms the initial base of the nictitating membrane’s structure.

Over the years, polar bears have been accused of walking in a lumbering, plodding fashion. Their response: how would you walk if you could plunge through the floor of your house at any second?

Polar bears are a walking contradiction. They weigh 2000 pounds, yet they live on a far more delicate surface, compared to the light grizzly bear, which prances around the mountains like a character from the Sound of Music. The answer lies in their differing gaits. The polar bear has a “rotary gate”. While running, it “bounces” off both its hind legs and its front legs. Meanwhile, the grizzly bear bounces off its hind legs only.

The mechanism is complex, but quite simply, it decreases the weight a polar bear places on the ground at any given moment. It also makes the polar bear slightly slower than the grizzly, with a top speed of 25mph versus 35mph. The polar bear tends to land its right front paw in the ice first, followed by the back left paw, the front left paw, and the back right paw. It’s all very complicated, a secret which the polar bears will never share with us.

The polar bear is well known to have a stronger bite than its already fearsome grizzly cousin. After encroaching glaciers separated two ancient bear populations, the polar bear morphed into the perfect Arctic predator, with its skull changing shape. However, this was a double edge sword.

Firstly, the polar bear’s narrow, elongated skull shape is perfect for thrusting through slushy holes in the ice. A grizzly bear would never be able to get at those tasty yellow-bearded seals hiding below the ice. Without berries, they would quickly perish. On the other hand, this elongation cost the polar bear quite a few bone density points. One scientific analysis concluded that a polar bear’s skull has a ‘weaker, less work-efficient structure’.

Why? Simply because polar bears rarely have to chew heavily in their daily lives. Instead, they swallow great chunks of seal flesh whole. Their knife like incisors shear the flesh apart, while their canine teeth keep a firm hold on the prey, but unlike brown bears, polar bears never spend weeks chewing on tough vegetation like berries and roots.

Hence, the need for a thick, tougher skull has diminished. This is possibly why the larger, heavier polar bear tends to retreat when confronting a brown bear, usually near whale carcass feasts in northern Canada. To be blunt, the polar bear knows that it’s vulnerable to getting its head smashed in.

Every resident of “bear country” knows the famous saying. If it’s black, fight back, if it’s brown, lay down, and if it’s white, say goodnight. The polar bear is the most carnivorous bear, which implies the most brutal as well, but its claws are another area where the grizzly has it beat.

The polar bear’s claws are shorter and more strongly curved, although less curved than the tree-climbing black bear. The polar bear’s goal is to grip the slippery ice cap more effectively, and hang on to slippery seals. They initially grab the seals with their long snouts, and finish them off with their sharp incisors. The claws are more designed for gripping rather than mauling, unlike a grizzly, which has a wider variety of potential prey: elk, moose, deer, bison.

More importantly, the omnivorous grizzly bear has to dig for roots and shrubs when berries and salmon are unavailable. Then there’s digging out their hibernation dens, where a sharp set of tools is vital. The polar bear’s claws average at 3.5 inches, but a grizzly’s are 5-6 inches long, thick as cigars and longer than a man’s finger. The claws of the Kodiak bear are particularly gigantic. A similarity is that both species have non-retractable claws, unlike Siberian tigers, for example.

Remember the hollow hairs we mentioned, which keep a polar bear floating like a life raft? They also change a polar bear’s appearance. They explain why a polar bear has clear fur, yet clearly appears to be white to almost everyone. The polar bear has a thick coat of outer “guard” hairs, each 5-15cm long, on top of a thicker undercoat of shorter fur.

When viewed under a microscope, each longer polar bear hair has tiny bumps visible. These are light scattering particles. When beams of UV light penetrate into the hollow core of a hair, they bounce off these bumps and break into smaller beams. These zoom away in all directions before bouncing off the light-scattering particles once again, filling the entire hollow hair with light.

The process repeats itself in every single individual hair. The polar bear’s entire fur is illuminated, in a process called luminescence. They don’t quite glow in the dark, but it creates the illusion of whiteness. The goal is to help a polar bear blend into the ice cap, so that seals and walruses don’t anticipate them.

Brown bears, meanwhile, live in forest steppe environments and have no reason for such luminescent hairs, which they probably laugh at and call a lame gimmick.

Your average local grizzly bear sleeps for only 4 hours a night during his active feeding mode in spring. The grizzly has things to do – gathering berries, hunting deer, swiping at passing vehicles – and after 5 months of sleepy hibernation, there’s no time to lose. A grizzly bear can eat for 20 hours straight during the peak feeding season, gobbling down 84,000 calories per day.

Polar bears, meanwhile, are less extreme. In fact, the white, loveable polar bear sleeps for 7 to 8 hours a night just like a human being, with no hibernation at all. Scientists have spent much time on the ice cap observing polar bears, during the bright summer months when everything is nicely illuminated and the icecap transforms from a dark howling nightmare to a sunny, shining wonderland.

Like humans, polar bears create beds, by digging out a shallow sleeping pit in the snow, typically measuring 1.5 metres in diameter and 0.5 meters deep. They even use pillows, such as their own paws.

Polar bears prefer to sleep during the day than night, which is odd considering the lack of natural predators they have. They’ve been observed taking 1 to 2 hour naps as well, proving that humans and polar bears may well be natural kinfolk.

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It’s said that a brown bear will eat almost anything, and it’s mostly true. Ursus arctos is not only an omnivore, but one of the most omnivorous animals on Earth, beating the black bear by virtue of its superior hunting capabilities.

Brown bears have been recorded eating over 100 species of mammals. They’re known to eat snakes in Japan, frogs in Italy, ants in Slovenia, moths in Yellowstone. Their plant foods include berries, flowers, roots, acorns, shrubs, grasses, and they have no problem guzzling down pizza or beer. The only animal with as varied a diet is the human, but that’s only because we can visit a supermarket and pick anything to our heart’s content. Bears have even been spotted eating mushrooms, including the red and white spotted deliriant ones that inspired Super Mario.

A bear’s diet switches wildly with the seasons. Spring is a scarce season for food, with neither berries nor salmon. So instead, brown bears dig for roots en masse, with one of their favourites in Alaska being sweetvetch. Grizzlies are far better at digging than black bears due to their longer claws and powerful forelimbs (though black bears are better at climbing trees).

In summer, grizzlies often hunt for acorns, which are fatty and extremely filling. Their strategies are to climb a tree, slowly and very haltingly, raid the secret stashes of squirrels nearby, or simply pick up acorns which have fallen to the ground.

Despite its reputation as a savage, flesh-eating monster who gnaws on the bones of hikers, the average brown bear’s diet consists of 80-85% plant matter. However, this all changes when coastal areas come into play, as the sight of the sea will awaken any bear’s love for salmon. Bears eat other fish species such as sea trout, but salmon is special. On Kodiak Island, or the famous Brooks River of Alaska, a bear with access to salmon will quickly make it 95% of its diet. They will spend two months by the salmon river, jockeying for position with other bears, and eating almost non-stop.

A bear in hyperphagia, the pre-hibernation feeding frenzy state, can eat 30 salmon day, and up to 58,000 calories. They normally go for the fatty brains first, followed by the roe, while chucking the entrails away. But sometimes, Alaskan rangers have seen a bear take a single bite of a salmon and discard the carcass into the river. The goal is maximum nutrition for minimum effort.

Salmon is special for a bear because of its huge fat content (the source of your omega 3 fish oil pills) and decent protein. It’s incredibly easy to digest for bears, and consequently, a grizzly by Brooks River can gain 3 pounds of fat (maybe some muscle) a day. Salmon is why coastal grizzlies are so huge compared to inland ones, which rely more on berries. A Kodiak bear averages at 800-1200 pounds, while a grizzly in Alberta clocks in at just 500-700 (for males).

The worst thing a blueberry farmer could possibly do is employ a bear as his new field picker, because if there’s one thing bears love more than honey, its berries. They’ve been documented to eat over 100 type across the world. One Alaskan species with a 2cm diameter and a bright red colour was even named the bearberry because of the grizzly’s fondness for it. In Yellowstone park, they love huckleberries, buffaloberry, twinberry, and serviceberry, while in Alaska, the inland bears snack on elderberries and lingonberries.

Despite being so small, berries are vital for a bear to fatten up for the long cold winter. In Denali, an adult male grizzly will typically eat 200,000 blueberries per day, while Banff’s grizzly bears can reach 200,000 buffaloberries per day. One time, a female grizzly was observed eating berries non-stop for 14 hours, chewing unceasingly, except for one half hour rest. It’s enough that park rangers typically warn hikers to not go too mad with the berry picking in summer. When the first schools of salmon appear in July, bears will gorge on them and totally forget about berries, with salmon making up 95% of calories, but in central Alaska, where fish is less abundant, berries can be a bear’s main food supply.

Instead of the flexible fingers of humans, bears pluck the berries with their prehensile lips, lips which are muscular and can bend and grasp a branch in order to snap the fruit off.

If properly motivated, a brown bear can take down almost any prey it wants. A buffalo is no problem, with a quick sledgehammer blow to the back that shatters its spine. Younger bears however, can be very reluctant to give chase, lacking confidence. Their early hunting attempts can be very half-hearted, with the elk or moose escaping easily. A bear doesn’t compare to a Siberian tiger, which pounces and pierces its prey’s jugular vein with ruthless efficiency. Bears are far clumsier, usually pinning their prey with their massive bulk and eating them alive. Bears couldn’t care less about the “pride of the kill” – they go straight for the weakest and most infirm animals.

Most of a bear’s large mammal prey comes not from fresh kills, but recently deceased corpses (carrion). This is particular favourite in spring, when a brown bear has just left its den and is still in a sluggish state of “walking hibernation”. The elk carcasses it finds are often frozen solid following a long winter, so to warm them up, the bear will sometimes sleep on them overnight.

Because of all this, bears are classified as an “unskilled predator”. They lack nuance, but get away with it due to being, well, bears. If your life’s ambition is to hug a wild bear, then don’t try it in the Canadian Yukon; scientists have proven that bears become more carnivorous the further north you travel.

A bear’s favourite large prey is the ungulate family – elk, moose, deer and cattle (and technically giraffes and rhinos). Anything with hooves will do for a hungry bear. Bears are skilled at exploiting terrain as well. A moose, for example, has very slippery hooves, making it easier for bears to catch up with them on snowy surfaces. The same applies on muddy, soggy riversides, which starving bears will often wait on for prey.

The fact that bears can run at 35mph helps, although a caribou could easily outrun them in open terrain. Believe it not, a brown bear can decapitate a moose with a single swipe of its paw, sending it flying over a riverbed. Another crafty strategy is to charge at a herd of deer and send them fleeing, to make the slower, weaker ones reveal themselves. Separating a cub from its mother is yet another tool in the box. One time scientists tracked bears in Alaska with GPS, and found an average calf kill rate for moose and caribou of 34.4 over 45 days. One bear managed 44 over 25 days.

As for deer, bears have been recorded eating 100 species around the world, and larger ones are their favourite. Smaller deer like roe, white tailed deer, and red deer are occasional meals, but are far too nimble. Their small size means that there’s no easy target for a swiping bear paw. In some countries bears hunt far more ungulates than usual, like Sweden, where moose makes up 70% of their diet, and the local bears seem particular skilful in hunting them.

The old chestnut of advice says that if you feed a bear garbage, it will come to associate humans with food, perhaps even you personally. It’s completely true, to the extent that if a grizzly bear pinches a lost apple which somebody left on a picnic bench, its imprisonment is almost inevitable. Just one bite can set it on a course for bear jail.

For example, sow 101 was one of the most beloved grizzlies in Yellowstone park. From 1982- 2002, she raised 3 or 4 sets of cubs, and gave scientists valuable data from her GPS tracking collar. One night in 1993, she strayed into the town of west Yellowstone, and spent the whole night feeding on loose garbage. Rangers shunted her away, and all seemed well, but one day in the early 00s, 101 was starving. Maybe the annual miller moths hadn’t turned up, or maybe the berries were withering that year. Her long bear memory kicked in, and she returned to the same garbage feeding ground she had last visited 10 years ago.

This time, she kept returning, and the inevitable happened: 101 was imprisoned in a wildlife sanctuary. There was no way for her to co-exist safely with humans, even if dumped on the opposite side of Yellowstone by helicopter, because bears can easily travel 100s of miles in a year.

So it’s not just black bears who love pizza and stale orange peels. On a happier note, Sow 101 lived to the ripe old age of 38 at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Centre, euthanised in June 2020.

They’re slightly less obsessed than the fairytales portray, but bears really do like honey a great deal. A bear’s thick hide is virtually immune to bee stings, so after climbing a tree using its limited tree climbing ability, the grizzly will just reach into the hive and scoop the honey out.

What the children’s classics didn’t mention is that bears also eat the protein-rich bees themselves, and the larvae. As opportunistic scavengers, no morsel of food goes to waste. The bees try to sting the bear, but normally bounce off. Once it’s done, the bear runs off and shakes its body to remove the bees, as though shaking water away after a swim.

In the first 5 months of 2018 alone, the Finnish government handed out 143,000 euros in compensation to beekeepers, and 370 beehives were destroyed by bears in Finland and northern Estonia. Papillon the escape bear is one honey lover. When he awoke from hibernation in March 2020, 6 months after leaping an electrified fence, one of his first moves was to roam the Italian province of Trentino raiding beekeepers’ hives.

Electric fences are popular deterrents, but one beekeeper in Turkey had a better idea: he decided to turn the local bears into taste-testers, by placing 4 samples of honey outside his farm. He waited to see which honey the inevitable bear visitor would go for, and the answer was the Anzer variety, over the flower honey, chestnut honey, and cherry jam decoy.

Despite the bear-moose royal rumbles that constantly happen, most of a bear’s meat-eating comes from smaller mammals. This includes hares, marmots, ground squirrels, pikas, chipmunks, mice, rats, voles and lemmings.

Inland bears living on tundra have a tendency to hide at the entrance of arctic squirrel nests, and pounce when they emerge in the morning. These squirrels weigh 2 pounds, a decent chunk of meat, and the bears tend to succeed most in October and November, just before hibernation, when the mounting snow blocks off the squirrels’ escape routes. Bears in Denali are particularly obsessed with arctic squirrels.

Bears commonly use their long claws, which evolved specially for digging, to completely rip apart the dens of small mammals and scoop them out. Sometimes they launch these assaults as the squirrel hibernates, if the bear wakes up from its own hibernation a couple of weeks early. The promise of a tasty squirrel and the nuts it has stashed are irresistible for a bear. A Siberian chipmunk’s winter stash, for example, can contain 8.8 pounds of food. The first stage is locating the dens, and here, grizzlies are helped by their superior sense of smell.

It varies by subspecies as well. The Tibetan blue bear of the Himalaya is obsessed with Tibetan pika, deriving nearly 60% of its calories from it. 25 pika have been found inside a single Tibetan blue bear’s stomach.

What is the point of a 1000 pound grizzly bear tucking into a meal of 5-10 delicately arranged ants? We don’t know either, but while the majority of grizzlies wouldn’t bat an eyelid at Flick and his friends, certain grizzlies can get a massive chunk of calories from them. The capital of ant-munching seems to be Slovenia, where they can sometimes account for 25% of a bear’s diet by weight, particularly in the Spring. It shows how unpredictable bears are, because Slovenia’s beech forests are only decent for ants, whereas Sweden’s lush boreal forests are a haven. Yet Sweden’s brown bear population hardly eats any ants.

Alberta is another place of ant-loving grizzlies, contributing 45% of calories in extreme cases. The typical grizzly prefers to hack apart old dead logs with its claws, rather than scooping out underground ant nests. Carpenter ants are the favourite species, and as for other insects, brown bears love ladybirds. In the early 1980s, officials running Kootenay park in Canada had to close down the area near MacDonald every year, as grizzlies consistently returned to feast on ladybirds and Miller moths.

Any of the random grubs, beetles and worms on a rotting leg are part of a bear’s menu, although they make up a lesser proportion compared to the more heavily forest-dwelling black bear. A study in Yellowstone found that grizzlies eat small amounts of earthworms in April and May, but none at all from June onwards, when the real feeding season kicks off.

If it’s there, it’ll be eaten by a bear.

In Greece, bears eat tortoise. Japanese bears eat snakes, and in Yellowstone, bears are partial to moths. 40,000 of them a day, in fact, equivalent to 20,000 calories. The species in question is the Miller moth, or the army cutworm moth, whose body can be up to 83% fat, far outstripping a pine nut or squirrel, making them incredibly energy dense for a bear. Somehow, this body fat doesn’t turn them into a couch potato, and instead, the miller moth flies to Yellowstone’s mountain slopes every summer in their thousands, to feed off the nectar of mountain flowers.

When scientists monitored 29 seperate moth hotspots, a total of 470 grizzlies arrived to feast on them, with 220 in a single year. The number of bears positioning themselves in moth country rose sharply in the three years to 2014.

Miller moths start their lives on farmland, where they’re a serious pest. According to Yellowstone rangers, this moth obsession is good for human-bear relations, because it draws them to the mountains rather than roads where they could attack people.

At 40,000 moths per day, a hungry bear could meet a third of its energy requirements for the whole year after 1 month. Catching a moth is easier than it sounds, because when they arrive in their thousands, they immediately burrow into dark crevices in the mountain slopes, to escape the intolerable sunlight. Bears must simply arrive and dig, a trick which mothers teach to their cubs. This video is a great example, until an aggressive male grizzly arrives to spoil the party.

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