Alberta Black Bear. Ursus hylodromus (Elliot).
The Fighting Bear. Ursus machetes (Elliot). Chihuahua, Mexico.
OTHER MEMBERS OF THE BLACK-BEAR GROUP
Emmons’s Glacier Bear. Ursus emmonsi (Dall). Mt. St. Elias region, Alaska.
The Inland White Bear. Ursus kermodii (Hornaday). South-western British Columbia.
DESCRIPTION AND DISTRIBUTION
The American Black Bear, or, as our friends with the big spectacles have named him, Ursus americanus (Pallas), has by very long odds the widest distribution of any North American bear.
The polar bear stays well inside the Arctic Circle. The big brown Alaskan bears are only found in certain localities on or near the north-west coast of the continent. The grizzlies inhabit, or inhabited, the mountain regions of the extreme west from Mexico to Alaska. But the Black Bear is found in the central and northern parts of the United States and in the central and southern parts of Canada from the Atlantic coast to the shore of the Pacific Ocean; and his half brothers, or first cousins, or whatever they are, in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Old Mexico, are so much like him that it takes a specialist and sometimes a post-mortem examination to tell them apart.
I have watched and studied these animals in the open for nearly thirty years, and have played eavesdropper and Peeping Tom times out of number when they were unconscious of my presence; and yet I have had dealings with Black Bears in Texas and Old Mexico whom I would never for a moment have suspected of differing in blood or descent from their northern relatives. However, as we may see from the list already given, the Black Bears of Florida, Louisiana, Mexico, and certain restricted districts in the North, have been technically recognized as entitled to separate classification. And it is just as well to state clearly that in these pages all statements (unless otherwise indicated) refer to the common American Black Bear, and the term Black Bear, when unqualified, refers always to Ursus americanus (Pallas).