Bears

Bears

2. What is your favorite bear?  Milly

3. Have you touched a bear before? -sam

1. What encouraged you to start liking bears?- Heith.

4. Bears are often found in myths and many cultures connect with them spiritually.  Why do you think this is?  Mrs Roil.

There are many different species of bear, this includes the Brown bear, Asian black bear, Sun bear, Giant panda, Spectacled bear, Indian sloth bear, and finally the Polar bear. The atlas bear is one of the subspecies of the brown bear, which is the only bear native to Africa. Sadly the Atlas bear has been extinct since the 1870s. The most widespread species is the brown bear, which comes from Western Europe eastwards through Asia to the western areas of North America. The American black bear is restricted to North America, and the polar bear is restricted to the Arctic Sea. All the remaining species are Asian.

Ever since I was little girl I tried forcing my mum to buy me a bear, she took it the wrong way and brought me a stuffed toy. I always said we could keep a real bear in the shed with a dog bowl of water. She refused.  I first started liking bears when I was 1 and a half when my grandad started hunting. He read me heaps of stories about bears in America and how he was going to travel there and be the first of his friends to kill one. When I was little I was convinced that a grizzly bear was the only bear in the world. I found out not long after that there are other bears and I then decided that sun bears are my favourite. I like the very long tongue that sunbears use, and how they stand on their back legs to look around.  I was lucky enough to feed a sun bear at the Wellington zoo. The zookeeper said when sun bears are tired they are very restless.

Because of their spirit-like appearance, spirit bears hold a place in the oral stories Scientists have found that black bears are not as effective at catching fish as white bears, as the white bears are less visible from the perspective of the fish. While at night the two colours of bears have similar success rates at catching fish, such as salmon, during the day the white bears are 30% more effective. Which is why the white kermode bear is most known as the spirit bear.

The Kermode bear was named after Francis Kermode, former director of the Royal B.C. Museum, who researched the subspecies and a colleague of William Hornaday, the zoologist who described it.