• Yearling bears leave mom and search for food, shelter and a place of their own.
• Adult males travel far and wide looking for mates.
• Nursing moms venture farther from home base to search for food.
• Cubs keep growing and developing. Spring lessons can be life changing.
Yearlings Move Out
Bears that were born last spring and denned up with mom this past winter are now 18-month old yearlings. If all goes well, they’ll be the size of a medium-sized dog by the end of June, although their fur coats can make them look larger. Yearling females are often allowed to move in next door to their mom. Yearling males are strongly encouraged to move out and go find a new territory of their own, so most young bears wandering far from home are males.
Spring Lessons Can Be Life-Changing
Like human teenagers, yearlings are at a very impressionable stage of life. If they quickly discover that human places should be avoided, they will learn to support themselves as wild bears. If they find the backyard pickings are easy, they start down a road that is often a dead end. No matter how cute they look and how hungry they are, never feed or approach them. The best thing you can do to help yearling bears grow up wild is to make sure there’s nothing around your home to attract them. Download our Be BearWise at Home Checklist: bearwise.org/bearwise-store/How-BearWise-Are-You-CHECKLIST-p534874788/?mc_cid=35639a4dcf&mc_eid=6f1229f7ee
Where’s the Bear Food?
Natural spring and early summer foods like tender leaves and grasses and developing plants are not as calorie-dense and nutritious as the nuts and fruits that ripen later in the year, so all bears travel further looking for food. Mother bears usually have between one and three hungry, demanding mouths to feed. Moms start traveling further looking for food, and cubs are left home alone for longer stretches of time, usually near the den or underneath a handy “sanctuary tree” they can climb in a few seconds. What’s on the June menu? Black bears are omnivores; they will eat pretty much anything with calories. The bulk of their spring and early summer diet is what people think of as a salad topped with whatever protein might be available – insects, carrion (dead animals), fish, small mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Nursing mothers need more calories to stay healthy enough to keep producing milk for the cubs and may actually lose weight until more calorie-dense foods become available later in the year and cubs start eating more on their own.
Thanks for living BearWise and doing your part to keep bears wild.
NYSDEC is a proud member of BearWise®, a program of the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies. For more information on how you can help keep bears wild…and enjoy your time in the great outdoors, visit DEC’s BearWise webpage and the BearWise website for free printable fact sheets and materials.
