What are the Bears eating today?

by Derek Ryder, Wildlife Ambassador & IGA Interpretive Guide

By now most bears have emerged from their dens and through the month of May, they’ll leave the higher alpine environments where they den, and move down to the snow free valley bottoms, so bear sightings and encounters will increase through the month. Along the way down from the alpine, if they can find a carcass of something killed over the winter by an avalanche, they’ll be very happy. However, there are no guarantees for that to happen, so most bears will rely on their veggie diets. One plant they will go after that does have berries at this time of year is kinnikinnik.

Evergreen, ground-covering mats of kinnikinnik are everywhere around here, and it’s a plant worth learning to recognize. While they prefer the sunny montane slopes, I’ve seen the plant in dark drier areas all the way up to almost the high alpine. The dark green oval leaves virtually cover the entire plant, hiding the woody stems underneath. Sometimes, the leaves will change colour a bit over the winter, ending up almost purple, but they seem to go back to green fairly quickly in the spring.

The plant flowers early, often in early April, and the flowers stay on until late May. The flowers themselves are quite small and look like small bells, whitish with pink edges. These flowers eventually turn into small red berries that earn the plant the more common name of bearberry. Those berries will eventually turn a dark blue or black.

While the berries themselves are very popular with birds and other animals, how appealing they are to bears depends on whom you talk to. Ben Gadd notes that bears seem to like the roots of the plants more than the berries. Many Indigenous people believe that bears only eat the berries when they’re unwell. The berries will stay on the plant over the winter, and some sources claim that the sugar (and the flavour) of the berries improves after having been frozen all winter. Perhaps this is why they seem more common in early season bear scat, where the berries seem to come out whole and any colour from red to black, suggesting they’re not digested too well. Kinnikinnik is possibly the most important plant food source straight out of denning.

The berries are edible for humans, but are dry, mealy and mostly tasteless, and eating too many results in constipation. Pound them with Saskatoon berries and animal fat and you have the original pemmican. Indigenous people often cooked them mixed with grease or eggs; tea can be made from the berries and leaves, but too much tea results in stomach and liver problems. Strong tea was used to induce labour. The name kinnikinnik is Algonquin for “smoking mixture” as the dried leaves were used to cut tobacco or smoked on their own. They’re also high in tannin, and were used to tan hides. Various Indigenous peoples used bearberry to treat kidney diseases, turned the leaves into a salve for skin diseases or for sore gums.

So as we go through May, see if you can find some kinnikinnik, including the flowers and berries. And if you see a pile of scat, grab a stick and poke around in it to see if you can find some red, blue or black kinnikinnik berries. The photo is of fresh bear scat, and it was taken on February 6, 2015, a year when spring came for a while (winter did come back) and a few bears got up early for a bit.

Click here to find out ‘What the bears are eating’ in other months!