The Birds and the Bees and the Bears

There are few events in the zoo world that attract more excitement from the public than the birth of a giant panda.  The panda is perhaps the most famous endangered species in the world and is found in very few zoos - until relatively recently breeding in western zoos was almost unheard of, despite herculean efforts to make it happen.  When a successful breeding does occur, one of the aspects that the public finds the most fascinating is the size-discrepancy between the mother and the cub.  "Giant" pandas might not really be very "giant" as far as bears go, but compared to their cubs, they look like leviathans.  A newborn panda, the cliche comparison goes, is only as big as a stick of butter.

Of course, there's nothing unusual about that size compared to the other bears - all of them give birth to similarly tiny, helpless babies that bear (pun unintended) almost no resemblance to the animals that they will grow into.  In the temperate and polar regions, bears tend to give birth during the time of year when they are sequestered in their dens, not really hibernating but certainly inactive.  The cubs are born in darkness (which is just as well, since they're blind at this stage anyway) and nurse from the mother, drinking up the fat stores that she has built up in the months before going into her den.  At this very young stage the cubs are completely helpless, and the mother knows it.  If she feels threatened by another animal (including a human) and has reason to believe that the cubs won't survive, she may cut her losses and kill them herself, or at least abandon them.  

By the time the mother bear emerges in the spring, ravenous and ready to eat, the cubs look like what we'd expect them to look like - more like Teddy bears than rodents.

Mother bears are well known for being very protective of their cubs, and it certainly is true that the youngsters need a lot of protection.  Predators that would flee at the approach of an adult bear wouldn't turn down the opportunity to prey on an unprotected small cub.  One of the greatest dangers to a cub is a male bear.  A male bear in the wild will kill cubs that he encounters, seeking to extinguish the genetic progeny of a rival and free up the female so that he can breed her.  A male bear may be a great father in the sense that he is able to sire many young... but he tends to be a lousy daddy.  As far as humans are concerned, the overwhelming cuteness of cubs can lead people to forget that the cubs are wild animals - with wild mothers - and try to play with them if they find them in the woods, seemingly on their own... which can turn south very fast when mom suddenly appears. 

I've only ever once handled bear cubs.  It was in a remote forested area, where I was assisting a biologist I was friends with in doing some den work on wild black bears before they awoke in the spring.  After weighing and measuring the little furballs, I snuck in a few seconds of snuggling with them... just to keep them warm, of course.  It was quite a brisk day.  All of this was possibly only because mom had a dart in her butt and was snoring deeply ten feet away, where my biologist friend was busy taking samples.