Black bears are very smart and curious animals. The black bear is the most common and most widespread bear in North America, and it lives across much of the continent, from Alaska and Canada through the United States to Mexico. As of November 2026, the IUCN Red List lists the American black bear as Least Concern.

The black bear is the smallest of the bears that live in North America. An adult black bear is about three feet tall at the shoulder, and standing up on its hind legs it is about five feet tall. Adult male black bears are bigger than adult females. A large male can weigh over 600 pounds, while a female seldom weighs more than 200 pounds. Some black bears are brown or cinnamon colored instead of black.

Black bears eat both plants and animals. What a black bear eats changes with the seasons. It eats grasses and other green plants in spring, berries in summer, and nuts in fall. In many places only a small part of what black bears eat is animal matter, mostly colonial insects and grubs. Black bears help spread the seeds of the plants they eat. Where salmon are available, they eat salmon in late summer and fall.

In fall, black bears eat a lot of fruits and nuts to build up fat for the winter. Black bears spend the winter in dens, and a den can be a hollow log, a hollow tree, or a space under tree roots or rocks. A black bear may hibernate for five to seven months of the year. In the far north, it may stay dormant in its den for about seven months. In its den it does not eat or drink for months.

Let us follow a cub. After mating in summer, the black bear's fertilized egg does not start to grow until fall. Black bear cubs are born in winter, in the mother bear's den. Newborn cubs are blind and have almost no hair. They are among the smallest babies, compared with their mother's size, of any mammal. The cubs stay in the den with their mother all winter, and she feeds them.

Let us see what the next year brings. Spring, when black bears come out of their dens, is a hard time to find food. A mother black bear most often has two cubs at a time, and she has cubs every other year when there is enough food. Cubs stay with their mother for about a year and a half, and black bear cubs go into the den with their mother again the next winter.

Words to know

• curious: eager to learn
• dormant: winter rest
• grubs: young insects
• hibernate: sleep the winter