Alaska Grizzly

This TB bear wants to travel from cache to cache, gathering miles. Please be sure to keep it moving and properly log it in and out of caches. This TB number is being recycled as the original item disappeared a couple years ago. It is being sent out with a new item attached.

The grizzly bear (Ursus arctos ssp.) is any North American subspecies of brown bear, including the mainland grizzly (Ursus arctos horribilis), Kodiak bear (U. a. middendorffi), peninsular grizzly (U. a. gyas), the recently extinct California grizzly (U. a. californicus) and the Mexican grizzly bear (U. a. nelsoni). Specialists sometimes call the grizzly the North American brown bear because the grizzly and the brown bear are one species on two continents. Except for females with cubs, grizzlies are normally solitary, active animals, but in coastal areas, grizzlies gather around streams, lakes, rivers, and ponds during the salmon spawn. Every other year, females produce one to four young which are small and weigh only about 1 lb at birth. A sow is protective of her offspring and will attack if she thinks she or her cubs are threatened.

The ancestors of the grizzly bear subspecies were brown bears originating in Eurasia that traveled to North America approximately 50,000 years ago. This is a very recent event, on an evolutionary timescale, causing the North American grizzly bear to be very similar to brown bears inhabiting Siberia and northeast Asia. The closest Eurasian subspecies to the grizzly bears are believed to be the Ussuri brown bear (U. a. lasiotus) for mainland grizzlies and the Kamchatka brown bear (U. a. beringianus) for the coastal Alaskan and Kodiak bears which arrived in North America shortly before the Bering land bridge flooded.

Coastal grizzlies, often referred to by the popular but geographically redundant synonym of "brown bear" or "Alaskan brown bear" are larger and darker than inland grizzlies, which is why they, too, were considered a different species from grizzlies. Kodiak grizzly bears were also at one time considered distinct. Thus, at one time there were five different "species" of brown bear, including three in North America. Although variable from blond to nearly black, grizzly bear fur is typically brown in color with white tips. A pronounced hump appears on their shoulders; the hump is a good way to distinguish a black bear from a grizzly bear, as black bears do not have this hump.

Brown bears are found in Asia, Europe, and North America, giving them one of the widest ranges of bear species. In North America, grizzly bears previously ranged from Alaska down to Mexico and as far east as the western shores of Hudson Bay. The species is now found in Alaska, south through much of western Canada, and into portions of the northwestern United States (including Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Wyoming), extending as far south as Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, but is most commonly found in Canada. In Canada, there are approximately 25,000 grizzly bears occupying British Columbia, Alberta, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and the northern part of Manitoba. The Alaskan population of 30,000 individuals is the highest population of any province/state in North America. Populations in Alaska are densest along the coast, where food supplies such as salmon are more abundant. Only about 1,500 grizzlies are left in the lower 48 states of the US.

This TB bear wants to travel from cache to cache, gathering miles. Please be sure to keep it moving and properly log it in and out of caches. This TB number is being recycled as the original item disappeared a couple years ago. It is being sent out with a new item attached.