Eight Bears
My Summary
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I found Eight Bears to be a fascinating, and eye-opening read about the eight extant bear species living on earth. The stories of each bear are explored from a ecological and historical perspective with ample writing addressing the plight of each species.
Overall a very enjoyable read and one which opened my eyes to some elements of the bruin world I never knew existed.
Highlights
I’d come to Boulder from Canada, a place that the country’s founders had once considered naming Ursalia, meaning “place of bears,” for its abundant bruins. — location: 53
When such a promise proves hard to keep in Zeus’s presence, Artemis transforms Kallisto into a bear as punishment for her unchastity. Kallisto’s son, Arkas, later hunts his mother, not recognizing the bear as his own flesh and blood. Zeus intervenes, sending Kallisto and her son to live on among the burning stars as Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. — location: 161
In one Greek myth, the nymph Kallisto strolls through the forest and swears to the goddess Artemis that she will remain a virgin. When such a promise proves hard to keep in Zeus’s presence, Artemis transforms Kallisto into a bear as punishment for her unchastity. Kallisto’s son, Arkas, later hunts his mother, not recognizing the bear as his own flesh and blood. Zeus intervenes, sending Kallisto and her son to live on among the burning stars as Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. — location: 160
The bear lineage diverged around thirty million years ago, when global changes in the environment spurred a compendium of carnivores to split off from a group of slinky mammals with sharp teeth, known as the Miacidae, that resembled today’s civets or martens. — location: 174
seals (science suggests that this is the bear family’s closest living relative), — location: 176
the first human ancestor only appeared around seven million years ago. — location: 179
Polar bears appeared on northern seacoasts around five hundred thousand years ago, making them the world’s “newest” bear species. — location: 188
There are thirty-five species of canines, from wolves to dholes, jackals to foxes. Felines number forty-one. — location: 207
Today, we are left with just eight species of bears. — location: 210
Similarly, the Australian drop bear is also a not-a-bear, nor an animal at all. This fictitious creature, Thylarctos plummetus, is nothing more than a hoax designed to scare American tourists. — location: 228
At nine hundred thousand strong, black bears are more numerous than the seven other bear species combined. — location: 258
The Old Norse word berserkr translates to “bear shirt.” — location: 272
the Inuit say the polar bear—Nanuq— — location: 282
First Nations leaders and scientists have put forward the argument that the grizzly bear and polar bear are cultural keystone species with the power to advance reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people through the bears’ continued restoration and conservation. — location: 291
In 1902, Roosevelt went on a four-day bear hunting trip to the forests of Mississippi. He soon fell behind his hunting guide, who ran off ahead with his hounds and cornered a small female black bear. The distressed bear attacked one of the dogs, crushing its spine, then went at another. The guide jumped into the fray and cracked the bear on the head with the butt of his rifle. Tying the helpless black bear to a willow tree, he called for the president to come and finish the kill. When poor Teddy finally caught up, he refused to shoot the semiconscious bear as he believed it was lacking in sportsmanship. Instead, the bedraggled Roosevelt instructed his companions to kill the bear with a knife and put the animal out of its misery. This questionable act of compassion soon made its way into the newspapers as a political cartoon labeled “Drawing the Line in Mississippi,” and it featured a small feeble black bear with big round ears. This cartoon would allegedly serve as the inspiration for the first “Teddy” bear. By the end of the decade, nearly a million of the stuffed toys were in production. — location: 377
1990, herpetologists deemed the extinct golden toad, once abundant in a minuscule 1.5-square-mile patch of cloud forest in Monteverde, to be the first victim of climate change. — location: 486
cloud forests make up just 3 percent of the earth’s tropical forests. — location: 518
The Ukuku is a mythical creature said to be half man, half spectacled bear that falls outside of whatever taboo exists around physical ursine artifacts in South America. — location: 692
parable for the plight of thousands of human refugees and the cost — location: 825
Created by Niall Bell (niall@niallbell.com)
The sloth bear is responsible for more human fatalities than any of the other seven bear species, — location: 861
(India contains more of the world’s bear species than any other nation.) — location: 869
Today, biologists consider the sloth bear to be “the most dangerous wild animal in India.” It is difficult to overstate the ferocity of the sloth bear. — location: 879
The country surpassed China in 2023 to become the world’s most populous nation. — location: 948
It was a luxury, I realized, to conceive of these animals as fable protagonists, majestic arbiters of wilderness, and cuddly cartoon characters. In many parts of India, the sloth bear is a force of devastation. — location: 1059
Kalandars, a nomadic Muslim ethnic group that travels across North India and Pakistan, enslaved the bears as entertainers in the courts of Mughal emperors and Rajput kings between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. — location: 1132
A bear named Raju is touted as the last dancing bear rescued in India. Wildlife SOS liberated him in 2009. — location: 1196
Droughts are known to exacerbate human-wildlife conflict; during a bad one in the late 1980s, there were more than one hundred wild animal attacks in Gujarat. Twenty people were killed. — location: 1262
The gray-brick headquarters and forty panda enclosures were built along Qingcheng’s ambling roots. The mountain is considered the birthplace of Taoism and remains one of the most important Taoist centers in modern China, though today the pandas seemed a bigger draw. — location: 1317
And though nearly five hundred species of bamboo grow in China, the bears only eat around sixty of them. Three are their favorite. — location: 1333
In a recent Beijing Institute of Culture Innovation and Communication survey of cultural icons—which included Confucius, kung fu, and green tea—the panda was found to be the most widely regarded symbol of Chinese culture outside the country. — location: 1397
So, in the 1960s, Mao Zedong’s party created four wild panda reserves and banned all Chinese hunting of the bear. Anyone caught poaching a panda faced jail time or, under grave circumstances, the death penalty. — location: 1478
(In 2017, China changed the maximum penalty for panda poaching and smuggling to “not less than 10 years or life imprisonment and a forfeiture of property.”) — location: 1481
During the 1970s and 1980s, there were two mass flowering events in western China. Vast acreages of arrow bamboo withered. Scientists found the bodies of 138 pandas in Sichuan’s Min Mountains, — location: 1489
For example, after Xi Jinping was photographed looking a little pudgy next to a lean Barack Obama in 2013, Internet memes drew snide comparisons between Xi and Winnie-the-Pooh. In response, government censors blocked all Pooh memes and the government banned the release of the Christopher Robin movie in China. (Suffice to say, China’s panda love does not extend to fictional bears.) Officials labeled such jabs as a “serious effort to undermine the dignity of the presidential office and Xi himself.” Oh, bother. — location: 1537
When this strategy failed, they screened panda pornography and administered herbal remedies to bolster the bears’ libido. “We used Chinese Lion Pills and even Viagra,” Zhang explained. Still, nothing. Zhang, trying everything he could think of, eventually patronized an adult toy shop in Chengdu to purchase a female genital stimulator for the pandas. Despite his noble efforts, the pandas remained stubbornly abstinent. The females were barren. No fuzzy, tumbling cubs brought cheer to the center’s empty enclosures. — location: 1566
After grabbing coffee at the restaurant, where a large portrait of Steve Jobs with a panda eating an apple hung next to the espresso machine, I headed to the Moon — location: 1597
A group of pandas is called an “embarrassment” — location: 1598
Pandas, I learned, are actually born at a developmental stage considered premature in all other mammal species. Pushed out at around 135 days, the bears are effectively exiting the womb in the equivalent of the third trimester. — location: 1615
And Australia, France, and Canada all received loaner pandas after agreeing to sell uranium to China. — location: 1650
Among experts who study Sino relations, such ursine bribery is known as “panda diplomacy.” China prefers the term “friendship envoys.” The — location: 1651
Xiang Xiang, the first bear Zhang released in 2006, fell off a cliff and died less than a year after he’d been set free. — location: 1707
The census found a marked increase over the previous 1998–2002 survey, which recorded just 1,596 individuals. — location: 1728
Each vial sold for between 25,000 and 50,000 dong, between $1 and $2, depending on purity. — location: 1810
BEAR BILE HAS BEEN USED in traditional medicine for thousands of years. — location: 1820
Bear bile is no snake oil cure. Unlike rhino horn, tiger penis, and pangolin scales, which have no proven benefits to human health, medical scientists have found that ursodeoxycholic acid—the active molecule found in bile—can reduce inflammation and lower cholesterol. — location: 1825
the molecule was found to slow the progress of neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and Alzheimer’s, and — location: 1830
the sun bear is the smallest of all eight bear species— — location: 1894
BEAR FARMING IS NO LONGER LEGAL in Vietnam. The government outlawed the practice in 2005 following aggressive lobbying by animal welfare groups—a rare success story in the dark world of wildlife trafficking. — location: 1985
Bear farming, Crudge said, “definitely didn’t help and may have hurt wild bear populations. It created a demand for having bears and a market for live bear cubs.” — location: 2076
Lake Tahoe Basin—a textbook example of the wildland-urban interface—is known not just for its azure waters, but as ground zero for black bear–human conflict in the United States. — location: 2216
The American black bear is the world’s most bountiful bear — location: 2220
Running through the ecology of American black bears, he and his colleagues concluded that odiferous garbage left unsecured by clueless tourists must be drawing bears out of the wild. — location: 2250
Tahoe’s urban bears were staying up until January. Five of the thirty-eight tracked bears never entered a den at all. — location: 2262
Between the 1990s and 2000s, the number of interactions involving bears and humans skyrocketed by 1,000 percent. Yet the actual number of bears in the Lake Tahoe Basin hadn’t increased. — location: 2291
bears enter a food-frenzied stage called hyperphagia to prepare for hibernation and, in the case of females, giving birth. — location: 2304
All bear species except sun bears experience a phenomenon known as delayed implantation during the reproductive cycle. — location: 2305
In wild black bears, a male bear’s sperm will fertilize the female’s egg during the summer, but the early-stage embryo, known as a blastocyst, won’t implant on her uterine wall until late autumn. — location: 2306
The strongest correlation: more people living, playing, and working in the wildland-urban interface. — location: 2316
Aided by a large brain relative to their body size and a super-sniffer nose—bears can smell about two thousand times better than any human and seven times better than a slobbering bloodhound—bears are capable not only of locating human food, but of figuring out how to gain access to it, even if that requires breaking into an RV, cabin, or bear-resistant trash bin. — location: 2341
China’s Qinling Mountains, where temperatures regularly reach −5°C (23°F), scientists have found that pandas ingeniously smear themselves with horse manure to bolster their cold tolerance. — location: 2348
bears have outperformed the great apes I’ve worked with on many tasks.” — location: 2387
General Sherman, the world’s largest tree, holds residence here. — location: 2401
In 2015, she published Speaking of Bears, a book about the ursine crisis in American national parks and subsequent rewilding efforts. — location: 2451
The United States Congress formally established Yosemite as a national park in 1890. — location: 2462
(Decades later, a study found that neither grizzly bears nor black bears showed a heightened interest in menstrual blood—but, terrifyingly, polar bears did.) — location: 2537
a carved wooden plaque that sat next to her computer. “This is one of my favorites,” she chuckled. It read: “At the root of the bear problem in Yosemite is the overlap in intelligence between the smartest bear and the dumbest camper.” — location: 2564
She had learned to break into backpackers’ bear canisters—supposedly bear-proof jars used to store food—by batting them off a 400-foot-high cliff so that they shattered. The bear then scrambled down to the bottom to feast on its spilled contents. — location: 2603
As such, world-renowned wildlife photographer Thomas Mangelsen entered the lottery in hopes of winning a tag to spare a bear’s life by shooting it with a camera instead of a gun. — location: 2843
Miraculously, Mangelsen was one of them. — location: 2846
depredation—the term used to describe domesticated animals killed by bears. — location: 2893
(Canada is the only nation that still allows for the international export of polar bear hides and the only nation that permits the sport hunting of polar bears.) — location: 3084
It had been over a decade since the Canadian government began limiting the number of bears that could be harvested and restricting hunting permits to Indigenous people or to sport hunters with an Indigenous guide. — location: 3082
(male bears can’t wear radio collars because their necks are wider than their skulls). — location: 3095
But eventually, dirt or tannins from the peat tinge their fur a creamy yellow. — location: 3104
THE WORLD’S POLAR BEARS ARE SPREAD OUT across nineteen populations in five nations that range from the unforgiving icescapes of Svalbard, to the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Siberia, to Greenland, to Alaska’s North Slope, — location: 3116
The Inuit were the descendants of the Thule, — location: 3139
Some stories say that the Inuit learned to hunt seals from the polar bear. — location: 3140
His court hastily fashioned a muzzle and chain for the bear so that the great animal could be walked, like a dog, down to the riverbank. Here, the polar bear was affixed to a long, staked rope and allowed to swim in the river and fish for himself. — location: 3154
Most notably, in 1252, King Haakon of Norway gifted England’s monarch, Henry III, a polar bear. — location: 3146
Satellite records show we’ve lost roughly one-third of summer sea ice cover since 1979. — location: 3182
bears only eat the blubber— — location: 3190
A single adult ringed seal weighs about 150 pounds, providing enough energy for a polar bear to go eight days without eating before it needs to feed again. — location: 3190
In 2015, the bears fasted for approximately 177 days. This extreme diet has taken a toll on the population, which has declined by around 50 percent since 1987 and dropped roughly 27 percent just since 2016. — location: 3202
NOBODY LOCKS THEIR DOORS IN CHURCHILL. The prefabricated houses, painted drab shades of gray and blue, are left unsecured at all times should some unlucky person need to take emergency shelter from a prowling polar bear. — location: 3217
“What happened to the bear yesterday?” I asked. “Did he go to jail?” Jail, in this context, was the government-run Polar Bear Holding Facility, D-20, located in an old military aircraft hangar out on the tundra. It opened in the early 1980s with twenty cells to house offending bears while they awaited the formation of the sea ice. — location: 3366
But the female offspring of polar bears and grizzly bears are fertile; two pizzly bears can mate and produce more little pizzlies, or “grolars,” if you prefer. — location: 3470