Imagine you're driving through the great smoky mountains on a sunny afternoon. The road winds through trees and you can see the mountains ahead. And then traffic stops. Not a little slowdown, a full stop. Cars ahead of you have pulled over. Cars behind you are stopping too. People are turning off their engines and everyone is getting out. You lean out your window and you look up ahead. And there, about 50 yards away, standing in a grassy field next to the road, is a black bear. Just standing there, eating, not paying the slightest bit of attention to the 37 cars that have stopped to watch it. What you have just experienced is called a bear jam. It is one of the most famous things that happens in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Traffic stops, people pour out of their cars, cameras come out, everybody watches. And the bear eats or scratches or walks away when it's ready. Welcome to the Smokies. Welcome back, Scouts! I'm Jenny, and this is National Park Scouts, the show where curious kids discover America's wildest places. And we are still in the Great Smoky Mountains, still discovering things that make visiting the park so much more fun. And this time, we're talking about the animal that has been the symbol of this park since before most of our grandparents were born, the black bear. There are more black bears per square mile in the Great Smoky Mountains than almost anywhere else in the eastern United States. They stop traffic. They show up in campgrounds. They've learned to open car doors. And there's a lot more to know about them than you might think. Let's go. The American black bear, Ursus Americanus, if you want to sound like a scientist, is the only species of bear that lives in the Great Smoky Mountains. No grizzlies here, no polar bears, just the black bear. And it has had these mountains to itself for thousands of years. The park is home to somewhere between 1,500 and 1,900 black bears. That works out to about two bears per square mile. That's a lot of bears. Males typically weigh around 250 pounds in summer. Females are smaller, closer to 100 pounds. But bears in the Smokies have been recorded at over 600 pounds. That's incredibly big. Black bears can run up to 30 miles per hour. That is faster than almost every human who has ever lived. If you are ever thinking about whether you can outrun a bear, you definitely cannot. They can also climb trees faster than most people can climb stairs. And they can swim. They are excellent swimmers. There is essentially no terrain in the smoky mountains that a bear cannot navigate like an expert. Now, the bears in the smokies are called black bears, and in this park, almost all of them are actually black, with a brown snout usually, but mostly black. In other places in North America, black bears come in almost every color imaginable. In the western United States, you can find black bears that are brown, cinnamon, or tan. In British Columbia, there are black bears with white fur, called spirit bears or commode bears. Scientists have even documented black bears changing color during the year. We call them black bears, but the name is really just a starting point. Before we go any further, let's talk about what to actually do if you see a bear. Because in the Smokies, you will probably see one. Rule number one, stay at least 50 yards away. That's 150 feet, or about half the length of a football field. In the park, this is actually a law, and you can be fined for getting closer than 50 yards to a bear. Stay in your car if you're seeing it from the road. If you want to see the bear better, then use binoculars or a camera zoom. Rule number two if you encounter a bear, like when you're on a hike, do not run. Instead, stay calm. Make yourself look large. Get your group close together. Speak in a firm voice and back away slowly. Most bears really want nothing to do with you and will leave on their own. Rule number three, never feed a bear. I know it sounds harmless, but this is the single most important thing you can do. When bears get human food, they start to associate people with meals. They lose their natural caution around humans. They come to campgrounds, they push into tents, they learn to open car doors, and yes, they really can do this. Here's the fact that really matters. A black bear on a healthy, natural diet can live 12 to 15 years. A black bear that regularly eats human food often lives half that long. Feeding a bear really doesn't help it. The fine for feeding a bear in the smokies is up to $5,000. The rangers take it seriously, so should we. Okay, you've seen the bear, you're 50 yards away, you're being a great guest. Now let's talk about what that bear is actually doing all day. Probably eating. Black bears are omnivores, which means they eat both plants and animals. But here's the part that surprises most people. 85% of a smoky mountain black bear's diet is plants. Berries, nuts, acorns, wild grapes. Bears also eat insects. They'll tear apart a rotten log to get at the grubs inside. And they'll eat carrion, which is a scientific word for dead animals they find. Occasionally a fawn or a small animal they can catch, but mainly plants. The most feared predator in the park is basically a really determined berry picker. Now, here's something crazy about bears. They are extreme eaters for a short time of the year. Every fall, as the weather starts to cool and days get shorter, something happens to a bear's body. It gets a signal winter is coming. Time to eat everything. Scientists call this hyperphagia. During hyperphagia, a bear stops doing almost anything else except eating. It can spend up to 20 hours a day foraging. It might eat 20,000 calories in a single day. To give you some sense of what that means, a typical adult human eats about 2,000 calories a day. A bear during hyperphagia eats 10 times that for weeks. A bear can gain 100 pounds in a few weeks during fall hyperphagia. That fat is stored energy, fuel for the long sleep ahead. This is also when bear jams are most common. Bears are everywhere, eating everything, not paying attention to cars. They have more important things to do. All this talk about bears eating everything is making me hungry. It's time for a short break. Let's listen to this park sound, think it over, and then we will find out the answer after the break. It has a secret though. The wood thrush has a two-part voice box called a syrinx, which means it can sing two notes at exactly the same time. What sounds like one complicated melody is actually the bird harmonizing with itself. The wood thrush is like its own choir. When winter arrives, bears head to their dens. And most people know that bears hibernate. Here's the thing though, bears don't truly hibernate. Not technically. True hibernators, like some ground squirrels, can go into such a deep state that their body temperature drops close to freezing, and it can take hours to wake them up. A bear is different. Scientists call it torpor. A deep sleep where the bear's heart rate drops from 40 to 50 beats per minute all the way down to eight beats per minute. Their body temperature drops a few degrees. Their metabolism slows way down. They don't eat, drink, or do much of anything. But they can wake up. If you disturbed a den, the bear could rouse itself and respond. They're sleeping deeply, but they're not switched off. In the Great Smoky Mountains, bears do something unusual even for black bears. They often den high up in hollow standing trees. Sometimes 30 feet off the ground. Because the old growth forests of the Smokeys still have enormous hollow trees, trees so big and old that their insides have decayed into cozy bear-sized chambers. Bears in younger forests that have been logged don't dent up in trees. The Smokies, ancient trees, make this possible. And here is the most astonishing part. In January, while the mother bear is in torpor, in her hollow tree, she gives birth. The cubs are born weighing about half a pound. That's about the weight of a baseball. They are born blind, hairless, and completely helpless. And their mother is not even awake. The cubs nurse and grow snuggled up next to their mom and her thick winter coat. By the time the bear family emerges in March or April, the cubs weigh four to six pounds. They came in as baseballs and left as small dogs. All that happened in a hollow tree in the middle of winter. Let's talk about how smart bears actually are, because this might change how you think about them. Bears have the largest relative brain size of any carnivore. Larger than wolves, larger than big cats, larger relative to body size than almost anything you'd call a predator. Scientists have been starting to figure out what that brain can do. Researchers trained three black bears to use a touch-screen computer by touching it with their noses and tongues. Yes, really. Then they tested whether the bears could count. Could they look at two groups of dots and correctly identify which group had more? The bears could. Every single time. They weren't guessing, they were actually counting. Now here's why that's a big deal. Counting, not just recognizing more versus less, is something scientists thought only a few animals could do. Humans, obviously. Chimpanzees, some dolphins, a few birds. It's considered one of the signs of a really advanced brain. But not only could bears count, they learned how to do it faster than chimpanzees and gorillas did in similar tests. But maybe the clearest evidence of bear intelligence is what they do in the wild without any researchers setting up experiments. Bears regularly figure out how to open things humans thought they had secured. Latches, coolers, carabiners, specialized bear-proof containers that took engineers years to design. They can open car doors. Not all bears, but bears have absolutely learned to pull on door handles and open vehicles to access food inside. If you have food in your car in bear country and you forget to lock it, a bear may figure it out. Here's a fun bear story. Someone in the American South had a problem. A bear kept getting into his deer feeder. So he electrified the legs of the feeder. Electric fence. Problem solved. Except one bear walked up to the feeder, found the electric fence wire, and unplugged it. Not damaged it, didn't chew through it, found the plug, pulled it out of the socket. Then he ate from the feeder. That bear figured out what an electric fence is, found the power source, and disconnected it for food on purpose. You can be impressed. I'm impressed. Here's a thing worth knowing about bears. Not because you have to do anything about it, but because it's genuinely fascinating. Every berry a bear eats, every blackberry, blueberry, huckleberry, has seeds in it. And a bear might travel several miles between where it ate those berries and where it eventually leaves the seeds behind. Bears are one of the most effective seed-spreading animals in the eastern United States. They travel enormous distances and carry seeds with them the whole way. Forests grow in places they might not otherwise reach because a bear walked through it. Bears are not just living in the ecosystem, they are actively shaping it. The Great Smoky Mountains have the largest protected black bear habitat in the entire eastern United States. And the forest is healthier because of it. Okay, scouts, time for a wild showdown. Three matchups, all connected to bears. You pick a winner, and then I'll tell you who actually wins and why. Ready? Round one. A black bear versus a Pacific salmon. Who travels further in one year? Answer the salmon. A black bear's home range is typically somewhere between 10 and 100 square miles. That sounds like a lot, but in terms of straight line distance, it's maybe 8 to 15 miles across. A Pacific salmon swims from its home river all the way to the open ocean, sometimes over a thousand miles, and then it turns around and swims the whole way back upstream to the exact river where it was born. The whole journey can cover 2,000 miles or more. Some salmon swim the entire length of the Yukon River, nearly 2,000 miles upstream without stopping to eat. And here's the part that gets me. They find their exact home river out of thousands of rivers emptying into the ocean by smell. They remember the specific chemical signature of the water where they were born, and they follow it home across thousands of miles of open ocean. The bear is impressive. The salmon is doing something almost unbelievable. Round two. A figure eight pattern that tells the whole hive the exact direction and distance to food. A Nobel Prize was awarded just for decoding it. But here's a twist. Bees ignore the waggle dance about 90% of the time. The bee invented GPS and mostly doesn't use it. The bear, meanwhile, remembers every berry patch and apple tree in its territory and returns to them year after year at exactly the right time. No dance required. Call it a tie. Bear one, salmon one. Not bad for an animal most people just think of as a traffic hazard on Newfound Gap Road. Every episode we get questions from scouts just like you. If you have a question about a national park, visit Nationalparkscouts.com. Let's hear our scout question of the day.
SPEAKER_01Hi, my name is Emma and I and I am eight years old. My question is if a bear is ignoring all the cars during a bear jam, can it actually smell everybody watching or does it just not notice?
SPEAKER_00Okay, this question is so good because the answer in both parts is yes. A bear can absolutely smell every single person in that bear jam. In fact, it smelled them long before it saw them. Here's some context. A dog's nose is considered one of the most powerful in the animal kingdom, about 300 times more sensitive than a human nose. A bloodhound, which is one of the best nose dogs there is, can track a scent that's several days old. A black bear's nose is seven times more sensitive than a bloodhound's, and over 2,000 times more sensitive than yours. A black bear can smell food from miles away. It can detect a human who walked through an area 14 hours earlier. The part of a bear's brain that processes smell is five times larger than the equivalent of a human brain. So, yes, when that bear is standing in the field eating, surrounded by 37 stopped cars, it's fully aware of every single person watching it. It can smell them and knows exactly how many people are there. It just doesn't care. Wild bears in the park that haven't been fed by humans generally want to avoid people, but they've learned that cars and humans near roads aren't a threat as long as nobody does anything alarming. So they tune us out. The bear knows you're there. It's made a decision that you're not worth worrying about. In bear terms, that's actually a compliment. Hey Scouts, whether you're listening right now or getting ready for a trip to a national park, head to nationalparkscouts.com. We've got free downloads waiting for you. Coloring pages, word searches, bingo cards, you can print them out and bring them on your visit. They're free, they're fun, and your parents can grab them in about 10 seconds. That's National Parkscouts.com. And if you love the show, hit subscribe so every new adventure lands right in your feed. What did you learn today that most adults don't know? I learned that bears don't truly hibernate. Most people will tell you that bears hibernate in the winter. Technically, what bears do is called torpor, a deep sleep that they can actually wake up from. Their heart rate slows to eight beats per minute, and they don't eat or drink for months. So the next time someone says bears hibernate, you know that's not quite the same. Time for your scout mission. If you're at home, calculate your own hyperphagia. A bear eats 20,000 calories a day during hyperphagia. Look at any food label in your kitchen and find out how many calories are in one serving. Then figure out how many of those servings a bear would need to hit 20,000 calories in one day. Is it 40 bowls of cereal? 100 granola bars? A thousand apples? Do the math, write it down and tell someone. If you visit the Great Smoky Mountains, go to Cades Cove in the morning or at dusk, especially in fall. Drive the 11 mile loop slowly. Watch the meadows and the tree lines. If you see a bear, count how many cars stop. Count how many seconds the bear looks at the road versus how many seconds it keeps eating. The bear's attitude toward traffic is its own kind of data. And here's a bonus park challenge. Note what the bear is eating. Is it berries? Is it digging for roots? Tearing apart a log? You are now doing field observation. That's real science. That's our episode, Scouts. We stopped traffic for a bear. We find out it can smell you from miles away and couldn't care less. We learned it can count on a touch screen faster than a chimpanzee. We learned it has baseball-sized cubs in a tree in January while barely waking up. The black bear has been in these mountains since long before any road was ever built. It has survived everything and it knows this place better than anyone. But now you know the Smokies a little bit better too. That's four episodes in the Great Smoky Mountains. We've seen the trees' VOCs, we've watched fireflies synchronize, we've looked for salamanders in the rain. And now we've met the bear. The most visited national park in the country, and most of its visitors never know half of what you know. Come back soon to explore another amazing national park. Scouts, your next adventure is waiting!