Three species of bear inhabit North America: the grizzly, the polar bear, and the black bear. But the American black bear is truly North America's bear, found only in North America. Black bears range from Canada to Mexico, from New England to California. There may be as many as 750,000 black bears roaming the forests and mountains of the continent. With its large population, and with more people moving into black bear territory, it's important that we understand this magnificent animal. Stephen R. Swinburne takes us to where black bears live. He joins biologists in search of bears in the Pennsylvania woods, where a mother bear is examined and her cubs tagged. He visits a "school teacher" for orphaned cubs who teaches them how to survive in the wild. Along the way, he offers his personal observations together with fascinating facts about black bears and their world. (Did you know that in the autumn, black bears consume as much as twenty thousand calories a day? That's equivalent to forty-two hamburgers!) With stunning full-color and archival photographs, this lively book shows how North America's bear behaves and survives.

What main factors affect mammalian home range size and dynamics? To what extent do constraints on home range characteristics vary between the sexes? This book aims to address these issues by concentrating the authors' expertise and experience in studies of home ranges in general and focusing on their studies of black bears of the Pisgah Forest, North Carolina, in particular. The authors provide an overview of the black bears and methods for their study before discussing concepts of home range, developing predictive habitat quality models, addressing influences of food production on social organization and exploring the mating behaviour of male bears.

The years from 1820 to 1920 saw the sport of bear hunting at its greatest flowering. Much of the country was still wild enough to support large numbers of both black and grizzly bears, who in turn supported a remarkable assortment of bear hunters. Some, like David Crockett and Theodore Roosevelt, became internationally famous. Others, like Wilburn Waters and Holt Collier, are almost completely forgotten, though their exploits were just as extraordinary. "The Bear Hunter's Century "brings to life the hard, thrilling lives, of these men. Not just a book of adventures, this a fascinating social history told with wit and style, a penetrating examination of the often inaccurate lore of bear hunting, and a celebration of the amazing skills developed by the best bear hunters.