Black Bears emerging from their winter dens are some of the least fussy eaters in the animal kingdom, opportunistically dining on everything from a rotting winter-killed deer to springtails to willow branches and catkins............."While many of us think that Bears depend on meat for protein due to their fondness for newly born deer fawns, during the early Spring, new grasses, forbs, stems, leaves and sedges of some two dozen wetland, meadow and forest plants make up the bulk of the Bruin calorie intake"

https://northernwoodlands.org/articles/article/tracking-tips-grazing-bears

Tracking Tips: Grazing Bears

by Susan C. Morse

Spring 2019

April 15, 2019

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Photos by Susan C. Morse

By the end of April, black bears have shrugged off winter’s dormancy and are getting hungry. They may get lucky and discover a winter-killed deer and get to indulge in its valuable protein. More often, however, they glean tiny foodstuffs, breaking willow branches and climbing aspens to reach the catkins, or even slurping from a pond’s surface to eat concentrations of minute springtails. In sunny openings where things are greening up, the tender new leaves and stems of succulent vegetation are voraciously grazed by eager bruins.

 Later on, these plants
become less


digestable and their nutrient
values decline as they “harden” with increasing
 amounts of lignin
and cellulose.

Forbs are next on the menu. In our region
(New England),
 the flowers, stems and
leaves of nearly two dozen wetland, meadow,
and forest plants may be
plucked by a bear’s prehensile lips, or delicately
 snipped by their incisor
 teeth. This sign reminds us of grazing livestock
or the nipped-looking
evidence we associate with the selective feeding
habits of whitetail deer.
Bears seek out palatable clover plants that are
extra nutritious because
 they provide high amounts of protein,
calcium, and phosphorus.

A bear ate these and hundreds of other
 nearby dandelion flowers.
 Bears eat prodigious quantities of flowers
 throughout spring and
 early summer, including hawkweed,
yellow goatsbeard, twisted
stalk, golden saxifrage, sweet cicely, wild
calla, pickerelweed, skunk
cabbage, jack-in-the-pulpit, swamp thistle,
 blue violets, jewelweed,
and the invasive non-native coltsfoot
 we increasingly find along
 roadsides.

Springtime bear feces are green when
fresh; over time they will
turn blackishgreen or even solid black.
Poke one with a stick to
reveal its still bright-green interior and
recognizable vegetative
contents.

Look for bear tracks, grazed vegetation,
daybeds, and scats in
 wetland habitats including riparian zones,
 beaver flowages, seeps,
and even around small vernal pools. Saturated
 soils support a greater
abundance and diversity of the graminoids and
 forbs that bears relish
at this time of year. Plan to investigate these
 habitats after the end of
June, when female bears with their young cubs
are safely dispersed
 throughout the forest and are less vulnerable
to being disturbed
 and frightened.

Susan C. Morse is founder and program director of Keeping Track
in Huntington, Vermont.