64 THE SCOTTISH NATURALIST 



but six days after the birth the mother was seen in the outer 

 cage with marks of blood about her, and upon investigation no 

 trace of the cubs could be found; she had evidently eaten them 

 all ! The other female did not apparently produce any cubs at 

 all that year. 



In January 1922 again both females had litters, and the 

 circumstances attending the births have paralleled in a remarkable 

 manner those of two years before. The smaller bear (" Baby ") 

 produced her litter on the r5th of January, and she was followed, 

 again at an interval of three days, by the other female on the 

 19th of January. When the cubs were old enough to be seen, 

 it was found that again the smaller bear had one cub and the 

 other two, and the parallel of circumstances was carried further 

 by the fact that when " Baby's " cub was eight weeks old, she was 

 again found with it in the outer cage, apparently biting it and 

 giving all the indications of the desire to get rid of it that she 

 had shown on the former occasion. The cub was accordingly 

 removed and put on to artificial feeding, and at the time of 

 writing is apparently thriving. 



In a wild state the Brown Bear passes the winter in a state 

 of hibernation, though probably the winter sleep is not, at any 

 rate over the greater part of the creature's range, an uninterrupted 

 one. In the Scottish Zoological Park, however, the bears have 

 never in ordinary conditions shown much sign of the influences 

 underlying this method of avoiding the unpleasantnesses of winter 

 and rough weather. Perhaps the fact that there is a constant and 

 regular food supply overcomes the other factors. The fat stored 

 up by the bears in autumn has not only to maintain the individual 

 itself, but in the case of the female it must support the developing 

 cubs as well, since the cubs seem to be born towards the close 

 of the hibernating period. The female bears in the Park, however, 

 have shown an interesting recrudescence of the natural habit prior 

 to the birth of cubs, for in each case the mother has lain up in 

 her sleeping den and refused to feed for some two or three weeks 

 before the cubs were born. — T. H. G. 



