Grizzly bears Vs Brown bears: facts and differences | Wildlife Documentary

Hello everyone, welcome back to Wildlifepedia. Today let's know more about grizzly bears and brown bears subspecies. The grizzly bear is a kind of brown bear. Many people in North America use the common name, grizzly bear, to refer to the smaller and lighter colored bear that occurs in interior areas and the term, brown bear, to refer to the larger and typically darker colored bear in coastal areas. However, most of these bears are now considered the same subspecies. In North America there are two subspecies of brown bear, Ursus arctos. The Kodiak bear, which occurs only on the islands of the Kodiak archipelago, and the grizzly bear, which occurs everywhere else. Brown bears also occur in Russia, Europe, Scandinavia, and Asia. Grizzly bears are large and range in color from very light tan, almost white, to dark brown. They have a dished face, short, rounded ears, and a large shoulder hump. The hump is where a mass of muscles attach to the bear's backbone and give the bear additional strength for digging. They have very long claws on their front feet that also give them extra ability to dig after food and to dig their dens. Grizzly bears weigh upward of 700 pounds or 315 kilograms. The males are heavier than the females and can weigh 200 to 300 kilograms or about 400 to 600 pounds. A large female can weigh 110 to 160 kilograms or about 250 to 350 pounds in the lower 48 states. Grizzly bears once roamed throughout the entire western United States south into Mexico, including the Great Plains and along rivers and desert habitats. Control actions and habitat loss extirpated them from 98% of their original habitat in the U.S., including the Great Plains and all habitats south of Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, including California, Idaho, and Washington. Populations persisted in the northern Rocky Mountains including Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks and in northwestern Montana and extreme northern Idaho next to Canada. A large population of grizzly bears lives inland in Alaska and northern Canada. The southern populations in Canada's British Columbia and Alberta are greatly reduced. Thanks to conservation efforts since about 1975, grizzly bears are recovering well in Yellowstone and elsewhere in the northern Rockies and are even beginning to recolonize prairie habitats along the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana. Grizzly bears can be found in woodlands, forests, alpine meadows, and prairies. In many habitats they prefer riparian areas along rivers and streams. Grizzly bears are omnivores. The most commonly eaten kinds of plants are fleshy roots, fruits, berries, grasses, and forbs. If grizzly bears are on the hunt, their prey can include fish, especially salmon, rodents like ground squirrels, carrion, and hoofed animals like moose, elk, caribou, and deer. They are especially good at catching the young of these hoofed species. Grizzly bears can also target domestic animals like cattle and sheep and cause economically important losses for some ranchers. The National Wildlife Federation has a program on national forest land surrounding Yellowstone Park to prevent attacks on domestic livestock by purchasing the grazing allotments from ranchers. Grizzly bears use sounds, movement, and smells to communicate. Grizzly bears also rub their bodies on trees to scratch and to let other bears know they are there. Winter can be very tough for many species of wildlife because the season brings harsh weather and little food. Grizzly bears hibernate in warm dens during the winter to minimize energy expenditure at a time when natural foods are not available and to permit their tiny young to be born in a warm and secure environment. Throughout the summer and autumn, grizzly bears build up fat reserves by consuming as much food as they can find. In late fall or winter, the bears find a hillside and dig a hole to serve as their winter den. When inside the den, grizzly bears slow down their heart rate, reduce their temperature and metabolic activity, and live off stored fat reserves. Pregnant females give birth in the dens and nurse their cubs until they are large enough to venture outside in the spring, as snow melts and new food become available. Depending on the length of the winter season, grizzly bears can stay in their dens for up to 7 months. They don't even go to the bathroom during this time. Grizzly bear hibernation is not as deep of a sleep as some other hibernators, like bats or ground squirrels, and they will quickly wake up when disturbed. Females with newborn cubs are the last to leave their dens in the spring. Females with older cubs emerge earlier and solitary females and males are the first to exit dens in the spring. Pregnant females are the first to enter dens in the fall followed by females with cubs. Solitary males enter dens the latest. The mother cares for her young for at least two more years, feeding and protecting them. When the cubs are two and a half years old, they typically separate from their mother. In areas with little food, the cubs may stay with their mother longer. Grizzly bears are mainly solitary and territorial, except for mothers and their cubs, or when a plentiful food source is Grizzly bears are known to congregate at rivers with many fish and at improperly fenced garbage dumps. Grizzlies can run pretty fast, reaching speeds as fast as 35 miles an hour for very short sprints. They are good swimmers too. Cubs can climb trees to evade danger, but they lose this ability as their front claws grow longer. Grizzly bears can live to be 30 years in the wild, but most die before age 25. Grizzly bears are federally listed as threatened. They were excessively overhunted by humans, and now there are less than 1,500 grizzlies left in the United States south of Canada. There are also about 31,000 in Alaska. The National Wildlife Federation is fighting for grizzly bears to make sure they have room to roam and can safely coexist with humans. Through our Adopt a Wildlife Acre program, we work to acquire land outside of Yellowstone National Park to expand the range of the Yellowstone grizzlies. The largest of the brown bears is the Alaskan Kodiak bear. These enormous creatures often top 1,600 pounds and are as big as polar bears. The Kodiak and the polar bear are the two largest land carnivores in the world. When confronted however, a mother grizzly is fearless in defense of her cubs, and often her fierceness alone will drive an aggressive male away. As he realizes she will fight to the death, and probably cause harm to him in the process. After all she is 6 feet tall, and 400 pounds of actual angry mama bear. The grizzly bear has incredibly long, thick and powerful claws. The nails themselves can be 5 to 6 inches long and thicker than our thumb. They use them to do more digging than any other bear species, uprooting shrubs, shredding logs and stumps in search of insects and tubers, and digging massive dens, sometimes in frozen ground. The fangs of an adult male grizzly bear are often close to 3 inches in length, but grizzly bears are more likely to do damage to an adversary or prey with a swat of their paw. Powered by the massive muscles in the grizzly's shoulder hump, one paw swipe from a grizzly can kill an animal as large as a moose. The grizzly bear can eat about 100 pounds of food a day. Grizzly bears do not hibernate, they are in a dormant state, but their body temperature does not drop dramatically as in true hibernation. Grizzly bears and polar bears occasionally interbreed in the wild. Some think their reddish-colored offspring are mistaken for Bigfoot. The grizzly bear's sense of smell is seven times greater than that of a bloodhound. Grizzly bears stay with their mothers for as long as five years. A newborn baby grizzly bear is smaller than a guinea pig. When it comes to intelligence, grizzlies may not get the same publicity that birds and whales do, but they're still pretty clever. The bears can remember hotspots for food even if it's been 10 years since they last visited the area. Some have been observed covering tracks or obscuring themselves with rocks and trees to avoid detection by hunters. Brown bears usually dominate other bear species in areas where they coexist. Due to their smaller size, American black bears are at a competitive disadvantage over brown bears in open, non-forested areas. Although displacement of black bears by brown bears has been documented, actual interspecific killing of black bears by brown bears has only occasionally been reported. The black bear's habit of living in heavily forested areas as opposed to the brown bear's preference for open spaces usually ensures that the two species avoid confrontations in areas where they are sympatric. Alaskan brown bears are the largest brown bears and require a very high caloric intake of food. Brown bears in Alaska can eat 80 to 90 pounds of food per day in the summer and fall, gaining around three to six pounds of fat each day in order to store fat for the winter. Alaskan brown bears are opportunistic eaters and will eat almost anything. Their diet consists of berries, flowers, grasses, herbs, and roots. They get their protein from beavers, deer, caribou, salmon, carcasses, and other small mammals. Eurasian brown bears used to exist throughout Eurasia. Today, their range is limited chiefly to northern and eastern Europe, Russia, the Baltic states, and the Balkans. However, isolated populations still exist in Spain, Italy, France, Southwest Asia, China, and Japan. The diet of Eurasian brown bears consists of roots, berries, nuts, insects, and fish. They are also known to attack livestock and hunt small and large mammals. The IUCN currently lists them as a species of least concern, although some question its status due to decreasing populations in several regions. The Kamchatka brown bear, Ursus arctos beringianus, is the largest subspecies of brown bears in Eurasia. The heaviest Kamchatka brown bears can weigh up to 1,430 pounds, although average weights vary throughout the seasons. When standing on their hind legs, they measure from 7 feet 11 inches to 9 feet 9 inches tall. While typically dark brown in appearance, lighter colorations do exist in the wild. Kamchatka brown bears get their name from the Kamchatka Peninsula, which is home to their population. However, sightings frequently occur on Karaginsky Island, the Kuril Islands, the Shantar Islands, and St. Lawrence Island. Their diet primarily consists of berries, nuts, fish such as salmon and trout, and marine mammals. Around 10,000 to 15,000 Kamchatka brown bears exist in the wild, which prompted the IUCN to list them as a species of least concern. The smallest of the brown bear subspecies is the Eurasian bear, the largest population of which is in the mountains of Romania. Ancient historians report the brown bears of Europe to be largely carnivorous, regularly hunting both large and small game from reindeer to squirrels. These are the same bears that were commonly used to fight in the Roman Colosseum, pitted against each other, other exotic animals like lions and tigers, or even human gladiators in gruesome spectacles. As their habitat decreased, the Eurasian brown bear, an all brown bear subspecies adapted by eating more vegetation. Over time, the once razor-sharp cutting teeth located further back in the jaw, transformed to more molar-type flattened teeth in order to grind grains and process nuts. Most brown bears today are omnivorous, digesting up to 85% vegetation. Fruits, berries, nuts, bark, roots and some flowers are eaten in massive quantities to power the bear's enormous bulk, and the brown bear spends hours a day actively foraging for anything edible. Regionally, brown bears will eat various protein sources like salmon on the Alaskan coast, and elk in the interior forests, and in the summer months the grizzlies of Yellowstone Park may obtain 30% of their daily calories by eating entire colonies of moths and ladybugs. Thank you for watching our video, for more exciting videos and information about wild animals and wildlife please like comment and subscribe to our channel.