John Leddy, age 10, of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, for his question:
DO BEARS HIBERNATE?
There are seven species of bears: the big brown bear, the American black bear, the Asiatic black bear, the polar bear, the sun bear, the sloth bear and the spectacled bear. King of them all is the Alaskan brown bear, the largest meat eating animal that lives on land. He grows to be about nine feet long and weighs more than 1,500 pounds.
Bears are large, powerful animals. Most live north of the equator and can be found in North America, Asia, Europe and the Arctic near the North Pole. One species, the spectacled bear, lives in South America, but there are no wild bears in Africa, Australia or Antarctica.
Bears like to live alone. They do not gather into packs. A male and a female bear may live together for about a month, but then the male wanders off and the female is left alone to look for a place for her babies to be born.
Bears spend most of the winter sleeping. They get ready for the long winter's nap by eating so much food that they become fat.
A bear will usually select a cave, a brush pile or a hollow log to use as a den. Sometimes a bear will build a shelter of twigs or dig a shallow hole in a hillside. The den is used to protect the bear from the winter weather.
A female polar bear, getting ready to have babies, will find an ice cave or dig a den in the snow. Most male polar bears do not sleep through the winter.
Most people believe that bears hibernate. They do not. Bears do spend much of the winter sleeping, but it is not true hibernation. The body temperature of a bear during the winter sleep does not drop as much as that of true hibernators. In fact, bears quite often wake up and walk around on mild winter days.
Most bear cubs are born during the mother's long winter sleep. A female bear will usually have two cubs at a time, but occasionally there is only one and from time to time a bear may have as many as four. The cubs weigh only about a pound at birth and have no fur. It takes about a month for a baby bear's eyes to open and about the same length of time to grow a thick, soft coat of fur.
Baby cubs will stay in the den with their mother for about two months. In the spring they will come out to play and travel with their mother. By the first autumn each baby will weigh about 40 pounds. The babies stay with the mother for one or two years, and during this time she teaches them to hunt for food and to take care of themselves.