---

People are afraid of bears. Rather, they’re afraid of bears’ stomachs. And being in them. Despite the evidence that most bears, in fact, eat very little meat – much less meat they, themselves have killed.

---

Bear Myths Part 1: Mothers & Cubs

Bear Myths Part 2: Playing Dead

---

Bear Myths Part 3: Carnivore Carnage

We humans have a strange relationship with bears. On the one hand, Teddy Ruxpin, the Grateful Dead and Coca-Cola Christmas commercials. On the other, When Animals Attack, Grizzly Man and the Bear-o-dactyl. We teach our kids bears are jolly and obese through toys and animated movies, but every time we’re in the woods and a squirrel skitters over a dead leaf, we look to the heavens and await the certainty of death.

I mean, I get why people are afraid of these often massive predators – what with the claws and the biting and the Carnivora and the yellowed fangs. (Mm-hey!) But it might make you feel better to know what bears really eat. 

The Specialists

The eight living species of bears display a dramatic range of diets – most of them rather encouraging to human survival. Let’s take a quick look at three that embody the spectrum:

Panda bears eat bamboo, as everybody knows. But did you know they eat thirty different kinds of it and nearly nothing else? They’ll eat carrion from time to time, but pandas are the least carnivorous of all bears. They even have a specially adapted thumb – actually a modified radial sesamoid – to help them grip and strip bamboo stalks. Now if they could just learn to reproduce without watching pornography first. (I promise, in the name of science, this won’t take you anywhere bad.)

Sloth bears, found in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, are frumpy-looking animals with bedhead fur and pouty, Angelina Jolie lips. And boy do they eat mounds of insects. Literally. Three inch claws allow them to shred termite mounds, ant nests and beehives. The sloth bear can then turn its mouth into a Dyson and vacuum up its prey, thanks to those sultry lips and the lack of upper incisors – an adaptation unique to this species. Another thing only sloth bears do? Carry their babies on their back, rounding out their bid for the cutest damn bear you never heard of.

Polar bears are where we have to let bygones be bygones. They are easily the most carnivorous bears, surviving mostly on ringed and bearded seals. Their bodies are machines designed to convert seal fat into bear mass. When times are good, they’ll strip carcasses of blubber and leave the meat, earning them the description of being lipophilic or fat-loving. In a pinch, they’ll also eat anything from whale and walrus carcasses to ungulates, seabirds, shellfish, kelp, berries and garbage. And with the way climate change is cutting into their SOP, you’d be best to avoid them altogether – lest you learn life isn’t like the Coca-Cola commercials.

The Opportunists

Unlike the picky posies above, black bears and grizzlies aren’t the type to sit at the dinner table until midnight in protest of the clean-plate policy. They could also be banner animals for the local movement since their diets differ considerably depending on the season.

Black bears are omnivores, much like ourselves – and they have an elongated digestive tract to match their menu. They eat everything from skunk cabbage, acorns, and blueberries to leaves and grass. They will certainly eat meat – moose and elk calves, deer fawns, snails, crayfish, woodchucks, bird eggs – but it makes up less than 10% of their diet. And they’re not at all above eating a rotting carcass. (Another reason not to play dead.)

A quick note now on yellowjackets. Bears love ‘em. In fact, if you’re hiking in the central or eastern United States, you should stop worrying so much about black bear attack and start watching for yellowjacket nests the black bears have torn up the night before.

“Right,” you’ll say, “because bears go bonkers for honey!”

Wrong. Yellowjackets are actually wasps. And wasps don’t make honey. But they do make wasp larvae. Sweet, protein-y, wriggling wasp larvae. So while bears will eat the sweet stuff while attacking a honeybee hive – honey’s full of sugary calories – they’re typically after the fat-building baby bees.

Grizzly bears, despite their alpha-monster reputation, are also omnivores, though the degree of this depends on the season and the biodiversity of their habitat. For instance, Yellowstone’s adult male grizzlies might eat a diet of up to 80% meat, while the adult females and subadults eat only around 40%. Likewise, the carpetbagging grizzlies up in Glacier National Park and Denali National Park survive on 97% plant-based diets. (Yes, Denali is where that guy was just eaten. More on him in a bit.)

They will eat grasses, dandelions, cow parsnip, clover, roots, tubers, thistle, mushrooms, berries, ants, grubs, winter-killed animals, salmon, caviar and any small animals they are lucky enough to catch. More rarely, grizzlies take down big game like bison and elk. 

Might a grizzly (or a black bear or a polar bear, etc) eat a human? Of course they might. We’re meat after all. And once in a blue hell, they actually do. (This guy wasn’t following my last post’s advice about surprising grizzlies, by the by.)

But the cold, hard, non-newsworthy reality is that most grizzlies are happy to fill their guts with moths. Up to 40,000 moths a day, when the season’s right. (Moth is “meat,” by the way.)

 

Grizzlies also love pesto. Well, OK – they love to eat whitebark pine nuts, which are similar to what we put in pesto. And they rely on red squirrels to bring pinecones out of the trees like little messenger pixies. And then the bears and squirrels feast and feast and all the animals hold hands and dance around the forest singing, “Pesto is the besto!”

But. When something happens to the pine nuts…

It’s like that party you had in your parents’ basement where everything was cool and you were probably going to make out with that girl until some jackass punched a hole in the wall and suddenly you were spending the next nine hours quick-repairing drywall with a spatula and a hairdryer and it looked so bad when you were done you ended up hanging a picture over it anyway because your mom would never notice the sudden appearance of a new picture frame at fist-level in the hallway she walks through thirty times a day, right?

Which is to say, when the pine nut crop fails due to blight or drought, things get ugly. Female grizzlies have fewer cubs after a bad pine nut year and food scarcity pushes the population into closer contact with humans, which leads to mortality rates three times higher than normal. And this brings us to the most dangerous bear in the world. The one with a taste for Subway sandwiches.

The Bear Diet 

This is me officially calling dibs on the soon-to-be-best-selling title, The Bear Diet, because nothing sells like a good (read: bad) diet book. Research is still pending, but I can tell you it involves eating 13,000 calories worth of gummy bears a day. And instead of exercise, you sleep through the winter. I’m gonna make millions.

BITTEL ME NEXT: YOGI

You fear the wild beasts of yore, but the most unpredictable bear is Yogi. Next time on BMT – how food habituation creates the most dangerous bear of them all.

Guess you better pack a lunch and come on back for Part 4.

 

Images: Blood Bath, Bear-o-dactyl, Panda Thumb, Sloth bear