These majestic animals are under serious threat from climate change. To celebrate these beautiful creatures and raise awareness of their situation, we hope you enjoy these photos and polar bear facts:Īlthough they share a lot in common with other bears, polar bears are in fact marine mammals. If you're fascinated by these magnificent marine mammals, get ready to scroll! Photos of polar bears In this photo special, we've gathered together some of the greatest polar bear pictures out there. Most estimates put the number at between 25,000 and 35,000. One of the world's most iconic creatures, the awe-inspiring polar bear lives in the planet's Arctic region. After washing out dissolvable materials we found this scat was chock-full of hawthorne seeds (inset).See stunning polar bear pictures from around the world’s polar region, where these magnificent creatures live in the wild. Arrowwood berries have a high fat content and are favored by bears.īears often feed heavily on an abundant food source. This late summer scat is made up almost entirely of downy arrowwood berries. The seeds of blueberries are very small and look like sand. Instead, they swallow them whole and let their muscular stomach grind the pulp off the seeds. Blueberry droppings usually include a lot of whole berries that were not soft and ripe enough to be broken up in the bear’s muscular stomach. A characteristic of black bear droppings is that they have a pleasant odor when the bear has been eating fruit and/or vegetation.Īn actual blueberry dropping. Most of the obvious seeds in this black bear dropping are raspberry, with one chokecherry pit showing. Bears prefer sarsaparilla, so often the droppings found at the height of blueberry season are composed mostly of wild sarsaparilla seeds.
Wild sarsaparilla berries ripen in late July and early August near the middle of the longer blueberry season. They differ from blueberry droppings in color and by having flat half-moon-shaped seeds rather than seeds that look like sand. Sarsaparilla droppings can be reddish to dark purple. Air and sun have turned it black.Ĭonveniently flattened on a road for easy examination, this dropping is composed almost entirely of wild sarsaparilla seeds. This dropping is from a black bear that has been eating mostly vegetation. Bear droppings have different shapes and consistencies depending upon the food eaten. A 6-year-old female climbed high in the tree and pulled in the branch tips to feed.Ī fresh dropping consisting mostly of vegetation. This April scat is made up almost entirely of big-tooth aspen catkins. Blood tests showed that researchers who had handled bear scats for decades were negative for any of these microorganisms. Scats from meat may be watery.īear scats don’t hold the contagious microorganisms some carnivore droppings do. Scats from succulent vegetation or berries are typically loose. Loose or watery scats do not mean the bear is sick-only that the bear was eating moist foods. Look under a microscope for more detail.īlack bear scats typically weigh ½ to 1 pound or more. It forces a person to learn details of vein patterns in leaves and exactly what different kinds of seeds or hairs or insects look like. Sometimes finding matching items takes close observation. Match these clues up with items in the area to learn bear diets.
In addition to the smell, look for seeds, leaf fragments, insect parts, hairs, bone fragments, scales, etc. Scats that contain meat or garbage smell somewhat foul but nothing like the feces of dogs, cats, or primates. Distinctive smells like strawberries come through clearly. In those cases, the scats smell like a slightly fermented version of whatever the bear ate. People are always surprised to find that black bear scats do not have an unpleasant smell if the bears ate only fruit, nuts, acorns, or vegetation.
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