48: Black Bear
I write to you from Arapahoe, Ute, and Cheyenne land. I am interested in learning about the different animals that live in the place where I was born. I want to mention that biological classification as taught by western science has its roots in racism, sexism, and transphobia – here’s a good explainer about why.
For at least 500 years – and probably much longer – the Southern Ute who now live in present day southwestern Colorado have celebrated the arrival of the first thunder of spring with the Bear Dance. The dance is based on a story of a hunter falling in love with a she-bear and dancers act like bears emerging from hibernation. “The Bear Dance is called mama-kwa-nhká-pú, or the ‘woman-return dance,’ because women choose their partners. It’s an endurance test that lasts three days or longer. Couples dance in lines inside a brush corral. Men sing songs and play moraches, or ‘growlers.’”
Today, the black bear (Ursus americanus) is the only type of bear that lives in Colorado. Prior to 1980, there were grizzly bears here too, although they had been increasingly rare throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. “Black” bear is just a name – they can be red, brown, or even blonde-ish in color. Speaking as an archaeologist, black bears can look remarkably similar to humans if you just find some skeletal remains sans skull and claws and my old boss told me that she had been called by the police several times to come see a “human” body that turned out to be a bear skeleton whose head had been dragged off by predators. Although they can appear much larger due to their fur and their stance, males are about 275 lbs and females are about 175 lbs. When they are preparing for hibernation, they can eat 20,000 calories per day, so Michael Phelps level.
Black bears are remarkably visible around the Front Range. They like to live in environments with Gambel’s oak and aspen, close to natural fruit sources like chokecherries and serviceberries. If you live anywhere in the western part of the Front Range, you probably have a bear-proof trash can. I have seen them a few times while hiking and most recently one evening in downtown Glenwood Springs when one ambled up from the Colorado River, across the train tracks, and onto Main Street in front of a burger joint. At that point a lot of people started yelling and the bear climbed a tree to get away from them. Poor bear. They are incredibly smart and curious, with remarkable senses of smell. I don’t like to quote Wikipedia, but this paragraph is both well-sourced and worth it:
“American black bears are highly dexterous, being capable of opening screw-top jars and manipulating door latches. They also have great physical strength. They have been known to turn over flat-shaped rocks weighing 310 to 325 pounds (141 to 147 kg) by flipping them over with a single foreleg. They move in a rhythmic, sure-footed way and can run at speeds of 25 to 30 miles per hour (40 to 48 km/h). American black bears have good eyesight and have been proven experimentally to be able to learn visual color discrimination tasks faster than chimpanzees and just as fast as domestic dogs. They are also capable of rapidly learning to distinguish different shapes such as small triangles, circles and squares.”
Black bears, interestingly, are not that closely related to either grizzly bears or polar bears, with their last common ancestor living sometime over 4 million years ago. Instead, they are most closely related to Asian sun bears.