There is a new addition to the Yosemite sightseeing attractions on Yosemite tours this winter. The relatively mild winter temperatures in Yosemite National Park combined with the lack of snowfall have meant that some of Yosemite’s black bears have not gone into hibernation this winter. While neither the temperature nor the season is necessarily a reason for bears to hibernate, there is usually an indirect correlation. The bears hibernate due to the relative scarcity of food when the ground is covered in snow. This winter’s often bare landscape in Yosemite’s valleys has meant that food has remained available – not just other animals on which to prey, but the abundance of acorns on the ground on which they feed. And so the black bears are now visible during winter Yosemite tours – a highly unusual occurrence.
This is not the case for the pregnant females. Regardless of the available food, the females will give birth in the dens sometime in January and then need to care for the cubs in a safe and warm environment, where they will do nothing much beyond nursing and growing into March or April before they begin to walk and venture beyond the den when spring arrives. That is the time when bears emerge from their caves and find themselves famished. The females will drop a third of their mass while feeding their cubs over the winter. Black bears are omnivores and get all but 15% of their diet from vegetation so they can begin to find nourishment at their feet immediately after hibernation, rather than needing to hunt in a deprived state.
While their indiscriminant eating habits bode well for their survival, it is this fact that also creates problem encounters with humans. The bears in Yosemite get enticed by ineffectively stored food around campsites and acclimated to the presence of humans. Their waning fear then allows them to change their feeding habits according to those food sources, and that’s when unwanted encounters take place. A fed bear is a dead bear, as the saying goes. That means that once the bears have reprogrammed themselves toward these food sources around humans, they will continue to seek those until which point they will need to be relocated, or killed to combat their escalating pursuits around Yosemite’s human visitors. The bears will find themselves in an escalating pattern of events toward euthanasia due to careless human actions; never based on inherent bad bear behavior. They are wild animals which only head toward unwanted habits based on the actions of humans, so the best thing Yosemite’s visitors can do is to go to great lengths to ensure that the bears’ only food sources are wild ones.
