Bear Facts

Each month our biologist brings you an interesting fact about bears. Bears are fascinating animals: curious, intelligent and powerful.

It’s getting hot in here!

It is still cold, dark, and snowy at the Great Bear Lodge, but the days are starting to grow longer as the sun begins its slow return. Inside the grizzly den, the long winter sleep continues, at least for the adult bears. The cubs are awake, however, though their newly opened eyes won’t see the outside world for another few months. The cubs stay cuddled up next to their sleeping mother, who does not enter a true state of torpor the way other animals do (ground squirrels and chipmunks, for example). This means that while her body temperature does drop to some extent (5 to 10 degrees), she is more than warm enough to provide the necessary body heat to protect her tiny cubs from the winter chill. The cubs spend their time nursing and growing steadily on a diet of her fat-rich milk. Grizzly bear milk has 4.5 times more fat and 17 times more protein than human milk, and each cub will consume approximately ? of a pint (350 ml) of this liquid gold each day of their winter sleep. 
Check back next month for another interesting bear fact.