They’re curious, clever, deeply maternal, occasionally cranky, and—much like your favourite mischievous cousin at a family reunion—always two steps from either a cuddle or a wrestling match.
Bear play looks adorable from afar—soft paws swatting, roly-poly wrestling, mock charges that end in huffing and zoomies—but make no mistake: this is serious business.
For young black bears and grizzlies, play is the curriculum of survival.
You will recognize the mouthing and pawing in bears if you have ever watched dogs playfighting. It has that same feel but with a much bigger smack.
Even the classic “stand up and paw slap” routine teaches social cues, dominance negotiation, and how to not get clobbered during adult interactions later on.
Scientists have documented adult grizzlies sliding down snow patches on their backs and black bears engaging in curious-object play, poking logs, tossing salmon carcasses, and investigating anything that smells even remotely like an adventure.
Interactions between bears are a delicate dance of dominance, tolerance, and opportunism.
Adult females tend to keep to themselves, especially when raising cubs, while males roam wider territories and have higher tolerance thresholds—at least until another big male wanders too close to a prime feeding spot.
During salmon runs, though, everything changes. Suddenly you’ll see a whole cast of characters congregate along rivers: veteran matriarchs who fish with surgical precision, rowdy subadults who think stealth means “splash loudly until the fish give up,” and massive males who square off in dominance displays worthy of a heavyweight title card.
Most conflicts end with bluff charges, raised hackles, and guttural woofs, but real fights—when they happen—are fast, violent, and rarely forgotten by the loser.
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| Maternal Tenderness: Mamma & Cub |
Cubs are born in winter dens, impossibly tiny—around 300 to 500 grams—and almost hairless, little squeaking marshmallows who depend entirely on their mother’s warmth and fat reserves.
Over the next 18–30 months, a mother teaches her young everything: which plants won’t poison you, how to find grubs by the sound of a rotting stump, how to climb fast when trouble arrives, and how to read the moods of other bears.
Her tenderness is matched only by her ferocity. A mother bear defending cubs is one of the most formidable forces in the forest, and even adult males—three times her size—think twice before pushing their luck.
Where Bears Appear in the Fossil Record
Bears are relative newcomers in deep time, with the earliest ursoids emerging in the late Eocene, around 38 million years ago. True bears (family Ursidae) appear in the early Miocene, and by the Pliocene and Pleistocene, the Pacific Northwest was home to a rich lineup of ursids, including the mighty Arctodus simus, the short-faced bear—one of the largest terrestrial carnivores to ever live in North America.
Black bears show up in the fossil record around the mid-Pleistocene, with fossils found in caves and river-cut sediments from British Columbia down to California. Grizzly bears, originally a Eurasian species, crossed the Bering land bridge during the Pleistocene, leaving their remains in Late Pleistocene deposits from Alaska through western Canada.
Today, the Pacific Northwest remains a stronghold for bears:
Black bears are the most numerous, with an estimated 25,000–35,000 individuals in British Columbia alone, and healthy populations throughout Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. They’re adaptable, omnivorous, and just clever enough to defeat most human attempts at bear-proofing.
Grizzly bears (coastal and interior populations) are far fewer. British Columbia hosts an estimated 13,000–15,000, though distribution varies greatly.
Coastal bears—brown bear or spirit bears—are more numerous and enjoy a salmon-rich in diet, while interior grizzlies face more fragmented landscapes and higher conflict pressures. In the Lower 48, grizzlies number around 2,000, clustered mainly in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems.
Conservation efforts, especially Indigenous-led stewardship across the Great Bear Rainforest and interior plateaus, continue to shape recovery, resilience, and coexistence strategies for both species.
