Composite bear

Black Bears were given their name on the East Coast where all are obligingly black. They are also uniformly black on the West Coast. But, around Kootenay Lake, Black Bears come in a delightful range of colours. Some, of course, are black and a few of these sport a white V on their chests. In addition to black, our Black Bears come in the colour morphs of chocolate, cinnamon (my favourite), blue (dubbed the Glacier Bear), beige, and blond (designated the Spirit Bear).

Although individual bears might appear in any of these colours, I long assumed that a particular bear would only display a single morph. Surely no individual would appear as a mixture of two different colour morphs — let alone the three I saw yesterday.

The primary colour of the lactating sow I saw was chocolate, but it had a Spirit Bear’s back and a Glacier Bear’s flanks. I am not a bear researcher, so I don’t know if this is common, but I have seen quite a few Black Bears, and this melange was a first for me.

A chocolate Black Bear looked as if a hair dresser had added a blond streak down its back.

That this was a lactating sow became evident with this side view. A pectoral nipple is visible just behind the right front leg and an inguinal nipple is dimly visible in front of the right hind leg. One can see that the sow is actively nursing cubs by the fact that the fur surrounding the inguinal nipple is slightly discoloured from the saliva of the cubs. This picture also provided the first hint that the sow’s flanks showed yet a third colour morph.

A shot from behind shows the mixture of colour morphs: It is a mainly chocolate Black Bear with a Spirit Bear back and a Glacier Bear flank. This was somewhat unexpected.