Brown Bears/Grizzly Bears/Kodiak Bear and others

[Admin Pete]

Brown Bear
The Brown Bear ranks among the smartest of animals; possibly on an equal level with the great apes, whales and dolphins, and the elephants.

[Admin Pete]

[Admin Pete]

The Grizzly Book by Jack Samson - page 241 - The Big Skull by Grancel Fitz.
In the case of bears, it wasn't hard to find. The world's record grizzly skull is in the National Museum in Washington. The measurements of skulls give us the only accurate basis for comparison, and it is worth noting that this one was inaccurately reported for the last edition of the records. When the figures were found to vary from those on the same bear in earlier editions, the Washington authorities made a careful recheck. The length of that skull is 16 inches. The width is 9 and nine sixteenths. Combining these gives the record "score" of 25 and nine sixteenths. But far more important is the fact that this bear was shot near the Missouri River in Montana, away back in 1890, and it is highly significant that E.S. Cameron bagged him as early as the 4th of April. Since bears live for 40 years or more, unless somebody shoots them, and since they keep on getting bigger until they die, it is a fairly safe bet that this old monster was born in the great days of the bison, at least a century ago.

With the passing of the bison and the settling of the plains, all this was changed. Those huge old buffalo-eaters turned to killing cattle, and were wiped out by the ranchers. The grizzlies that survived were in the high mountain country, where the heavy snows and lack of winter feed forced them to hibernate for as much as six or seven months of the year. If a bear can eat only half of his life, and has to sleep throughout the rest, it just doesn't make sense that he can ever grow as big as one who is out and eating well for nine months, and hibernates for only three.

[Admin Pete]

The link no longer works but I found this statement from a Field and Stream.

It’s official. Last Friday the Boone and Crockett club announced a grizzly bear taken by Larry Fitzgerald in 2013 near Fairbanks, Alaska will enter the record books as the largest ever taken by a hunter, and the second largest grizzly skull in the world.
Boone and Crockett collects data from trophy animals either found or harvested by hunters to help gauge wildlife management practices. A press release from the organization says it ranks bears according to skull size and Fitzgerald’s bear measured 27 6/16 inches—just 7/16 of an inch smaller than the reigning world-record skull found in Alaska in 1976.
“One would think that a relatively accessible area, with liberal bear hunting regulations to keep populations in line with available habitat and food, would be the last place to find one of the largest grizzly bears on record,” said Richard Hale, chairman of the Boone and Crockett Club's Records of North American Big Game committee.
Hale said the Alaska Department of Fish and Game liberalized hunting regulations in the area Fitzgerald hunted to help manage an overpopulation of grizzlies, and while baiting is legal, Fitzgerald stalked his bear after spotting it during a moose hunt.
"Grizzly populations are doing well across all their ranges. That includes populations in the Lower 48 states that are currently federally protected under the Endangered Species Act, but will soon be up for delisting and management authority turned over to the watchful eye of state wildlife managers," said Hale.

[Admin Pete]

The brown bear (Ursus arctos) is a large bear species found across Eurasia and North America. In North America, the populations of brown bears are called grizzly bears, while the subspecies that inhabits the Kodiak Islands of Alaska is known as the Kodiak bear. It is one of the largest living terrestrial members of the order Carnivora, rivaled in size only by its closest relative, the polar bear (Ursus maritimus), which is much less variable in size and slightly bigger on average. The brown bear's range includes parts of Russia, Central Asia, China, Canada, the United States, Hokkaido, Scandinavia, the Balkans, the Picos de Europa and the Carpathian region (especially Romania), Iran, Anatolia, and the Caucasus. The brown bear is recognized as a national and state animal in several European countries.

While the brown bear's range has shrunk, and it has faced local extinctions across its wide range, it remains listed as a least concern species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with a total estimated population in 2017 of 110,000. As of 2012, this and the American black bear are the only bear species not classified as threatened by the IUCN, though the large sizes of both bears may be a disadvantage due to increased competition with humans. Populations that were hunted to extinction in the 19th and 20th centuries are the Atlas bear of North Africa and the Californian, Ungavan and Mexican populations of the grizzly bear of North America. Many of the populations in the southern parts of Eurasia are highly endangered as well. One of the smaller-bodied forms, the Himalayan brown bear, is critically endangered, occupying only 2% of its former range and threatened by uncontrolled poaching for its body parts.[13] The Marsican brown bear of central Italy is one of several currently isolated populations of the Eurasian brown bear and is believed to have a population of just 50 to 60 bears.

[Admin Pete]

Bear in mind that the average size of bears is determined by all the measurements taken which includes young immature bears. Bears don't reach full maturity until the age of ten.

The brown bear is the most variable in size of modern bears. The typical size depends upon which population it is from, and most accepted subtypes vary widely in size. This is in part due to sexual dimorphism, as male brown bears average at least 30% larger in most subtypes. Individual bears also vary in size seasonally, weighing the least in spring due to lack of foraging during hibernation, and the most in late fall, after a period of hyperphagia to put on additional weight to prepare for hibernation. Therefore, a bear may need to be weighed in both spring and fall to get an idea of its mean annual weight.

The normal range of physical dimensions for a brown bear is a head-and-body length of 4 ft 7 in to 9 ft 2 in and a shoulder height of 2 ft 4 in to 5 ft 0 in. The tail is relatively short, as in all bears, ranging from 2.4 to 8.7 in in length. The smallest brown bears, females during spring among barren-ground populations, can weigh so little as to roughly match the body mass of males of the smallest living bear species, the sun bear (Helarctos malayanus), while the largest coastal populations attain sizes broadly similar to those of the largest living bear species, the polar bear. Interior brown bears are generally smaller than is often perceived, being around the same weight as an average lion, at an estimate average of 400 lb in males and 298 lb in females, whereas adults of the coastal populations weigh about twice as much. The average weight of adult male bears from 19 populations, from around the world and various subspecies (including both large- and small-bodied subspecies), was found to be 478 lb while adult females from 24 populations were found to average 335 lb.

In spite of the so-called "average" size range, it is believed that a fully mature well fed male grizzly can reach 1500 lbs or even a little larger with a length of about 12 feet.

[Admin Pete]

Brown bears have very large and curved claws, those present on the forelimbs being longer than those on the hind limbs. They may reach 2.0 to 2.4 in and may measure 2.8 to 3.9 in along the curve. They are generally dark with a light tip, with some forms having completely light claws. Brown bear claws are longer and straighter than those of American black bears (Ursus americanus). The claws are blunt, while those of a black bear are sharp. Due to their claw structure, in addition to their excessive weight, adult brown bears cannot typically climb trees as well as both species of black bear, although in rare cases adult female brown bears have been seen in trees. The claws of a polar bear are also quite different, being notably shorter but broader with a strong curve and sharper point, presumably both as an aid to traveling over ice (sometimes nearly vertically) and procuring active prey. The paws of the brown bear are quite large. The rear feet of adult bears have been found to typically measure 8.3 to 14.2 in long, while the forefeet tend to measure about 40% less in length. All four feet in average sized brown bears tend to be about 17.5 to 20 cm (6.9 to 7.9 in) in width. In large coastal or Kodiak bear males, the hindfoot may measure up to 16 in in length, 11.2 in in width, while outsized Kodiak bears having had confirmed measurements of up to 18 in along their rear foot. Brown bears are the only extant bears with a hump at the top of their shoulder, which is made entirely of muscle, this feature having developed presumably for imparting more force in digging, which is habitual during foraging for most bears of the species and also used heavily in den construction prior to hibernation. The brown bear's strength has been roughly estimated as 2.5 to 5 times that of a human.

Grizzlies are known to be able to swat a 2000 lb bull across the shoulders and break its back. You can judge for yourself if that is only 5 times as strong as a human.

[Admin Pete]

The brown bear is often described as nocturnal. However, it frequently seems to peak in activity in the morning and early evening hours. Studies have shown that activity throughout the range can occur at nearly any time of night or day, with bears who dwell in areas with more extensive human contact being more likely to be fully nocturnal. Furthermore, yearling and newly independent bears are more likely to be active diurnally and many adult bears in low-disturbance areas are largely crepuscular. In summer through autumn, a brown bear can double its weight from the spring, gaining up to 400 lb of fat, on which it relies to make it through winter, when it becomes very lethargic. Although they are not full hibernators and can be woken easily, both sexes like to den in a protected spot during the winter months. Hibernation dens may consist of any spot that provides cover from the elements and that can accommodate their bodies, such as a cave, crevice, cavernous tree roots, or hollow logs.

Brown bears have one of the largest brains of any extant carnivoran relative to their body size and have been shown to engage in tool use (e.g., using a barnacle-covered rock to scratch its neck), which requires advanced cognitive abilities. This species is mostly solitary, although bears may gather in large numbers at major food sources (e.g., open garbage dumps or rivers holding spawning salmon) and form social hierarchies based on age and size. Adult male bears are particularly aggressive and are avoided by adolescent and subadult males, both at concentrated feeding opportunities and chance encounters. Female bears with cubs rival adult males in aggression and are much more intolerant of other bears than single females. Young adolescent males tend to be least aggressive and have been observed in nonantagonistic interactions with each other. Dominance between bears is asserted by making a frontal orientation, showing off canines, muzzle twisting and neck stretching to which a subordinate will respond with a lateral orientation, by turning away and dropping the head and by sitting or lying down. During combat, bears use their paws to strike their opponents in the chest or shoulders and bite the head or neck.

[Admin Pete]

Adult bears are generally immune to predatory attacks except from tigers and other bears. Siberian tigers prefer preying on young Ussuri brown bears, but smaller adult female brown bears outside their dens may also be taken, generally when lethargic from hibernation.Of 44 recorded encounters between the two predators, 20 resulted in confrontations; in 50% of these, the bears were killed, in 27% the tigers were killed, and 23% of the cases ended with both animals surviving and parting ways. Some bears emerging from hibernation seek out tigers in order to steal their kills. Some large brown bears may actually benefit from the tiger's presence by appropriating tiger kills that the bears may not be able to successfully hunt themselves and follow tiger tracks.

Brown bears regularly intimidate wolves to drive them away from their kills. In Yellowstone National Park, bears pirate wolf kills so often, Yellowstone's Wolf Project director Doug Smith wrote, "It's not a matter of if the bears will come calling after a kill, but when." Despite the high animosity between the two species, most confrontations at kill sites or large carcasses end without bloodshed on either side. Though conflict over carcasses is common, on rare occasions, the two predators tolerate each other on the same kill. To date, there is a single case of fully-grown wolves being killed by a grizzly bear. Given the opportunity, however, both species will prey on the other's cubs. Conclusively, the individual power of the bear against the collective strength of the wolf pack usually results in a long battle for kills or domination.

In some areas, grizzly bears also regularly displace cougars from their kills. Cougars kill small bear cubs on rare occasions, but there was one report of a bear killing a cougar of unknown age and condition between 1993 and 1996. Smaller carnivorous animals, including coyotes, wolverines, lynxes, and any other sympatric carnivores or raptorial birds, are dominated by grizzly bears and generally avoid direct interactions with them, unless attempting to steal scraps of food. However, wolverines have been persistent enough to fend off a grizzly bear as much as ten times their weight off a kill. There is one record of a golden eagle predating on a brown bear cub.

[Admin Pete]

Man Meets Grizzly by Young and Beyers.
This member of the great bear family continues to grow larger and stronger until he reaches maturity, in the seventh or eighth year. At that time he varies in size from four hundred to one thousand pounds. A grizzly bear at the Chicago zoo was weighed at 1,153 pounds. The biographer of James Capen Adams says that Adam's Old Sampson tipped the hayscales at 1,500 pounds. Many hunters have estimated grizzlies they have killed to weigh from one thousand to one ton; but a bear may look very large to a man out in the wilds.
Much has been written concerning the size of grizzlies. It was long a custom of mountaineers and hunters to speak of the size of bears in terms of the size of their tracks. Enos Mills gave the measurements of the largest grizzly track he had seen as slightly more than thirteen inches long and seven and a half inches wide. This length did not include the claws, which are sometimes seven inches long. Townsend's grizzly had a lateral footspan of ten inches and claws of seven inches. Than Galloway measured the foot of a Colorado grizzly at a little more than fourteen inches. Yet, tracks do not always indicate the size of a bear, any more than footprints do the size of a man.
There have in fact been many huge grizzlies. Than Galloway, the Utah bear hunter, reported killing one so large that it's skin, when stretched to dry, covered one end of a good-sized cabin. A bear is measured from the tip of the nose to the root of the tail; not that it would do much good to measure to the end of the tail, for this appendage is notoriously short. Despite the size of its tail, the grizzly is commonly a large bear, and many of the stories in this collection comment on its great size. An interesting footnote to the tale of Old Ephraim is that when his skull was presented to the Smithsonian Institution by the Boy Scouts of Cache Valley, the year following his death, the curator reported that it was the largest grizzly specimen they had had an opportunity to examine - a statement that the Smithsonian recently confirmed.

[Admin Pete]

Brown Bears by Melissa Gish.

The largest brown bear ever, a 2,130-pound Kodiak named Clyde, died at the Dakota Zoo in Bismarck, North Dakota, in 1987. According to zoo director Terry Lincoln, Clyde probably weighed close to 2400 lbs a year earlier He still had a fat layer of 9 inches when he died.

[Admin Pete]

The Grizzly by Enos A. Mills.

The grizzly always appears larger than he really is. The average weight is between three hundred and fifty to six hundred pounds; males weigh a fourth more than females. Few grizzlies weigh more than seven hundred pounds, though exceptional specimens are known to have weighed more than one thousand. Adams gave the weight of "Samson," a California grizzly, as fifteen hundred pounds, and a few Alaskan grizzlies, judging by their skins, may have weighed more than "Samson." It may be that years ago, when not so closely hunted, the grizzly lived longer and grew to a larger size than he attains today.

[Admin Pete]

The greatest weight recorded for a Kodiak bear in the wild is 1656 lb for a male shot at English Bay. Kodiak Island in 1894 by J C Tolman. The stretched skin (pegged to the side of a cabin on a frame and then weighted with rocks at the bottom edge for maximum effect) measured 13 ft 6in from the tip of the nose to the root of the tail, and the hindfoot was 18in long (Phillips-Wolley. 1894).

[Admin Pete]

Himalayan Brown Bear
Amur/Ussuri/Manchurian Brown Bear
Gobi Bear
Kodiak Bear
North American Brown Bear - Grizzly
Alaskan Peninsula Brown Bear
European Brown Bear
Mongolian Brown Bear
Syrian Brown Bear
East Siberian Brown Bear
Tibetan Brown Bear
Kamchatka Brown Bear
Hokkaido Brown Bear

[Admin Pete]

Grizzly bear

[Admin Pete]

[Admin Pete]

[Admin Pete]

[Admin Pete]

[Admin Pete]

[Admin Pete]

The Bear Almanac by Gary Brown.
STRENGTH - Bears possess enormous strength, regardless of species or size. The strength of a bear is difficult to measure, but observations alone ( bears moving rocks, carrying animal carcasses, removing large logs from the side of a cabin, and digging cavernous holes ) are indicative of incredible power.
A study team at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, found that a grizzly bear could treat a 700-pound garbage dumpster like a beach ball, while it took a minimum of two persons just to tip the dumpster. The team concluded the strength of a "calm" grizzly is two-and-a-half to five times that of a human.
No animal of equal size is as powerful. A bear may kill a moose, an elk, or a deer by a single blow to the neck with a powerful foreleg, then lift the carcass in its mouth and carry it for great distances. "The strength... is in keeping with his size," describes Ben East in 'Bears'. "He is very powerfully built, a heavy skeleton overlaid with thick layers of muscle as strong as rawhide rope. He can hook his long, grizzly-like front claws under a slab of rock that three grown men could not lift, and flip it over almost effortlessly... a brown bear took a thousand-pound steer a half mile up an almost vertical mountain, much of the way through alder tangles with trunks three or four inches thick."
Strength and power are not only attributes of large bears but also of the young. The author observed a yearling American black bear searching for insects turn over a flat-shaped rock that was between 310 and 325 pounds "backhanded" with a single foreleg. The bear was captured the following day in a management action and was found to weigh only 120 pounds.
Brown Bear ( Ursus arctos ) The brown bear is the most diverse bear in size. Its color is variable, though generally brown, and an individual's is relatively uniform. It has a dished face ( dished-in profile ); short, round ears that are small compared to the skull; and long claws on the front paws. With its strong build, great strength, thick head, and large hump over the shoulder, it is the largest omnivore.
The remarkable and distinguished "hump" is actually a mass of muscle that, coupled with long claws, provides the brown bear with great digging ability.
Brown bears have a hump between their shoulders that is covered with long hair and is normally a reliable means of species identification. The long hair often accentuates the hump when the hackles are raised. This distinguishing feature is a distinctive mass of muscle that provides brown bears with their exceptional digging ability and the powerful striking force of their forepaws.

[Admin Pete]

by Blaire Van Valkenburgh

SPEED AND STRENGTH
The skeletons of a bear and a domestic dog illustrate the difference between plantigrade and digitigrade postures. The dog is digitigrade, standing on its toes with the soles of its feet (metapodials) off the ground. By contrast, the soles of the bear's hindfeet are flat to the ground, as in humans, giving it a plantigrade posture.

If one imagines the additional energy required to walk or run with ankle weights or heavy shoes, then the drawbacks of heavy feet become clear. There are yet further benefits to runners in having long tendinous muscle attachments. Tendons are elastic and act as energy-saving springs when running. They are stretched as the limb is flexed under the weight of the animal and then rebound, propelling the body forward and upward. So, digitigrade posture, long metapodials, and compact muscles with stretchy tendons are typical of carnivores built for speed.

Bears are clearly not built for speed. Although their forefeet are semi-digitigrade, their hind-feet are plantigrade. Moreover, their metapodials are short and their muscles thick throughout the length of the limb. In many ways, bears are built more like badgers than other similar-sized carnivores, such as tigers, and it shows in their speed. The top speed recorded for both black and brown bears is 50 kilometers (30 miles) per hour, whereas the range for the fully digitigrade lion and wolf is 55 to 65 kilometers (35 to 40 miles) per hour.


If bears are not built for speed, then what does the combination of massive limbs, plantigrade hindfeet, cumbersome paws, and a short back provide? Strength and mobility of limb movement are the answers. The stout limbs of bears are capable of producing large forces over a much greater range of motion than those of dogs or even cats. Bears use these capabilities when digging for food or shelter, fishing for salmon, climbing to escape danger, and battling with members of their own species as well as other predators. Imagine a wolf trying to perform a bear hug or climb a tree. Dogs have forfeited these abilities in favor of speed. Cats are more like bears in their range of possible movements, but lack strength. Bears may not be able to outrun danger, but can successfully defend themselves through brute force.

[Admin Pete]

wildfact.com/forum/attachment.php?aid=292 Login required

Conclusion: Bears are noted to be extremely strong by both literature and first-hand accounts, and this approach is also true for very young bears. The ratio of the vertical pulling weight to the young bear's weight approximated at 4.624x, and the ratio of the horizontal pulling weight to the young bear's weight approximated at 20.550x, slightly more than 20 times his own body weight. Powerlifters and other humans, who lift according to their body's maximum loads, will usually vertically-pull 2.5 to 3.5 times their body weight. The power of the young bear in this experiment was astonishing, and this finding could provide more light into the muscle function of not only brown bears, but all bear species in general.

[Admin Pete]

American Serengeti by Dan Flores - 2016.

But of course it wasn't just dinosaurs they were finding. Up and down the plains, from West Texas to the Canadian border and beyond, the paleontologists excavated boxcars of fossil materials pointing to other giants that had lived much more recently than 65-plus million years ago. As nineteenth-and-twentieth-century scientists began to recreate the world of the Late Pleistocene, they invented a term - "charismatic megafauna" - to characterize a suite of African-like animals whose bones they were unearthing. It turned out that the American Serengeti had possessed lions ( Panthera, the giant steppe lion ), elephants in the form of mammoths, cheetah-like cats related to modern cougars, along with saber-toothed and scimitar cats that preyed on mammoth calves, giant ground sloths, and probably huge, long-horned bison. Skeletal material showed what was a remarkably gracile short-faced bear that ambushed almost every prey speicies. The American Serengeti had hyenas, a fast, hunting version, and giant wolves called dire wolves, which pulled down distinctively American-evolved prey from bands of camels and the incredibly plentiful herds of wild horses. That American bestiary was the closest analogue of the creatures of the African Plains and veldt anywhere in the world. Teddy Roosevelt is supposed to have said of his train ride out of Nairobi in 1910 that it was a "railroad through the Pleistocene."