With fall literally just around the corner, we take a look this week at our ursine neighbors, the black bears, as they prepare to bid us the big “good night” for 2022. Autumn brings the final “flourish” of natures abundance as fruits that were growing and ripening throughout the summer come to their peak, and these great beasts are some of the largest consumers of the grand “harvest”.
Like so many other animals that hibernate, bears spend most of their waking life eating and building up fat stores in preparation for the long slumber. While they are omnivores, most of their diet in the wild consists of plants, roots and of course, fruits. As I mentioned in last week’s article, while it is a treat to take advantage of these fruits and do a bit of wild foraging ourselves, it is imperative to keep the critters in mind and only take a days consumption worth and leave the remainder for the animals, as this is their last opportunity for nutrition and they greatly rely on this last “push” to survive the winter ahead.
This brings me to a point about bears that is very important to know when living with them as we do. In the fall bears enter a phase called hyperphagia, which is basically a stage of truly hyper-active eating. Given a “limitless” supply of food, they will consume as much as 20,000 calories or more per day, eating nearly everything edible in sight. Hence the need to leave as much of the natural foods in the wild for them. This feeding frenzy can also bring them to a more emboldened mindset that has them coming into our space with more frequency to take advantage of any opportunity to gain easy access to food. It is imperative to always keep our garbage and other potential food sources away from bears, but in the fall that diligence is most important, as a bear will do anything and everything in its power to gain access to that tasty trash.
This week’s image features a large specimen, one of my surprisingly very few encounters with bears in my personal history in Colorado. We came across this seemingly gentle giant as it was in the very midst of the “never-ending eating” one fine September evening while descending Trail Ridge Road. It was quite happily and eagerly taking advantage of the harvest (we couldn’t see the food itself, but guessing it was gorging on wild currants?), so much so that it was only after a good while that it even took notice of our presence. Bears in the wild are typically wary of humans, and in normal situations it would likely have bolted quite rapidly upon our arrival. Once it realized our presence, we were given a brief and stern warning not to come too close followed by a quick assessment as to whether we might make a good addition to its meal before apparently deciding against us and put its head back down to continue the glorious overindulgence.
Originally published in The Mountain-Ear
