154 FUR FACTS 



Black bear cubs are born in the winter den of the mother some 

 time between the latter half of January and the middle of March, 

 depending upon the latitude as well as the altitude of the den. The 

 farther north a bear happens to live, the later the spring sets in and 

 so the later the animal comes out of its retirement. And the cubs 

 are born from six to eight weeks before the mother comes out. 



The little bears, when first born, are absurdly small and helpless; 

 their eyes are shut and do not open for some time. They have no 

 teeth and are almost naked, and although the mother may weigh as 

 much as four hundred pounds or more, the whole litter of cubs does 

 not weigh over a couple of pounds and single cubs vary from eight to 

 eighteen ounces each according to the number in the litter. A black 

 bear will have all the way from one to four cubs at a time, and four 

 is not at all uncommon; three seems to be the common number 

 throughout the Rocky Mountain region. Of course, meeting a black 

 bear in the woods with only one cub, even in the early spring, does 

 not definitely prove that she only gave birth to one; because the 

 others might have died or have been killed. But, records of black 

 bears in captivity show that single cubs are not unknown. For some 

 time after the young are born, the family continues shut up in the 

 winter den and the young are nursed for six to seven months. 



Another point on which there is much popular misconception and 

 disbelief is the extreme smallness of bear cubs at birth. This, at 

 first glance, is not only astonishing, but to many people seems almost 

 incredible. "How is it possible" they ask, * 'and why is it advantageous 

 for an animal as large as a bear to have young so small? Why the 

 puppies of a forty-pound dog are as large as the cubs of the four 

 hundred pound bear!" Yet the fact remains, and in the case of the 

 grizzly, where the mother sometimes weighs twice as much as the 

 black bear mother, the cubs are, if anything, a trifle smaller at birth 

 on the average. I have never heard the matter explained, but it 

 seems to me that when we consider the yearly habits of the bear they 

 tend to suggest how this peculiar race-habit has developed. A 

 dog mother with three or four puppies, weighing six or eight ounces 

 at birth, will eat three huge meals a day and grow thin as a rail nurs- 

 ing her hungry youngsters. What, then, would become of a bear 

 mother who had to nurse three or four cubs for six weeks or two 

 months, with never a meal at all, if the cubs were born weighing five 

 or six pounds? It looks very much as though nature, with her usual 

 skill at making both ends meet, had so arranged matters in the bear 

 family that, as these animals developed the hibernating habit, the 



