BEAR BEHAVIOR: TERRITORIALITY, HUMAN HABITUATION, OPENING CARS, TIGERS

BEAR BEHAVIOUR

Bears are the world's largest carnivores (polar bears and brown bears are bigger than Siberian tigers and lions, the next largest carnivores) but are technically omnivores (eat plants and animals) that get most of the nutrients from berries, leaves, roots, and other kinds of vegetation, and are only partly carnivorous. There are eight species of bears: 1) sloth bears of the Indian subcontinent; 2) sun bears of southern Asia; 3) Asiatic black bears (moon bears) of Asia; 4) polar bears of the Arctic (which evolved from brown bears a couple million years ago; 5) brown bears of North America, Asia and Europe (Grizzlies and Kodiak bears are kinds of brown bears); 6) black bears of North America; 7) speckled bears of South America; and 8) giant pandas.

Bears are terricolous (live on the ground), arboreal (live in trees), motile (move around as opposed to being stationary), nomadic (move from place to place, generally within a well-defined range), migratory (make seasonal movements between regions, such as between breeding and wintering grounds), sedentary (remain in the same area) and hibernate (the state that some animals enter during winter in which normal physiological processes are significantly reduced, thus lowering the animal’s energy requirements). Bears are most often nocturnal (active at night), or crepuscular (active at dawn and dusk), but may be diurnal (active during the daytime) as well. Polar bears are primarily diurnal . [Source: Tanya Dewey and Phil Myers, Animal Diversity Web (ADW) |=|]

Bears have a reputation for behaving in an unpredictable manner. Evidence does not bear this out. They usually follow strict rules based on size, sex, age and social rank. Even so individual bears have distinct personalties and behavior, with individuals acting in different ways in similar circumstances. Stephen Herrero, professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Calgary and a leading authority on bear attacks. told the New York Times that bears are "complex, intelligent and individualistic." Bear lovers Maureen Enns and Charles Russell believe they have emotions and can appreciate beauty. Evidence of their intelligence includes their curiosity, the fact they can be trained to do difficult circus stunts and their ability to remember the exact location of food sources months later and pull the meat from traps without getting caught. Wildlife biologist Bruce McLellan encountered a female black bear that repeatedly stole they baits but avoided getting caught in a trap by placing a large rock into, setting off the trigger mechanism.

Bears are largely solitary animals with the exception of mothers with their young. Bears cover large distances in search of food. Often the only time bears come together is when males and females breed and sows take care of their cubs. But polar bears often den in communities and brown bears sometimes hunt salmon in communities. Sometimes a group of bears will gather around a kill or grbage dump. In addition siblings often stay together, sometimes for several years, after they leave their mothers.

Websites and Resources on Animals: Bear Conservation bearconservation.org ; Bear Book and Curriculum Guide web.archive.org ; Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; BBC Earth bbcearth.com; A-Z-Animals.com a-z-animals.com; Live Science Animals livescience.com; Animal Info animalinfo.org ; World Wildlife Fund (WWF) worldwildlife.org the world’s largest independent conservation body; National Geographic National Geographic ; Endangered Animals (IUCN Red List of Threatened Species) iucnredlist.org

Books: “Bears: Majestic Creatures of the Wild” edited by Ian Stirlin (Rodale Press); Book: “Bears: A Brief History” by Bernd Brunner (Yale University Press, 2008); “Bears of the World” by Terry Domico and Mark Newman (1988) .

Bear Territory, Homes and Communication

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Japan Brown bear

Black bears are highly territorial and live in a rigidly matriarchal society. The average territory for males is 16 kilometers across; for females, five kilometers across. Some a male and female ranges overlap and sometimes a bear will wander into the territory of another bear (if they are caught they are often challenged or chased away, sometimes there are serious fights).

Black bear mothers define their territory and then subdivide it and give portions of it to their daughters when they are 1½ years old. At when 2½ years of age, when they become independent, the daughters expand the territory (and their mothers give up some) and claim it as their own. Territories are defined by scent markings. Persistent scratching is a way of releasing scent. Males are forced leave their mother's territory when are 2½ or 3½ years of age and establish their own new territory. Often they have to wander a hundred kilometers or more from their mother's territory and engage in fights with other bears to establish their own territories. They often end up in marginal territories with less abundant food supplies.

Bears generally take advantage of shelters, such as caves, hollow logs, and cavities in tree roots, as dens. Some bears make beds on the ground during the spring and summer that consists of a trampled down area or a shallow pit dug in the ground. Sun bears individuals spend much of their time in trees and build platforms for resting. [Source: Tanya Dewey and Phil Myers, Animal Diversity Web (ADW) |=|]

Bears communicate with sound and chemicals usually detected by smelling. According to Animal Diversity Web: Little is known about communication in bears, but grunts, moans, and roars are known from most species. Cubs may be especially vocal, uttering "woofs" and shrill howls when distressed. "Chuffing" is used as a greeting in Ursus arctos. Chemical cues may be used by males in locating receptive females. Home range boundaries, individual identity, and sexual condition may be advertised, both visually and chemically, by tree-scratching and by urinating and defecating on boundary trails.

Bears Habituated to Humans in California

According to the Los Angeles Times: Founded in 1849,Downieville, population 300, is one of California’s oldest towns, and also one of its quaintest. Colorfully painted wooden buildings sit at the junction of two rivers, beneath majestic pines and mountain peaks. Along with tourists, who flood in in the summer for rafting and mountain biking, the town also receives frequent visits from bears and mountain lions. More recently, wolves have arrived with deadly force, snatching domesticated cattle off the open pastures that stretch across the plains on the other side of the mountains east of town. Longtime residents in the area were used to the challenges of living among wild animals. But in the summer of 2023, Sierra County Sheriff Mike Fisher said he started getting an overwhelming number of calls about problem bears. “We had three or four habituated bears that were constantly here in town,” said Fisher. "They had zero fear. I would say, almost daily, we were having to go out and chase these bears away, haze them.”[Source: Jessica Garrison, Lila Seidman, Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2025]

Bears have a sharp sense of smell, a long memory for food sources and an incredible sense of direction. If a tourist tosses them a pizza crust or the last bits of an ice cream cone, or leaves the lid off a trash can, they will return again and again, even if they are relocated miles away. That summer, Fisher said, no matter what he did, the bears kept lumbering back into town. It was unlike anything he had experienced, he said, and he had grown up in Downieville. “A police car with an air horn or the siren, we would push the bear up out of the community. Fifteen minutes later, they were right back downtown,” he said.

And then there were the bears harassing locals. “There were three bears,” said Patty Hall. “Twice a night they would walk up and down our [porch] stairs. The Ring cameras were constantly going off.” Some complained that their neighbors were part of the lure, because they were not disposing of their r garbage properly and tossing food on their porch for her cats — that the bears were coming for. The daughter of a woman killed by a bear said that bears were “constantly trying" to get into her house, and that “her mother had physically hit one” to keep it out. One particular bear, nicknamed “Big Bastard,” was a frequent pest.

In the Lake Tahoe area, where 50,000 people live year-round and tens of thousands more crowd in on busy tourist weekends, bears were breaking into houses and raiding refrigerators; they were bursting into ice cream shops and strolling along packed beaches. State and local officials went into overdrive, trying to teach residents and tourists how to avoid attracting bears. The state set money aside for distribution of bear-proof trash cans and “unwelcome mats” that deliver a jolt of electricity if bears try to break into homes. The Bear League, a local conservayion organization, stepped up its efforts. From a small office,the organization's 24-hour hotline was ringing, and volunteers were rushing out with paintball guns to haze bears and to advise people on how to bear-proof their houses.

The tensions continued to escalate, nonetheless, between people who wanted to protect bears at all costs and those who wanted some problem bears trapped and relocated — or killed. In 2024, after a homeowner in the Tahoe area fatally shot a bear he said had broken into his home, many people were outraged that the Department of Fish and Wildlife declined to file charges. Advocates also complained that the state has fallen behind in its efforts to help people and bears coexist. In recent years, the state had hired dedicated staff to help people in bear country, but the money ran out and some of those people were laid off, said Jennifer Fearing, a wildlife advocate and lobbyist. "We have the tools to minimize human-wildlife conflict in California," Fearing said. "We need the state to invest in using them.” In Sierra County, the sheriff had come to a different conclusion. “We’ve swung the pendulum too far on the environmental side on these apex predators,” Fisher said.

Smart Bears of Yosemite National Park

At Yosemite National Park in California, Daniel Davis-Williams wrote in Outside: Bears have gone to some impressive lengths in pursuit of the hot dogs and graham crackers we bring to the park. They’ve opened car doors with their paws and pried open locked, supposedly bear-proof dumpsters. These are examples of "habituation," Caitlin Lee-Roney, head of the park's bear unit, explains, which occurs when the animals become so familiar with a barrier we put between them and a source of food that they develop a knack for circumventing or overcoming it. This is why you can't just leave your snacks in the car when you go to bed at night—savvy Yosemite bears learned that trick decades ago. And when one bear learns, the others can pick up the knowledge through observation—the animals have remarkable memories. [Source: Daniel Davis-Williams, Outside, September 4, 2015]

Humans have responded to their intelligence with innovations of our own. We've devised locking mechanisms on dumpsters and trashcans, and garbage pickups in parks run like clockwork. We’ve brought this same measure of caution to the backcountry, where the standard food container is the bear canister, which is designed to withstand intense force and pressure. These preventative measures aren't put in place to stop the bears from getting fat, they're designed to keep bears from getting so comfortable with humans—and so aggressive in their pursuit of our food—that we have no choice but to put them down. It's not that we need to be protected from them; they need protection from us.

Though park staffers have had success with bear-proofing—human-bear encounters are down from a record high of 1,541 in 1998 to fewer than 200 a year—there’s been a worrisome development. Two summers ago, in a shocking turn, park staffers found that one female black bear in the Snow Creek area, northeast of Yosemite Valley, had learned how to crack open bear canisters—a veritable coup in the human-bear innovation race. She doesn’t paw or jaw the canisters into submission. Instead, she stalks a particular backcountry campsite at night, sniffing out canisters stashed near ground level, moves them to a nearby 400-foot-high ledge, then lets gravity take over. “I think she kind of rolls them,” says Lee-Roney. The bear then scrambles to the base of the cliff and retrieves the goodies. To this day, no one has seen her in action. This may sound like a cute Yogi Bear situation, but the stakes are high. If other bears were to start mimicking this female’s behavior, the entire canister system—a key means of mitigating bear encounters in the backcountry—could be undermined.

Park staffers couldn’t let that happen. They caught and collared the bear last year in order to track her, and set up extra patrols at the Snow Creek area both to haze the bear and to instruct backpackers to camp far from the ledge. The incidents stopped—but only temporarily. The bear started swiping canisters in the same area this summer. If another bear starts picking up her habits, park officials say, Yosemite's wildlife management department may pursue more drastic measures—maybe even euthanasia.

How Yosemite Bears Became a Nuisance

Daniel Davis-Williams wrote in Outside: Black bears are nature’s opportunists when it comes to eating, and that opportunism has challenged Yosemite since its first days as a park in the mid-nineteenth century, says Rachel Mazur, head of Yosemite’s wildlife management department and the author of Speaking of Bears, a history of black bear management in the Sierras. In the early days, trash was simply tossed into open garbage dumps scattered throughout the park. The dumps attracted bears, Mazur writes, and the scavenging bears attracted curious park visitors. [Source: Daniel Davis-Williams, Outside, September 4, 2015]

Park management were well aware of the ways that feeding black bears might increase annual visitation. By 1923 the park had allowed a concessionaire, the Yosemite National Park Company, to establish a formal bear-feeding platform where visitors were guaranteed a show. But the garbage dumps weren’t far from roads, and visitors began feeding bears from their car windows. Injuries weren’t uncommon. Mazur notes that 67 people were hospitalized in incidents linked to bear feeding in 1937 alone. The more that black bears received food from people or manmade structures, the more habituated they became, leading to more and more interaction with people. “In late summer and fall, after visitation subsided and the dumps were no longer used, they would head to the upper east end to forage at residences,” Mazur writes in her book. “The resulting conflicts could be intense.”

Yosemite finally closed the bear-feeding stations in 1941, but that didn’t deter the bears like staffers had hoped. The animals raided campgrounds and continued roadside begging. The bear situation worsened, according to Mazur, until 1963, when bear-proofing “began in a meaningful way” with metal garbage lids. But that didn’t stop bears from ripping into cars.

Lee-Roney, who has been at the park since 1999, remembers when one bear figured out how to open car doors. Within five years, three bears had learned the technique. They became so comfortable that “one of them actually got in and the door closed behind him,” Lee-Roney says. When wildlife officials approached the car, they found the bear napping inside.

The dumpsters currently in use feature a curved input outfitted with a trap door and locking carabiners. They are the products of decades of evolution—upgraded with new features as bears bypass the old ones. For a while, the park used lockers outfitted with latchkeys. But campers would leave the keys in the keyholes and bears would paw at them until they turned and unlocked. Staffers have altered the shape of the openings on recycling bins (they’re circular, upgraded from square, so bears can’t fit a paw inside) and welded metal ridges onto the edges of dumpster hoods (another paw-blocking move). Most recently, they’ve welded clips onto garbage lids. The innovation, Mazur says, is “almost endless.”

Car-Opening Bears Prefer Hondas and Toyotas

John J. Fialka wrote in the Wall Street Journal: When it comes to selecting small sedans, the bears here lean toward Hondas — sometimes heavily. 1998 was a record for what the rangers call "car clouting." Yosemite black bears bashed and clawed their way into 1,103 vehicles, nearly six times as many as in 1993. They caused $634,595 worth of damage and gobbled up a great deal of campers' food. But these bears are no indiscriminate brutes. Through trial and error, some are refining their tastes and learning to pick out specific models of cars they deem ideal for a good break-in. Honda and Toyota sedans, popular among park-goers, are thus especially big with bears. [Source: John J. Fialka, Wall Street Journal, February 4, 1999]

According to 186 of the park's "bear incident" reports, these furry wrecking balls spent April and May 1998 hitting 26 of their pet Hondas and 21 Toyota sedans, the No. two favorite. By contrast, the bears only messed with two Buicks and one Lexus. They can't prove it, but rangers say this selection process appears to be deliberate.

John Stobinski, a park ranger who spent much of last summer filling out bear reports, says the bears are getting more discriminating. Vans, he says, have become another favorite. One night, he saw a bear score a lot of food by breaking into a red Ford Windstar. Then for the next few nights, any other red Ford Windstar in the area also got clouted, food or no food.

Steven Thompson, the park's biologist, says mother bears are teaching cubs how to clout. A favorite technique is to insert claws just above the rear side door, then pull the door frame down to knee level. This creates a handy stepladder for the bears, which can weigh up to 350 pounds. Next, they claw their way through the back seat and into the trunk. Mr. Thompson says clouting is an unintended side effect of the park's five-year campaign to get campers to stop leaving food out and instead put it in steel "bear safes" now installed at most campsites. The theory was that bears would go back to munching acorns and ripping open rotten logs to find termites. Instead, campers decided their food must be safe inside their cars, so the bears adapted by learning how to tear them open. They have developed quite a few skills. To break into vans, they lean against cars parked alongside to get some leverage for bashing in the van's windows. Bears have also found that the bolted-on windows of some vans can be yanked off.

Victims of Car-Opening Bears

John J. Fialka wrote in the Wall Street Journal: Campers who follow the rules can still fall victim — particularly when they have a bear's preferred model. When the Tillquist family of Palmdale, Calif., arrived April 23, they dutifully lugged four coolers from their van to safes near their campsite. Then Karen Tillquist, her husband David and their two daughters went to sleep in their tent. As she was dozing off, Mrs. Tillquist recalled that two years earlier, a convertible parked exactly where the family had parked their van was clouted. Just then, crash. She heard their van's side window breaking. "My husband threw a folding chair at the bear, but it missed and put a dent in the van," she says. "The bear simply went around to the other side and bashed in a second window." Finally, Mrs. Tillquist pressed a button on her car keys, triggering the van's banshee-like burglar alarm and causing the furry visitor to slouch off. [Source: John J. Fialka, Wall Street Journal, February 4, 1999]

On May 6, Patrick Anderson of Santa Rosa, Calif., rose at 3:30 a.m. to find the right rear door of his Toyota Tercel four-wheel-drive wagon peeled down and a bear and her cub devouring the food in his backpack. He drove the semi-wrecked vehicle to the parking lot of a nearby campsite. There, he saw another bear pulling down the rear door of the same model Tercel. "It was uncanny," he says.

On May 14, two campers watched a bear working a parking lot, first pushing in the rear window of a sport-utility vehicle, then ripping down the door frame of a Dodge sedan. Fearing for their own car, they called for help. The park's biological technician, Kathryn McCurdy, answered the call. She peered up the tree where the bear had fled and saw a familiar face: It was Blue 26, a five-year-old male implicated in four previous car clouts. Each time, he was trapped and driven to a remote part of this Rhode Island-size park. Once again, he was back. But there wasn't much Ms. McCurdy could do.

Dealing with Troublesome Car-Opening Bears

John J. Fialka wrote in the Wall Street Journal: Because bears who repeatedly clout cars are considered more dangerous to people, Yosemite once had a policy of "three strikes and you're out," which meant the bear was given a fatal dose of anesthetic. But the park deep-sixed the policy because, as Ms. McCurdy puts it, "it's a good way to kill off all of your bears." The new policy is that a bear must be "responsible for a large amount of damage" before it can be killed, says Ms. McCurdy, who also functions as the park's chief executioner. In 1997, she had to deal with Bear 2061, who was clouting up to six cars a night. Worse, 2061 was teaching her two cubs, who later struck out on their own. All three were given fatal injections. Last year, three more bears were euthanized and others may be headed that way when they crawl out of their dens this spring. [Source: John J. Fialka, Wall Street Journal, February 4, 1999]

There is Orange 35, who has learned to hit cars while campers are registering. And there's the bear who peeled two doors off Richard Walther's Honda on May 21, then carefully folded down the rear seat to get into the trunk, where he pushed a button to open a cooler. "This bear clearly knew what he was doing," says Mr. Walther, of Los Angeles.

The park plans to convene a committee to discuss how to get Yosemite's population of black bears — estimated at between 250 and 500 — to unlearn their new tricks. One possible solution is using packs of specially trained Finnish Karelian bear dogs to drive the animals away from parking lots. In the meantime, park rangers worry about the park's vending machines. Says Robert C. Hansen, director of a private fund that has donated $1 million worth of bear-proof safes to the park: "Someday, they're going to figure out that they need to break into the grocery store in Yosemite Valley. That hasn't happened yet, but these are very smart animals."

Bears and Siberian Tigers

In the Russian Far East, the range of some brown and black bears overlaps with that of Siberian tigers. There are reports of brown bears tailing Amur leopards and tigers to feed on their prey. In the Sikhote-Alin reserve, 35 percent of tiger kills were stolen by bears, with tigers either departing entirely or leaving part of the kill for the bear. Some studies show that bears frequently track down tigers to usurp their kills, with occasional fatal outcomes for the tiger. A report from 1973 describes twelve known cases of brown bears killing tigers, including adult males; in all cases the tigers were subsequently eaten by the bears. [Source: Wikipedia]

Following a decrease of ungulate populations from 1944 to 1959, 32 cases of Amur tigers attacking both Ussuri brown (Ursus arctos lasiotus) and Ussuri black bears (U. thibetanus ussuricus) were recorded in the Russian Far East, and hair of bears were found in several tiger scat samples. Tigers attack black bears less often than brown bears, as the latter live in more open habitats and are not able to climb trees. In the same time period, four cases of brown bears killing female tigers and young cubs were reported, both in disputes over prey and in self-defense. Tigers mainly feed on the bear's fat deposits, such as the back, hams and groin. [Source: Wikipedia]

When Amur tigers prey on brown bears, they usually target young and sub-adult bears, besides small female adults taken outside their dens, generally when lethargic from hibernation. Predation by tigers on denned brown bears was not detected during a study carried between 1993 and 2002. Ussuri brown bears, along with the smaller black bears constitute 2.1 percent of the Siberian tiger's annual diet, of which 1.4 percent are brown bears.

The effect the presence of tigers has on brown bear behavior seems to vary. In the winters of 1970–1973, Yudakov and Nikolaev recorded two cases of bears showing no fear of tigers and another case of a brown bear changing path upon crossing tiger tracks. Other researchers have observed bears following tiger tracks to scavenge tiger kills and to potentially prey on tigers.Despite the threat of predation, some brown bears actually benefit from the presence of tigers by appropriating tiger kills that the bears may not be able to successfully hunt themselves.Brown bears generally prefer to contest the much smaller female tigers.[54] During telemetry research in the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve, 44 direct confrontations between bears and tigers were observed, in which bears in general were killed in 22 cases, and tigers in 12 cases.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; National Geographic, Live Science, Natural History magazine, David Attenborough books, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Discover magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Wikipedia, The Guardian, Top Secret Animal Attack Files website and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2025