There are twice as many black bears as every other bear combined
North America's smallest bear is also its great survivor. American black bears outnumber all other bear species put together, and while specialised giants like the short-faced bear vanished after the last Ice Age, this adaptable tree-climbing omnivore carried on. Now it is quietly reclaiming states it left over a century ago.
Despite sharing a continent, the black bear is only a distant cousin of the brown and polar bears; their lineages parted about 5.05 million years ago. Its closest relative is the Asian black bear, from which it split around 4.08 million years ago. A small primitive bear, Ursus abstrusus, dated to 4.95 million years ago, may be its direct North American ancestor, and early fossils from Port Kennedy, Pennsylvania, look strikingly like the Asian species.
During the Pleistocene it shared the land with the giant and lesser short-faced bears, thought to be heavy meat-eaters, and a mostly plant-eating Florida spectacled bear. Only the generalist black bear came through the end of the Ice Age, a success often credited to its varied diet, though its rivals had weathered earlier ice ages. Afterward, only three bear species remained in North America.
Numbers are healthy, and the IUCN rates it least concern. Canada held an estimated 396,000 to 476,000 in the mid-1990s across seven provinces, and the United States somewhere between 339,000 and 465,000 in 2011, not counting several states. California's population is put at 60,000 by 2026, up from 25,000 to 35,000 in 2017, while western North Carolina's count has climbed past 8,000 in the 2020s, from roughly 3,000 two decades earlier. In 2019 Iowa confirmed its first resident bear since the 1880s, living in woods near Decorah.
Black bears favour thick cover, often mountains between 400 and 3,000 m in the lower 48 states, from oak-hickory forest in the Appalachians to swampy hardwoods on the southeastern coast and chaparral in the Southwest, where they wander out to eat prickly pear. Their paws are big for a medium-sized bear, with short curved claws and bare, wrinkled soles.
Source: American black bear
