The bears of Bern

Do you have a teddy bear at home, too? A crumpled, cuddly, soft bear that lets you do anything to it and that you can’t fall asleep without? Bears are cute, aren’t they? You know that only toy bears are like that. Bears living in the wild are large predators. Although they mainly eat plants, they also kill other animals and feed on their meat. They can even be dangerous to people. Bears used to live in our forests, too. Farmers didn’t like them much because they sometimes killed livestock. So people hunted the bears, and eventually they became extinct in large parts of Europe. In Germany, the last bear is said to have been killed in Bavaria in 1835.

Bears often appear in our fairy tales and old stories, for example in “Snow-White and Rose-Red.” These animals have also always been seen as symbols of power and strength, like lions and wolves. We say that a particularly strong person has “the strength of a bear.” Images of bears were often included in the coats of arms of towns and noble families to express their importance and power.

The bear is also the heraldic animal of Bern, the capital of Switzerland, and the canton of Bern. Bears have been kept in Bern since ancient times. They used to be housed in a bear pit, but today they have a large bear park. Located on the banks of the Aare, it is part of Dählhölzli Animal Park.

The park covers 6,000 square meters and includes bushes and trees, caves, and a moat. Visitors can watch the bears and learn about them. The bear park also has several webcams that rotate and change their position every 20 seconds. There are currently 3 bears living in the park. They belong to the European brown bear species. They are named Finn, Björk, and Ursina. These bears can measure up to 2.8 meters from head to rump and weigh around 300 kilograms. Their relatives in North America, grizzlies and Kodiak bears, are also brown bears.

Brown bears need up to 40 kilograms of food a day and can gain almost three kilograms in the process. About 80 percent of their diet consists of berries, fruit and other plant matter. The rest is made up of small and large animals, from beetles to young moose. They especially like honey and fish, and they will also eat carrion. When foraging, bears rely above all on their keen sense of smell and hearing. Their eyesight is not as good. Bears walk on thick pads on the soles of their feet. Each foot has 5 toes, each with claws up to 8 centimetres long. Bears have a thick coat that becomes even thicker and coarser in winter than in the warmer months. They are good swimmers, and young bears can also climb trees. Bears can run fast, reaching speeds of up to 50 kilometres per hour for short periods. That makes them much faster than any human.

In late summer and autumn, bears build up a store of fat. During the cold season, they retreat to a den or cave and enter a period of winter dormancy. This is not hibernation, as experienced by some other animals. During winter dormancy, bears wake up from time to time and even look for food if the weather allows. Their body temperature also does not drop as much as that of animals that hibernate. In the wild, bears can live up to 30 years, and in captivity, up to 50 years.

Besides brown bears, there are seven other species of bear: the American black bear, polar bear, Asiatic black bear, sloth bear, sun bear, spectacled bear, and giant panda.

But what kind of bear is your teddy bear?