What is it?
BLACK BEAR (may be black, brown, reddish or grayish in color)

How big is it?
200-600 pounds!!!

What does it eat (forage)?
Mainly fruits, nuts, insects; but will eat mice, dead animals, and human garbage or food.

Where does it live (habitat)?
Forests, wooded mountains.

What does it do (behavior)?
Bears hibernate during the winter (sleep in a den). They need to put on a lot of fat to survive the winter, and even so they are very thin when they wake up in the spring

When bears hibernate their metabolism drops to about 50% (temperature drops to about 40 degrees, heartbeat drops from 50 to 15 beats per minute.

Baby bears are born while their mother is hibernating.

Signs:
Claw marks on trees

Big rocks overturned

Scat:
Changes the way it looks depending on what the bear is eating, may contain berry seeds, twigs, wood. May look like a small cow-pie or more like dog poop.

Poop Fact:
Bears do not poop at all while hibernating (for 5-8 months!), one of the things to look for in the spring is many many piles of bear scat near the den where the bear gets rid of a whole winter's worth of poop all at once.