Top 8 Tips to Understanding Bear Behaviour
Top 8 Tips to Understanding Bear Behaviour
AiM for Bear Awareness this Summer. Many of our employees and co-workers are back in the field sharing space with bears and other wildlife in our beautiful province. At AiM, we take educating our teams about Bear Awareness very seriously because we know how important it is for the both bears and our people.
Our Top 8 Tips to Understanding Bear Behaviour are:
1) Bears are NOT ferocious. They are NOT mean or malicious. Bears are normally shy, retiring animals that have very little desire to interact with humans. Unless they are forced to be around humans to be near a food source, they usually choose to avoid us.
2) Bears, like humans and other animals, have a “critical space” – an area around them that they may defend. Once you have entered a bear’s critical space, you have forced the bear to act – either to run away or be aggressive. The size of the critical space is different for every bear and every situation.
3) Bears, like people, react to threats by evaluating their potential danger. Grizzlies are more likely than black bears to defend themselves when threatened. A black bear’s first line of defence is retreat, but grizzlies, especially sows with cubs, can be very aggressive towards other bears and people they perceive as threats.
4) Bears are very curious and will inspect odours, noises and objects to determine if they are edible or playable. Standing up on its hind legs allows a bear to get more information from its senses of smell, sight and hearing. It is a sign of curiosity, not aggression.
5) You can communicate with a bear in much the same way you might communicate with your pet dog. When my dog strolls through the neighbourhood, all the neighbours pet her and are nice to her – they welcome her to their yards. And so she continues to visit them. If, on the other hand, all my neighbours yelled at her and pelted her with rocks, she would learn to stay away and never visit them. It works the same way with bears.
6) Black bears, for instance, are usually less aggressive and more tolerant of people. They often live near human settlements, whereas grizzly bears prefer to stay away from human settlements and are often extirpated from heavily used or populated areas.
7) Many of the behaviours that fearful people might think are ferocious are actually expressions of the bear’s own anxiety. Most bear attacks are defensive, based on fear.
8) Bears are intelligent and try to communicate with humans as they do with other animals. Bear behaviour can be predictable. The more you can learn about bears and how they behave, the less likely you will be to have a negative encounter or misinterpret interactions.
Despite our best intentions and precautions, bear encounters still occur. To learn more about bear behaviour click here ...
