Black Bear Skulls & Tracking Black Bears

Video Transcript

" We are Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of expertvillage.com. We would like to talk about bears and if you would like more information on tracking animals, please visit our website at walnuthilltracking.com. We’ve got a bear skull here. This is from the black bear and this was an adult male, very young male about 1 ½ or 2 years old. The bear skull is amazing because it is really well developed canines in the front. The bear is an omnivore and so a huge portion of its diet consist of nothing more than succulent vegetation, berries, insects, nuts and acorns and very little meat is actually eaten by it. You can see by the molars that it has a lot of grinding capability and that is for the things that it eats. The canines although they have a lot of power in them are used mostly for tearing apart logs to get at things like carpenter ant larvae. They are really not used to capture and hold prey although it has well developed temporal muscles that do give it a lot of leverage at the front. You can also see that the bear’s skull is very long and that is to accommodate the nasal passages. The bear has an amazing sense of smell. It is probably most highly developed sense. Its eye sight is relatively weak although it does see in color and has good close up vision. Its hearing is fairly good but its sense of smell is amazing and some researchers have recorded black bear smelling things like hazelnuts ripening from over 40 miles away. "