Reading Trees to Track Black Bears: Part 2

Video Transcript

" We are Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of expertvillage.com. We would like to talk to you about black bear signs and if you would like more information, please visit our website www.walnuthilltracking.com. Black bears leave a variety of sign on trees. Some of it is from climbing for safety. Some of it is climbing for food and others are just communicating with each other. We would like to point our some differences between the three different kinds of sign and particularly here on this white oak. First of all we’ve got some marks on this tree. How are we sure that it is black bear? The black bear has five toes and as you can see there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 marks. The last mark is actually the inside toe. It is set much further back and it is smaller. It is like the pinkie on a human’s foot except it is on the inside instead of the outside. Looking at these we can tell by the color that they are relatively fresh so a bear has left sign on this tree but what was it doing when it did that? If we followed these tracks of the bear up the tree, we see that they stopped at about our head height. It is an indicator that it did not climb. The tree here was marked by the bear. Bear’s do this to communicate with each other. They did not climb this tree for food. "