The Asian Black Bear

The Asian black bear, also known as the Moon bear is black with a beautiful white or cream-colour V shape mark on its chest. The Asian black bear is comparatively small, but full of aggression and courage. Bears tend to live in alpestrine regions. They are of the length from one to two meters and a grown Asian bear can weigh up to 200 kilograms. At times he even is too fearless to attack a grown tiger. The Asian black bear lives out its days in the trees. Nowadays the majority of the forests are hew out and the bears start to invade cultivated farmlands.

The diet of the Asian Black Bear includes berries, fruits, young plant sprouts and bugs. It also eats carrion, which other predators have left aside. The Asian bears hibernate in the hollows of the trees, cleaning them very carefully before the hibernation. Interesting is the fact that the bear sleeps in a sitting position in the hollow. However such huge trees are very hard to find for the bears. The rest which haven’t found any cosy hollow need to sleep in some kind of rock gap. The Asian black bears are loners and usually make contact with other bears only during the time of mating. Like other bears, females give birth to 1-3 cubs during the winter season. The cubs stick with the mother for about two days, but start going for food with the mother at the age of one month.

It’s pretty normal for Asian black bears to sleep during the day time and only come out of the cave at dusk, generally to look for food. They also can live in a family formation were there are two elders and one or two cubs, and an interesting fact is that they walk in a procession from the largest to the smallest.

Some of the natural scientists believe that the Asian black bear isn’t at all brave, but very easy to infuriate and it sometimes gets angry without any particular reason. In the wild they try to avoid conflict situations. Asian black bear attacks people only in situations it feels endangered. Due to its furious nature, responsibility for many maimed people in India falls upon his conscience. The thing about the Asian black bear is his dead sleep – any kind of footsteps or noise of that kind can’t awake him, but if a person somehow succeeds in rousing the bear, it becomes angry, jumps on his feet and attacks the human with his paws, that are equipped with 20cm long nails.