Black bear Facts

About the black bear

Forests are its main home, though hunger sometimes pulls it past the tree line and even into towns where food is easy to grab. What it eats shifts with the season and the place, since it is an omnivore. Mid-1990s surveys counted somewhere between 396,000 and 476,000 black bears across seven Canadian provinces, and in the United States the range runs almost unbroken along the Appalachians from Maine to northern Georgia.

Its family tree holds a surprise. Black bears are not close kin to brown or polar bears; their nearest relative is the Asian black bear, which they split from about 4.08 million years ago. Flexible eating habits may explain why this bear made it through the last Ice Age while more specialized predators such as the giant short-faced bear died out. It has been gone from Prince Edward Island since 1937.

Did you know?

• The world's black bears are thought to outnumber all other bear species combined, about two to one.
• The earliest American black bear fossils come from Port Kennedy, Pennsylvania.
• Sixteen subspecies are traditionally listed, though a 2015 genetic study questioned some of them.