I begin the description of animals with the bear, because in our area, among predatory animals, it should undoubtedly take first place both in its enormous strength, fearlessness, and in the difficulty of hunting it. All animals are afraid of the bear, except the elk and the wild boar, which, despite this, still become a victim of the bear, albeit in rare cases. And how many hunters are there who have killed bears? Of course, not much compared to the total number of people who claim to be a hunter! Not because bears have become scarce or difficult to find, no! Here fear plays the first role... I knew many hunters, excellent marksmen, who did not like forest hunting, even for hazel grouse, but actually because they were afraid of meeting a bear... Of course, hardly anyone admits this! A Siberian industrialist is constantly in the forest, doesn’t he think much about the bear? On the contrary, he is still looking for an opportunity to meet him. But according to the proverb “every family has its black sheep,” there are also many Siberian industrialists who go into the forest to hunt because of need and, terribly afraid of meeting bears, hope in this case again: “maybe God will carry it through.”
In the forests of Eastern Siberia there are two breeds of bears: anthills - small in stature and vultures - large. This division in a strict sense cannot be called accurate, because both breeds are terrible lovers of anthills, just as both breeds will not miss an opportunity to feast on the meat of dead or killed animals, and especially fresh meat. The main difference between them is the height and size of the beast. Siberian hunters only distinguish bears by this and very rarely, and then only a few, use the words “anthill” or “vulture”: the majority do not know them.
What names do they call bears in Transbaikalia! Some of the Russians in conversation call him master, others taptygin, others clubfoot bear or shaggy devil; others, carried away by their stories, call it black sickness... and all these nicknames have already become so familiar that no explanation is ever needed. In addition, Siberians for the most part call the bear a black beast or simply a beast. In Tunguska, a bear is called karagurosu, which also means a black beast; It must be assumed that the Siberians learned this name from the Tungus, like many other words. The Orochons call it chepchekun, and some call it cheldon. It’s strange that the Orochons called the bear that, because in Siberia they call all exiled convicts cheldons.
The bear warehouse is known to everyone, so a fat, clumsy person will just be called a taptygin or clumsy bear. It should be noted that in Siberia bears reach terrible sizes. I happened to see at one station in the Krasnoyarsk province the skin of a freshly killed bear, more than 20 quarters long from nose to tail; and skins of 18 and 19 quarters are not uncommon in Transbaikalia. The skins of local bears are of much higher quality than those of bears killed in European Russia. Here their fur is much fluffier, softer, longer, and the kind of brown-red color that I happened to see in Russia cannot be seen here. In the smaller breed, the coat is sometimes almost completely black, with silvery gray on the ridge; In large breeds, the coat is always browner. Occasionally you come across bears with a white shirtfront on their chest; according to industrialists, they are the most evil and most dangerous. They are said to be descended from a cross between princelings and common bears.
The smell of a bear is so strong that dogs can hear it several dozen yards away, and it is difficult for a timid horse to cross a fresh bear trail. I can’t determine the bear’s age: we must assume that it can live for quite a long time. Bram says that in. in captivity, bears lived up to 50 years and that the female, being 31 years old, gave birth to more young ones. In 1855, near the Shilkinsky plant in the Nerchinsk mountain district, a bear was caught so old that it could no longer resist. He was killed like a calf. His teeth were completely worn out, his claws were worn out, and there was no fat at all. This bear was not even able to make a den for himself and lay down between two slabs in the cliff, where he was killed in the fall, still in blackfoot. His skin was extremely bad; the fur is reddish in color, not fluffy, hard and hung in strands, the flesh is thin and not strong.
Everyone knows that bears go to dens for the winter and stay alert until the warmest weather. There is a popular belief that a bear sucks its paw and thereby becomes saturated with winter; I personally don’t believe this, because I have many facts that reject this circumstance: I have never heard from local industrialists that they took bears with wet, sucked paws out of their dens; on the contrary, the paws are always dry, of even thickness, with dust and even dirt in the claws, left over from walking before the snow. I would like to know how scientific naturalists interpret this circumstance? Most Siberian industrialists do not believe this. A bear's winter sleep is not like the “hibernation” that other animals in our country undergo - hedgehogs, frogs, bats, marmots. The bear is not in a daze - no, he is only in the den, so to speak, half asleep, half asleep, and if he doesn’t see, then he hears; proof of this is the fact that bears, in the midst of the most severe winter, hear the approach of hunters and often jump out of their dens before the hunters have time to prepare for an attack. There is no doubt that bears breathe in dens, because in severe cold weather around their dens, early in the morning, on the surrounding bushes and trees there is what is called here kurzhak, that is, frost, which settles on the branches from the freezing vapors that are separated as a result of life beast. The bear in the den feeds on its own fat, stored in large quantities since the fall. Thin, uneaten bears do not lie down in dens, but wander through the forest and become connecting rods (see below for more on this).
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Mother bear with cubs |
A bear arranges his den in various ways: he makes it under sparkle, that is, at the root of a fallen tree, or digs it in the form of a large hole under huge boulders, slabs, etc.; when they walked, they simply made it from the surface of the earth and covered it on top with brushwood, twigs and moss; finally, some bears lie down in cliffs, that is, in their crevices, grottoes and caves. In every den, wherever it is made, the bear makes a bed and a headboard from moss (shaikta in Siberian) and lies mostly with its snout towards the hole, or, as they say, towards the hole. Dens are usually made in the most secure places, Siberian-strong, always in logs, in sears (behind the wind), in the terrible thicket of the forest, and very rarely in open, visible places. Siberians notice that the bear that makes its den in open places, for example, on a hill or in the sun, is much more dangerous than the one that lies in remote taiga places. Therefore, when hunting such a bear, more precautions are taken. Why this is so, they themselves do not know how to explain, but interpret it. different. I didn’t actually have a chance to check this myself. But here is a case that explains the completely opposite. Two boys from the village of B-y, Nerchinsk mountain district, were traveling in the fall of 185... along a straight forest road from a neighboring village home. Seeing a squirrel on the ground, they jumped off their horses and rushed to catch it. They didn’t catch the squirrels, but they ran far away from the horses. Returning, one of them noticed some kind of black hole in the sunshine in the ridge. As he explained later, he was spurred on by curiosity: he abandoned his young comrade, climbed onto the ridge, walked up to the black hole, lay down on the floor and began to look into it, but when he saw two large glowing eyes in it, he got scared, quietly crawled away from the find and , looking back repeatedly, he ran to the horses, where his comrade was already waiting. Arriving home, he immediately explained this circumstance to his father, who, realizing what was going on, gathered fellow industrialists and went, at the direction of his son - the future intrepid hunter - to the place where the boy saw the black hole. I found it - it turned out to be a den; in it lay a huge bear, which was killed in the presence of the boy. Since it was still in the fall, when the bear had not laid down, one cannot help but be surprised at the simplicity of the animal, which saw the young observer through the hole and did not leave its home after he left. This case goes beyond the bear’s ordinary precautions and foresight.
Bears lie down in dens in the fall, near the elevation. If autumn is cold and snowy, earlier. If the snow finds a bear not yet in its den, then this animal resorts to cunning: it hides its tracks and, before it gets to the den, which they prepare much earlier, always following the blackfoot, it makes loops like a hare, walking several times one at a time. place, jumps in all directions, sometimes through huge bushes and fallen trees, and then approaches the den. First, while it is still warm, they lie down on or near the den; and then, when it gets colder, they climb into it and lie down with their heads right next to the hole, which does not stop until winter sets in. That is why it is very dangerous to catch them at this time, when they are not yet lying firmly, with their foreheads (hole) open: bears always jump out of the den almost earlier than hunters approach them. And then, in the dense thicket of the forest, where you can barely crawl through, the bear has a hard time dealing with it. Here success is more a matter of chance, and neither experience, nor agility, nor the ability to wield a weapon helps. When winter sets in, severe frosts begin - the bear plugs the hole into the den from the inside with moss, tightly and, thus sealed, lies until it is warm, if no one bothers him. It often happens that a dog, accidentally stumbling upon a den and barking over it, drives the bear out of its winter quarters to another place. It often happens in Transbaikalia that three and four bears lie in one den, that is: either a female with two cubs and a nurse, or without a nurse with her children, who at this time are already quite large. The bear is a male, a male, or a bull in Siberian style, and always lies down alone. If the queen lies with the children and the nurse, then each one has its own den, its own bed made of moss, grass, thin twigs, etc. Usually the queen lies first at the opening of the den, and the children and the nurse are behind her. Bears leave the den around Annunciation, a little earlier or later, depending on whether it is cold or warm. The she-bear always brings the young while still in the den, usually in March and very rarely in early April. Young cubs always have a narrow white collar, which, with the first molting of the animal, imperceptibly spreads through the fur, losing its whiteness more and more and, finally, completely disappears as the animal ages. In very rare cases, white spots remain mainly on the neck and in mature animals. In one litter she usually carries one or two, rarely three and very rarely four bear cubs (which are born blind and become visible after a few weeks) and, moreover, extremely small ones, no more than two-week-old puppies, because the bear’s castle is small in comparison with the size of the animal , which, as industrialists say, does not disperse during births. Although some fur keepers claim that mother bears sometimes give birth to five young ones, I don’t believe it. Is this assumption based on the fact that industrialists have seen a mother bear with five cubs, some of which could have joined someone else’s from their own mother, who accidentally died? Didn't two mother bears walk together with their children, one of whom was seen and the other not? I make all these assumptions because not a single industrialist assured me that he happened to kill a she-bear in a den with so many cubs, although there were examples in Transbaikalia that before spring they killed the sixth she-bear from the den, that is: with a pestun, two Lon children (from last year) and two newborns, who, of course, could immediately be distinguished by their size.
It rarely happens that a female bear brings young after leaving the den; This only happens when March is too warm and the bears come out of their dens earlier than expected, or when before spring they somehow kick out a female bear from her winter home and she no longer lies down. In this case, the mother, before permission, makes a calm, soft lair, Gaino in Siberian style, in the strongest places of the remote taiga; Having brought the young, she almost never leaves the nest until the children emerge and become stronger.
First, the mother feeds the cubs with milk from her breasts, of which she has two near her front paws. If the she-bear has settled down in the den, then she does not come out of there until the children look, and after that she takes them out to a specially prepared nest. This is why male bears always leave their dens earlier than females. In any case, the mother does not take the cubs with her for quite a long time, but keeps them in the nest; but when they grow up and get stronger, then she begins to take them with her everywhere, so that the bear and her children are usually seen only from the month of May. The she-bear is generally smaller and lighter in stature, and has a quieter disposition than the male, but with children she rushes at everything decisively, knows no fear and does not value life. At the slightest danger, children usually climb trees, and often the pestun goes with them; The she-bear, with her breasts, goes for everything that only produces a fright. It rarely happens that the cubs will run away and the bear will rush after them, fleeing from danger.
Pestuns are last year's children. For the most part, there is only one nurse and then predominantly the queen; the male is left in; breeders only in this case if the she-bear has brought two males. For the most part, the bear walks in front, her children behind, and then the mentor, like a page behind a noble lady. The responsibility of the caregivers is to care for young cubs, like a nanny for children. A reliable hunter, the Tungus, told me that he once happened to see how a pestun was dragging bear cubs across the Kashyulik River (which is near the G-th Cossack guard, on the Chinese border), of which there were three: he carried one, the bear herself carried the other, and behind the third The pestun did not go, for which he received several blows from his mother. It is rare to find an old mother bear with a mother bear, that is, her cub in her third year, or, as they say here, a third year old, which only happens if the bear remained barren and did not bring any young. For the most part, the she-bear drives the Tretyaks away as soon as the cubs are born, and remains only with last year’s children - the Lonchaks, and then more than one, and also drives away the others along with the first ones. These Lonchaks, left with their mother, are the real nurturers.
By autumn, young bear cubs reach a significant size; they are as big as a large yard dog, so they can defend themselves. It should be noted that in a dangerous encounter, cubs usually climb one tree and are located on its branches, mostly on one side. If you have to shoot them, you need to hit the bottom one first, otherwise the top one will fall and knock down perhaps the bottom one, who can run away and hide. “A beast is just a beast,” say industrialists, and indeed, if you happen to carry a bear cub on horseback, then you must first tie its paws, otherwise it will still try to reach the horse, albeit with one paw, one claw... then it’s already the best the industrial horse will probably start knocking down its rider.
If a bear cub somehow ends up in a mouth or pit prepared for other animals, the mother does not immediately pull it out, but usually lies down nearby and waits for the owner of the trap, sometimes not leaving for several days in a row. But there are cases that... the she-bear takes out the cub from a shallow hole, for which she then severely punishes her; she cannot get it out of her mouth: she does not have enough sense to lift the fallen log, and therefore, by scratching the bear cub with her claws, she only increases his suffering and contributes to the end of life; Noticing the death of the child, she stuffs it with brushwood, twigs and moss along with its mouth. That is why it is necessary to inspect traps in the summer in forest areas where bears live, with a gun, otherwise you can pay with your life, especially since the bear jumps out of an ambush by surprise. Many such cases have happened in my memory!.. Local industrialists go to inspect traps without a rifle, with only an ax or knife, and unfortunate examples still do not force one to be more careful than some lazy Siberian!..
Estrus, or, to put it in Siberian, the chase of bears occurs in the heat of the summer, precisely around Peter's day. Usually the female is courted by one male, and it’s a disaster if another admirer appears: a terrible frenzied fight between them continues until one remains the winner. During a massacre, fur often flies in shreds, blood flows, a terrible roar deafens the surroundings; and there are cases when the weakest pays with his life, and the female remains in the possession of the strongest; if the males are equivalent, then in this case the one the female prefers. How much noise and roar there is when a bear is in heat! How many places they will trample and crush grass, flowers and bushes! Their pursuit usually takes place in remote and hidden places, mostly near forest springs and mountain streams, in the cool. The children are not present here, but go with a mentor, otherwise they will be torn to pieces by the bear. Males, searching for queens during estrus, become terribly angry, especially if their search does not quickly lead to the desired goal. At this time, they often rear up, roar, tear at the ground, and with their front paws, stretching them out as far as they can, scratch the trees with their claws to such an extent that the entire bark falls off and hangs in ribbons on the pulp. Every male tries to reach as high up the tree as possible with his claws, as if leaving the enemy a measure of his height and ferocious power. Industrialists call such traces of bearishness “scraping”, “scraping”. Indeed, such signs involuntarily catch the eye of an unprecedented hunter and impressively declare the possibility of meeting such giants that frost runs through the skin, for these scrapes occur at great heights.
Many local industrialists claim that the bear is not chased every year, but as if every year, which is why they call such bears barren. I don’t know how fair this is, I’m telling you what I heard. - During the chase, the bear is extremely angry and looks like a madman: his eyes are dull, he sees poorly, he runs around with his tongue hanging out, he doesn’t eat anything, and foam comes out of his mouth in a cloud... Once upon a time, Petrov post in this form, an angry bear ran into a camp of workers who were burning coal near the Shilkinsky plant, in the Nerchinsky mountain district; Seeing him, the workers ran away, and the bear, hearing screams and noise, ran into the very mound and burned its paws and side. Then one lively, passionate industrialist, Dmitry Kudryavtsev, grabbed a rifle from the booth and managed to shoot at the bear, which rushed down the mountain from a bullet, ran into another artel of charcoal burners and died in terrible convulsions in front of their camp.
The she-bear not only sometimes suffers cruelly from the claws and teeth of the male, but it also happens that she pays with her life. Once in the taiga I happened to see a bear that had been mauled to death - her breasts and noose had been eaten away. Having driven away a little, we met a bear who was quietly walking ahead of us along a forest path, tattered and plucked; blood flowed from him in streams; Apparently, he did not pay any attention to us, but when we drove up close, he hastily ran away into the thicket of the forest. The next day, when I was driving back along the same path, the bear was no longer in that place... And on the path, except for our old tracks and fresh bear tracks, we did not notice anything. It must be assumed that the male stole the corpse of his mistress at night.
In general, immediately after leaving the den, bears look for the so-called bear root; this is nothing more than a bulb that usually grows under stones, slabs and on ridges. The taste of this onion is sweetish, pleasant at first, but then disgusting; people find it mostly only in bear scraps. It is used here for the benefit of many diseases. Having eaten it, you feel some kind of relaxation of the body and at the same time lightness, as if after a bath, as if several pounds had been lifted from you. In large proportions it produces vomiting and diarrhea. Having eaten this onion, or bear root, the bear is immediately cleansed of everything, and most importantly, of the so-called bush (we will talk about it). After this, he goes to the young aspen tree and eats it with the greatest appetite. Many local hunters say that the bear, having eaten this root and part of the aspen tree, still lies near its den for several days and sleeps soundly, so that you can approach it without any danger and, as they say, “at least grab it by the ears.” The Orochons also say that at the same time bears eat rotten meat, which they extract with their claws from long-fallen dead trees. Then the bear attacks the blue flowers of Urguy (lumbago), eats them in great abundance, runs after them at full speed, wherever he sees a flower. As a result, he cleanses again and worms appear in his nose. This is the worst time for a bear; From now on, his winter fur begins to fall out, and then he absolutely cannot hear anything through his nose. At this time, shooting it is easy, but unprofitable, because the skin is thin and suitable only for halves (suede). After being shot, the bear begins to eat ants; and there berries, honey, and nuts ripen, for which he is a big hunter. In addition, the bear eats various meats, fresh and carrion; He especially loves horses - this is his best dish. Finally, even in the summer, he goes to lakes, rivers and swamps, looks for young ducks in the grass, catches them, chasing them for several hours at a time, and often spends whole nights in this hunt, looking for them like a dog, crawling, jumping after young, so that splashes fly in all directions, and a terrible splash arises. You have to see what he comes out of the swamp after such a hunt: a freak, dirty, wet, in one word, to put it in Siberian, a puzha puzhalo.
The footprint of a bear, especially the hind legs, is extremely similar to a human one, except that the prints of its huge claws are visible in the snow or mud. The male's trail is somewhat wider than the female's, and therefore a habitual hunter can immediately distinguish from the trail who passed - a bear or a she-bear? It is not difficult to keep track of him even in summer, because he really crushes the grass with his paws and tilts it in the direction he was going, that is, he pulls it together with his paws. In addition, the bear will not pass quietly anywhere, he is always active: he will either dig up an ant heap, or turn over stones, slabs, snags, sparks, and the like. This is where his terrible power is amazing! He often turns entire fallen trees around with ease! The bear eats ants in a funny way! tearing apart the heap, he immediately begins to lick his front paws and places them on the ant. The ants run around in turmoil, fuss, scurry in all directions, run onto his paws and immediately become his victim.
Evening and morning dawn are the bear’s favorite time: here he performs all his adventures, all his tricks! It has been noticed that a bear, living for a long time in one place, always goes along the same path to feed. Hunters know it well and often catch it in such places. In addition, the bear loves to walk along forest paths or paths made by other animals or industrialists; traces and feces are often visible on them. Ridges and bare sunbeds are the favorite places for bears to walk, especially in the spring. It should be noted that he approaches them mostly from the north, that is, from the forest, therefore from above the mountain. He will always stop at the edge of the forest, watch everything quietly, and listen to see if there is anyone or anything dangerous, whether there is a seasoned (large) boar under the mountain or on a ridge, to put it in Siberian - a cleaver, because he is afraid of it. If he sees a queen with piglets, he will look out for a convenient place, steal (pick up) them slowly and begin to lower huge stones, fallen trees, etc. from the mountain onto them. It often happens that in this manner he gets piglets for a snack.
One cannot help but be surprised that the bear, with all its clumsiness, massiveness, and apparent clumsiness, perfectly conceals any animal, and often even man himself; he does this so skillfully, quietly and carefully that he often grabs anzhigan (young wild goats) at their rookery. In some places he crawls like a dog, in others he jumps like a cat, without touching his feet anywhere and without breaking a single twig.
The trouble is if the bear, having seen a person in advance, decides to steal him and the person does not notice it. This is where accidents happen! There were examples of bears approaching hunters so quietly that they did not notice them until they felt the heavy paws of the beast on them. First of all, the bear tries to disarm the person and knocks out everything he has in his hands with his paws, and then, if he succeeds, he deals with the unfortunate man in his own way!.. But if a person first sees the bear, then he can get close to him quite easily , because the bear is careless, is not afraid of anything, does not look around, and if a twig cracks under the hunter’s foot, it doesn’t matter, the bear will not pay attention; but as soon as the scent of a person hits him, he immediately rears up, roars in a terrible way, and if he sees that you were hiding him, therefore you were not afraid, for the most part he quickly runs away; but if he sees that you are frightened of him, have moved away from him or to the side, which he unmistakably understands, then “anything can happen, then whose will take it,” say industrialists.
On this occasion, in Transbaikalia we have the following Rule: if you have just seen a bear and you see that he has also noticed you, you should not at all show that you are afraid of him, and it is always better to move towards him or stand still, but not to run to the side or back. An unexpected noise or knocking sometimes frightens the bear to the point of causing bloody diarrhea, and the animal disappears soon after. Many examples of such cases are told by eyewitnesses and supported by facts.
Common people claim that the bear is afraid of the human eye. I asked many people who, being in the forest not at all for hunting and, therefore, without any defense, accidentally came across bears, but got off safely only by hiding behind thick trees and looking intently into the eyes of the beast. Finally, who hasn’t heard and who doesn’t know the truth that many unfortunate people saved themselves from bears by pretending to be dead, or, as they say here, getting sick, which is why the bears covered them only with moss and brushwood, and left. The unfortunate ones, having noticed the absence of bears, barely climbed out from under your outer grave, you returned safely, blessing God, to your warm corners, to your wives and children, repenting for the future not to go in vain into the dark, dense forests of the Siberian taiga! .
If a bear is full, then it is always afraid of a person and does not look for an opportunity to meet him. The proof is that he is almost always afraid of the smell of a person blown towards him by the wind, although he does not yet see the person himself; if this happens on the way, he immediately turns to the side and tries in every possible way to avoid the encounter. The proverb is true when it says that “the courage of the city takes away”, and it is very appropriate when hunting bears. If a person is not afraid, trusts in himself, in his composure, in his gun, then it is not difficult to kill; but if you are not sure, it is better not to touch it!..
Siberians say that the bear is flimsy (weak) on the backside, and indeed, if the bear somehow accidentally touches a branch or something else with its backside, it will immediately roar in a terrible way. The angry bear roars somehow dully, hoarsely, but loudly; in a calm state he seems to howl. The cubs grumble and purr, and in displeasure they roar shrilly and abruptly. In addition, an angry bear puffs and puffs heavily; and the frightened or frightened, but at the same time cowardly himself, snorts strongly. In general, his voice can often be heard during estrus, especially when the males are fighting among themselves. If you hear a bear's roar from afar, the most fearless person will immediately have an involuntary shiver run through his body, while another's limbs will probably tremble and his hair will become a bruise... And indeed, the bear's roar is terrible, and especially at night, and even in mountainous places, where the echo echoes the king of the forests of vast Siberia and drives terrible, wild sounds through the valleys and mountains, rocks and cliffs, ridges and forests of Dauria - first with the same terrible, thunderous force, and then with a barely audible dying sound. A wounded beast roars even more horribly, and the industrialists say the truth: “As the black sickness roars, the Indian earth rises”!..
Everyone knows how intelligent a bear is! He easily and quickly climbs trees, but mainly smooth ones; He is afraid of gnarled ones and reluctantly climbs on them, probably because twigs and branches often deceive him, breaking under his terrible weight. One day I happened to see a bear cub descending from a tree head down. I don’t know if this happens with big bears? Some thinkers claim that a big bear sometimes descends from trees head down, but only from knotty ones, and from smooth ones - backwards.
The bear swims excellently; The largest rivers are not an obstacle for him - he swims across them quickly and easily. In summer he loves to swim and often lies in the water for a long time. He can swim in all sorts of positions, even standing, like good swimmers do.
It is remarkable that the bear, for all its clumsiness and massiveness, loves a kind of fun: it deliberately lowers stones from steep mountains and cliffs, and hilariously looks at them, how they fly and jump, sometimes thrown from a terrible steepness, how they meet others on their way stones, knock them out of place and also carry them along. He is probably interested in the fact that he will lower one stone from above, and several of them will fly downwards. What an innocent activity!.. Such pranks must be seen on the sly in order to be fully appreciated... In addition, the bear amuses himself in this way: he will find somewhere a tree broken by a storm, the trunk of which, for the most part, high from the ground, remains split into tattered splinters ( especially near trees broken by a thunderstorm) - this is a godsend for a bear, and even more so for a she-bear when she is with children. The bear stands on its hind legs, with its front paws it takes one or two wood chips, moves them away, or, better to say, bends them almost to the ground and then suddenly lets go, and from the elasticity of the wood chips they instantly return to their original position, immediately hit others standing, and thus produce some special rattling, piercing sound. This is what occupies, presumably, the bear's musical ear. One only has to get thoroughly acquainted with the forest and the area to hear or see similar bear activities in the evenings or mornings.
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Tree stripped by a bear |
During the day, bears mostly hide in the thicket of the forest, near springs, springs and mountain rivers, avoiding the sun's rays and the terrible gadfly; At night they walk everywhere, not even afraid to go out onto large forest roads and into wide valleys. If the bear begins to get very tired of the gadfly, then it roars, clasps its head with its front paws and rolls on the grass in a ball, like a hedgehog. He loves to catch chipmunks, more for fun than for food, because the chipmunk is too small and agile in its movements, in addition, in bad weather, it catches young hazel grouse, wood grouse and other birds for snacks. But what does a young hazel grouse or capercaillie mean compared to the monstrous appetite of a bear? If he is able to eat a small cow at one time, then he “will not kill even a worm” with hazel grouse.
Bears often open goat pits and pull out everything that has fallen into them. It's a disaster for the owner if the bear gets into the habit of going to his pits. Not only will he take out and eat the game, he will also mutilate the entire pit and with his frequent visits will scare away any foreign animals from the area. It is for this reason that the bear is called an auditor in conversations, or, as industrialists say here, a levisor. But the bear is cunning, he does not go to inspect the pits at a time when the owner of the pits might meet him and, perhaps, blow off his head (which often happens); he goes to inspect traps more at night, early in the morning or late in the evening.
Where there is a bear's den or a female bear's den, you will probably never see a single fresh trace of other animals nearby - goats, wapiti, hares and other animals. This circumstance serves partly as a sign when finding a bear's apartment. In addition, in winter, during severe cold, the steam that separates from the den and settles on the surrounding bushes and trees in the form of a white kurzhak, which I already mentioned above, serves as a sure sign that the bear is lying in the den.
The bear loves pine nuts very much, eats them in large quantities and gets very fat from them. A bear in a hazel tree is a funny and interesting picture! Look how he picks nut cones from the cedar tree: sometimes, standing on his hind legs, he puts them in a pile or on his paw pressed to his chest; then he carries the prey to a clean place, rolls the pine cones either in his paws, or on the floor, or on a stone, on a stove, causing the nuts to spill out and become a delicacy for the shaggy prankster. He also eats salt marshes with appetite, but especially loves mineral water and laps it up like a dog, in large quantities.
Before the time comes to go to the den, that is, in late autumn, the bear no longer eats anything except bear root and some kind of herb (could not find out the name), with which it completely cleanses its insides until the intestines he will be as if washed clean, and then he will lie down.
Here is a strange circumstance to which I ask hunters and naturalists to pay special attention, namely: that the bear lies in a den with what is called here a bushing. This is nothing more than a cylindrical lump the size of a fist, which is located in the passage canal, near the anus itself. Whenever you kill a bear in Transbaikalia in winter, he always has this bushing, except for the connecting rods, that is, those bears that do not go to dens in winter for various reasons. I don’t know if this is true everywhere there are bears? This bushing is extremely strong, so that it can hardly be broken with an ax head or a stone; I can’t explain what it consists of, nor can I explain why it serves the bear lying in the den. Siberians say that it is like “locking the heat or warmth within them for the whole winter.” Here's the original explanation! I wonder if it is formed from some kind of gastric impurities due to the complete cessation of eating food; or, on the contrary, is this not the remnant of food, which, after diarrhea during sleep, due to the heat and the complete cessation of feces in the den, has become so hardened? It's a shame I didn't get a chance to thoroughly examine these bushings; in appearance they seem to consist of chewed pine needles or some kind of bark. In fact, doesn’t the bear eat these substances on purpose, instinctively, for a special purpose indicated by nature? These bushings are sometimes found along ridges where bears live; those who are unaware of this circumstance can easily mistake them for something else, but certainly not for a product formed in the stomach of the beast!!. There were examples that in some bears taken from a den, two bushings were found, one after the other, lying near the anus. The local fur-hunters explain this circumstance even more funnily: they say that the bear prepares two bushings for reserve, i.e., if one bushing “flies out” in case of fright, then there is still another, with which he can safely go back to another den - to finish your long sleep. They also say that without this bushing it would be impossible for him to survive the winter - it would freeze. It would be interesting to know whether these bushings are found in bears killed in warmer climates than in Transbaikalia? .
There are years when berries and nuts are born poorly, or even not born at all; That’s when there are the so-called connecting rods, that is, bears who were unable to eat in the summer, therefore skinny, dry, in a word, hungry, wandering through the forest all winter and rarely seeing the next spring; They are usually either killed by fur trappers, or they themselves die from cold and hunger. Such connecting rods are very dangerous, they attack everything that can serve them as food, and therefore, a person; they are extremely arrogant and brave. Often hunger forces them to come to the most residential places, where, of course, they are immediately killed. In addition, some bears, driven out of the den, also sometimes do not lie down and also become connecting rods; these latter, without being killed by industrialists (which very rarely happens), for the most part fall to the mercy of wolves, who, having gathered in a herd of several heads, easily strangle such bears, especially when the harsh winter comes into its own and covers the entire taiga with a deep snow shroud when bears, exhausted by circumstances, are unable not only to attack, but even to defend themselves. Industrialists say that such half-mad connecting rods sometimes come to the very booths of protein workers, shepherds and to the yurts of local nomadic foreigners, who always have a fire laid out at night for safety and warmth in the cold autumn time, and that this precaution does not in the least save from connecting rods: a bear, having attacked such a camp and frightened those present, but still fearing a direct attack, he first runs into a river, swamp or lake to swim, then, jumping out of the water, runs wet to the fire, shakes himself off over it and thereby extinguishes it. But this circumstance also serves as a benefit for people who are not prepared for defense and are taken by surprise, because at this time they manage to escape, leaving their belongings to be plundered by the insolent, or they manage to prepare for defense and kill the daring beast. Knowing the examples of the arrogance of the connecting rods and having once seen his furious, undaunted figure in the forest with my own eyes, I believe this. However, they tell so many jokes and fables about bears that, really, it’s hard to believe the truth. But still, I must say once again that the audacity and impudence of the connecting rods are truly worthy of note. Here is a fact that may well confirm my words. In 185... near the Cherninsky Cossack village, in the Nerchinsky mountain district, on the Chernaya River, in late autumn, one Orochon and his family stayed in a yurt. One day, early in the morning, he went to the Gorbichensky guard on his business; on the same day, after he left, a huge bear appeared in the vicinity of the yurt, where his Orok wife and children remained. The woman, frightened by the bear, moved from this place to another; but the bear, chasing her, again appeared near her yurt and gave her no rest. The poor orc moved to third place and again saw her pursuer with horror. Finally, it ended with the bear eating the little orc and the children at night. Her husband, returning home a day later, found an empty yurt and all the signs of the violent death of his family; Having recognized what was the matter, with a bleeding heart, he appeared in the neighboring villages - Omoroi and Chernaya - and announced his misfortune. Residents immediately stopped the raid, found the bear killer not far from the yurt and, in turn, punished him with death. This is a fact that the residents of Omoroi and Chernaya, and even more so the orphaned Orochon, will remember for a long time.
There were examples in Transbaikalia that industrialists who went into the forest to inspect their traps fell into bears that attacked them, and they, having no defense, were saved only by jumping on a horse and running away from them, and, seeing on the heels of catching up with the bear, did not lose their presence of mind; Their resourcefulness was of this kind: they threw back their hat, mittens, boots and finally outer clothing one by one, as soon as the bear caught up with them again. The fact is that the bear, in excitement, having caught the industrialist’s hat, mittens, boots and other things, paused for a minute, fiddled with them out of anger and tore them into pieces; then he again set out to catch up with the deceiver, but, having reached him, he again met some thing of the person escaping, rushed at it with great fury and fury, and meanwhile the resourceful industrialist jumped out to a safe place, and, having safely reached home, told the incident with an involuntary laugh.
It is extremely difficult for a person to observe such an animal as a bear in the forest, in the taiga, and, I think, there is no way to find out all the details of his life. The morals and customs of tamed bears are no longer typical and are not suitable for hunters and naturalists. I will limit myself to what I wrote above, and I ask the reader to forgive me, perhaps, for the lack of information. I wrote everything I could learn from local industrialists and observe myself. He kept silent about many things that were already known in Russia, and spoke only about rarer shades of the life of a bear.
In addition to the two breeds of bears that I mentioned above, in Eastern Siberia one occasionally comes across the so-called princelings, that is, white forest bears, and sometimes piebald ones. In 185... the gypsies drove a trained polar bear around the Nerchinsk mountain district. This is a fact known to many residents here. I have not seen him and therefore cannot say anything more about his figure. Local industrialists talk a lot about princelings, but I myself have never met any princelings in the forest. According to the remark of fur hunters, these bears are the smallest, but the most evil. I will give here the story of one truthful old industrialist and I will try to preserve his typical character of speech from word to word:
5 * Bram says that the cub born from a tame bear was only 9 inches long.
6 *“Jaeger, Canine Hunter and Shooter” (M., 1852) on page 63 says that bears are in heat in March and April - which cannot be, because everyone knows that in early spring they see newly born cubs, and not in winter, as he calculated, taking into account the nine-month pregnancy of the bear. Finally, what about bears (they will be in heat in March and April, when they are just leaving their dens at this time, and a male bear always lies alone and never lies down in the same den with the queen, even if we assume that they copulate in dens.
7 * Kuchenok - firewood piled in a woodpile, covered with earth and turf on top and lit from below to produce coal.
8 A booth is a hut in which people live.
9 * Isn't magnetism at work here? It is known that a dog, having made a stand over a bird a few inches away from it, quickly looking at it with its sparkling eyes, seems to chain the bird to its place. The rabbit, planted in front of the boa, sits as if nailed, seeing the terrible eyes of the boa constrictor. Isn't this magnetism? To prove that a bear is afraid of a person’s eyes, common people cite the fact that a bear tormenting a person often rips off the skin from the back of the head onto the face with its claws and actually covers the person’s eyes with it. Perhaps this is partly true! There is always part of the truth in popular speech.
10 * Many claim that connecting rods are caused by worms under their skin that do not allow them to lie down, and that worms were often found on dead connecting rods.
11 * The reader, perhaps, will ask how the returning Orochon found his yurt in the forest, which his wife had moved without him to a third place? It’s very simple: Orochon is also a forest dweller; he is able to track a squirrel in the forest in the summer, and not just a yurt that has already been moved through the snow. In addition, the Orochons, wandering from one place to another, always stick a stake at an angle in the place where the yurt stood, in the direction to which they migrated.
12 * Loni - last year, Siberian expression.
13 * Kadachi is a small wooded pad, 70 versts northeast of the Shilkino plant in the Nerchinsky mountain district.
14 * I heard from a comrade who was in St. Petersburg in 1869 that one of the capital’s hunters and magazine publishers once remarked to him: “I don’t believe Mr. Cherkasov’s hunting stories, they are exaggerations. For example, he says that one Siberian came across six bears. This is nonsense! Bears never travel in herds.” I don’t know what my comrade said to such a hunter, but I will briefly report to him myself that his remark is fair, but not in this case, because a she-bear with two pestuns, two small children and a male bear ingratiating himself with the affections of the female is not a herd , this is a rare accident. However, Mr. P. may not believe my stories, but only write down the facts...
15 Barnaulai is the name here for a copper coin minted from the time of Catherine II.
16 * Kukuiny - a belt made from the neck of a wild goat (guran) or red deer, extremely durable and soft.
17 * Chaga is nothing more than deposits on old, dried out, half-rotten birch trees, and shulta is extracted from the same birch, but not from the outside, like the first, but from the inside, near the core. Not knowing well what was going on, I once asked a poor old woman to explain to me what shulta is and what chaga is, for the poor local residents also eat them. The old woman, not being able to explain what was going on, said this: “Well, write in such a way that shulta say rotten birch sticks, extracted from the inside of a birch tree at the root; If you boil them, the water will be red, which we, poor people, make instead of brick tea; and chaga - birch scum, if you boil it, the water will be yellow; This one really weighs on my heart, it’s worse than shulta; that’s all, write it like that - they’ll understand.”
18 * A party is a gathering of girls and young boys in a house in the evening, where dance songs are sung; grooms look out for brides and introduce themselves; There are various love affairs and so on and so forth.
19 * Druzhka is a medicine man, without whom not a single common wedding takes place here. He is the first at the wedding everywhere - he has the first piece, the first glass. His responsibilities are extremely varied.
A representative of the bear family is the sloth bear ( Melursus ursinus) has a very peculiar appearance and is noticeably different from an ordinary brown bear.
Due to its original appearance, this animal is separated into a separate genus. The body of the beast is covered with a thick, matted sheath of dark color. On its chest it has a light spot of almost white color in the shape of the Latin letter U. In this way it looks like a Himalayan bear. The animal's paws end in elongated claws, reminiscent of the claws of a sloth. Despite its long claws, the sloth fish runs very fast.
Photo: Srihari Kulkarni
The most important distinguishing feature of this predator is its long, light, bare muzzle, which distinguishes it from other relatives. There is practically no hair on the face. The beast has extremely mobile lips, capable of stretching into a long tube. It does not have front incisors, but it has a long tongue, which it protrudes from its mouth, closing one or another nostril. Thanks to these features, the animal has an excellent tool for obtaining food, working on the principle of a vacuum pump.
photo: The Belurs The fact is that the sloth bear eats termites and ants. Having found an anthill, it destroys the outer shell with strong claws, sticks its muzzle inside and pulls the ants into its mouth. The loud snort it makes during this process can be heard within a radius of 200 meters. With a characteristic snort he gives away his location. In addition to ants and termites, the animal likes to feast on honey, climbing tall trees in search of bee nests. In addition, the sloth fish eats fruits, flowers, plant roots, and even corn and sugar cane, for which farmers are not very fond of it.
photo:ucumari The animal is nocturnal, resting during the day in secluded places and caves. In this regard, his hearing and vision are poorly developed, but his sense of smell is highly developed. Due to poor eyesight and hearing, the animal can allow people to get close to it. Usually he is not aggressive, and often, noticing the appearance of strangers, flees. It does not run away into a tree, although it is excellent at climbing branches in search of food. Sometimes his self-defense instinct awakens, in such a situation he becomes dangerous, as he is capable of showing aggression.
photo: Nick Michalski The bear does not hibernate in winter because it lives in places with a warm climate, where it is possible to get food all year round. Males meet with females for mating only for a few days a year, between May and July. The rest of the time the animals live alone. The female bears the offspring for six and a half months. In September - January, 2-3 bear cubs are born in a secluded cave. For the first three weeks of life they are completely blind and helpless.
photo: Nick Michalski As soon as the cubs have eyes, they begin to go hunting with their mother. You can often find a female sloth whale with cubs on her back. During this period, the family leads a diurnal lifestyle, fearing attacks from nocturnal predators. Apart from tigers and leopards, the sloth bear has no enemies. After 2-3 years, the cubs become sexually mature and begin to live separately. Males do not take part in raising the young.
The average weight of an adult animal is 100 kg, with females usually being a third lighter than males. The body length reaches 180 cm, not counting the small ten-centimeter tail. The height at the withers of the animal is about 90 cm.
photo:Steve W Lee The sloth bear can be found almost throughout India. It also inhabits the hilly areas of Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Republic of Bangladesh. He does not like to live high in the mountains, nor in valleys with high humidity. The favorite habitat of bears is dry forests and small hills with rocky outcrops.
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In the Far East, in the Primorsky Territory, there are tigers and leopards; in the European part of Russia, in some places there are bison, but encountering them is unlikely. Wolverines, wolves and lynxes, when you get to know them closely, are not as bloodthirsty as they are shown in feature films or described in fiction. The bear is usually considered the most dangerous in the forest zone of Russia. This is not true, the most dangerous animal in Russia is the moose. Even a bear gives way to a large elk. Siberians have a saying: “You go for a bear’s bed, but for an elk you go for a mother’s coffin.” This means that the bear will only maim, and the elk will kill.
Then on the scale of the most dangerous comes the wild boar, then mouse-like rodents, insects and ticks that carry dangerous diseases, then poisonous snakes. But we’ve somehow gotten used to moose, wild boars, mosquitoes, ticks and snakes, everyone has seen them, everyone knows them and, showing reasonable caution, they are not particularly afraid.
The bear is special in this regard. On the one hand, you can admire the funny and good-natured antics of bears in circuses and zoos. The bear is a kind character in many folk tales, a symbol of Russia. On the other hand, it is known that the bear is a very large and dangerous predator. There are so many terrible stories about bear crimes, but for some reason there are few people actually injured by bears, and mostly such incidents happen not somewhere in the taiga wilderness, but in zoos and circuses, that is, in cities and large towns. Meetings between people and bears in natural conditions are very rare, accidental and short-lived. You can live in bear country all your life and never see a bear.
In order to dispel some doubts, and since meeting a bear in many parts of Russia is quite possible, it is necessary to know its lifestyle, habits and habits better.
There are three species of bears found in Russia. The largest, weighing up to 700 kilograms or more, is the polar bear, which lives in the ice and on the islands of the Arctic Ocean. In the Primorsky Territory in the Far East there is a small, weighing up to 150 kilograms, black or Himalayan bear.
The brown bear is the most common; it lives throughout the Russian taiga zone, from forest-steppe to forest-tundra. The color of this bear species actually varies from almost white, sandy to pure black.
Brown bear cubs are born at the end of January, in February, weighing 200-300 grams. Usually a mother bear has two of them, less often one or three. Bear cubs often have white or yellowish-brown collars and ties; in adults they disappear. For one and a half, two years, the cubs are raised by their mother bear, and then the mother expels them into an independent life. The main enemy of a young bear (and all bears in general) is other bears, those that are older or stronger. The life expectancy of bears is up to forty years; in their prime, some gain weight up to 300 kilograms or more, with a height of up to 2.5 meters when standing on their hind legs.
Each adult bear has its own area of 5-6, rarely 8-10 square kilometers. This is not enough for a predator of this size; for example, Ussuri tigers of the same weight have areas of 300-400 and up to 1000 square kilometers. During the first few years of ownership, a bear learns literally everything about its property, including all the other inhabitants of the area and its neighbors. Thanks to his keen sense of smell and hearing, the owner of the site quickly learns about any incidents on his territory. The bear very jealously controls its territory and the entry or invasion of another bear, the passage of wandering deer or the appearance of a person will not go unnoticed and at the first opportunity the bear, at least from a distance, will meet and admire its guests, which is why bears see people more often than people see bears .
Sometimes, a bear can share a small part of its territory with one or several neighboring female bears, but never with another male or with an outside female bear. Likewise, female bears cannot tolerate the presence of other female bears and extra males in their area. An explanation needs to be made here. All areas sufficiently suitable for life are divided between bears and the boundaries of the areas are marked in one way or another. Any disputed territories, for example, too poor or, conversely, too rich in food, can be controlled by several bears at once, regardless of gender, but they are known to each other by sight and strangers have nothing to do in this disputed territory. Strangers without their own areas are usually elderly, crippled and young bears. The owners of the bears do not allow all strangers to live in peace in their areas. Border conflicts between neighbors usually end bloodlessly, with people shouting, roaring at each other and going their separate ways. The bear, the owner of the site, is not specifically looking for trouble. It’s another matter if a foreign bear comes to the occupied area with the aim of seizing the territory, then the fight will be very serious. The owners perceive any invasion of such bears as a challenge to war and fight for their territory to the last drop of blood, killing (and eating) the weaker enemy at the first opportunity.
Young bears have virtually no chance of survival, and only the fittest become adults. Young bears, or in hunting jargon, “anthills”, risking their lives, learn the art of survival in enemy territory and not being able to calmly fill their bellies with plant food, switch to higher-calorie animal food, and become reluctant hunters in several areas occupied by other bears. They gain their weight and authority mainly by hunting for everything that can somehow move. The range of prey ranges from mice and chipmunks to moose and weaker, alien bears. At night, anthills do not approach fires; the risk of them meeting the owner of the site is too great, but during the day, anthills, when they meet by chance, most often try to scare or demonstrate themselves to a person.
Young bears are often quite intrusive and, without showing themselves, literally follow people on their heels, do dirty tricks, spoil and steal things accidentally left behind. Experienced bear cub dogs try not to notice such anthill bears, since they know in advance about the futility of hunting them. In cases of danger, the anthill is ready to run almost in a straight line ad infinitum and hunters on foot cannot catch up with it, and the dog itself cannot cope with the anthill. In turn, anthills are not afraid of young and inexperienced dogs, and they run around in circles from time to time, scaring the dogs themselves and can be ideal “teachers” for developing the character and reasonable courage of future anthill dogs.
The tactic of escaping in a straight line, from one area to another, is effective in escaping the anthill from the owners of the areas. The owner of the bear will not go into someone else’s area and will stop the pursuit.
Any living creature, including humans, with unusual behavior, coloring, smell and deliberately demonstrating its courage (or stupidity) is considered dangerous for all other animals. And the bear is afraid of humans (or rather, wary) mainly because of the specific behavior of humans. During a chance encounter, nose to nose with any bear, you must continue to demonstrate your courage. The bear knows perfectly well how to deal with those who want to run away, but does not want to fight with an enemy who is confident in his abilities or with an “incomprehensible” enemy, even on his own territory. A normal bear senses and hears a person several hundred meters away, and the bear almost always has the time and opportunity to avoid a meeting, move further away or hide in the nearest bushes, sometimes two steps away from an unsuspecting person passing by. Chance encounters usually end with the bear leaving first, and if the bear is deliberately showing itself off, then the bear has some special reason for this.
The bear attacks its prey on four legs and only stands on its hind legs in front of an opponent equal in strength or in front of a stronger opponent. When a bear rises to its full height in front of a person, it considers the person to be its equal and such a confrontation does not necessarily have to end in a fight or attack. If at such moments the bear stands slightly half-sided, holds his front paws with his palms facing him, has an uncertain look, or, changing jumps to sharp stops, moves parallel to you, he (the bear) expects to end the meeting peacefully, or rather in a draw, in any case, he is not going to attack. If he stands in a football goalkeeper’s stance, palms out, ears flattened, or walks slowly on all fours, parallel to you with a defiant look, then this is a clear demonstration of aggression.
The bear, the owner of the site, will demonstrate aggression and fight with a person only in cases where he is protecting his offspring, his prey and honor (life). Having stood on its hind legs and prepared for a fight, or more precisely demonstrating aggression, the bear (I repeat) considers you not as game, but as its equal, and if you do not look the bear in the eye and without turning your back to it, you will quickly move away (or rather sideways, not very quickly run away) to a sufficient distance of 30 meters, then the bear will lag behind you. A bear does not need trouble; if a bear wants to attack, it will attack, like any other predator, suddenly without prior warnings or threatening poses.
You cannot run away with your back to the bear. You can’t back away either, you can stumble and fall, in both cases the bear may not be able to withstand the temptation and, having caught up or jumped up, it will definitely give a couple or three slaps in the face as a souvenir. It is usually difficult for a normal person to survive such physical suggestion without prompt medical assistance. It’s not convenient to run sideways, but that’s the way to run sideways, without losing sight of the bear, the surrounding environment, and most importantly, without losing control of yourself and you need to move away. Try to understand what caused the threat and in this retreat, try to portray another bear, equal to the owner and retreating, almost with dignity.”
If you yourself provoked the bear into a fight, for example, you are trying to take away the prey, you wounded it, then get out of the situation as you want. In this case, running sideways is unlikely to help you, and the bear will not limit itself to only slaps. Before you do something stupid, think about how your stupidity might end.
It’s better to demonstrate your superiority in front of young bears, it’s not difficult, young bears are already afraid of everything. You still need to drive it away so that the young animal leaves with dignity or so that he believes that you did not see his shameful escape. Small-sized bears are not always young, and huge overgrown ones are not always adults, and if you don’t know how, then treat any bear as if you were an adult bear.
It is very rare, but it still happens that a person will be the first to see a bear; if in this case the meeting is undesirable, then it is quite enough to cough quietly and the bear will try to leave with dignity, pretending that he did not hear or see anything. If in this case you suddenly yell or try to scare the bear with shots, or also try to climb the nearest ship’s pine tree, then the outcome of the meeting will be unpredictable.
Adult bears lead a fairly measured and, if possible, quiet life, they eat mainly plant foods, they do not specifically engage in hunting, but they do not refuse random and easy prey. They destroy anthills, look for worms and larvae, catch fish and frogs in drying lakes, eat eggs from randomly found bird nests, crush rabbits, deer and pick up carrion.
In the summer, you can smell a bear from afar by its ant smell.
Despite their heavy weight and apparent clumsiness, adult bears can be very playful and agile. If necessary, bears can get rid of the contents of their stomach and intestines surprisingly quickly, clearly and silently. In seconds, turning from an overfed airship into a lean and muscular beast, ready for any trouble. Some people contemptuously call this feature of the bear’s behavior “bear disease from cowardice.” It is unreasonable to blame an adult bear for cowardice. Monstrous strength, the ability to run for a long time at speeds of up to 50 kilometers per hour (on an empty stomach), amazing intelligence, a good and long memory, reasonable caution, phenomenal sense of smell and hearing, plus good eyesight, this is not a complete list of qualities in an adult bear. Over its relatively long life, a bear, relying on the knowledge received from the mother bear and on its own experience in survival, may well gain considerable wisdom.
Always well-fed and having a lot of free time, the bear, out of boredom, looks for entertainment and adventure in its area. Buildings and other traces of human presence or life are necessarily studied by the bear and the owner of the area. People living in these buildings are not a hindrance. Bears come close to buildings at any time of the day. Hunting dogs of bear cubs do not allow bears close to their homes, but such dogs are rare, and dogs that are afraid of bears bark at bears only in the presence of their owners or from afar. During night bear visits, such dogs first bark hesitantly, looking in the direction of the bear, then hide somewhere further away and remain silent. When a person sees a bear engrossed in something during the day near his house in a trash heap or in a barn, it is too late to raise noise and panic. The bear has long been firmly established with you and, out of the simplicity of his soul, came during the day and began to do the same thing he did as usual at night. He has long been accustomed to the fact that no one sees him and no one pays attention to him, because so many times he accompanied each resident at night to a separate small house and to other buildings and areas, looked into the windows, etc.
After the noise and panic, shooting from all guns in all directions, dog barking, confusion and screams, the bear (if it survives) will come less often, but will not completely abandon its visits, and will continue to come.
Many other animals also come to human habitation. Some are looking for some kind of food (mice, mustelids, foxes). Others rely on protection (hares, hazel grouse, wood grouse). Often it is near human habitation that the largest concentration of animals is formed throughout the entire area.
Most people, after such an impudent arrival of a bear, immediately have the idea of either training it or teaching it a lesson (shooting it). There is no need to do either one or the other. Bear morality differs from human morality; if you give a bear a sop (feed), the bear will consider it a tribute. And instead of a friend, you will get a very arrogant and persistent tax inspector.” If, having accustomed the animal to handouts, you suddenly decide not to give handouts anymore, the bear will come to demand its own, by force. Again, human food with spicy and other flavoring additives is harmful to the bear; after trying human food, the bear stops eating its natural food and, having not gained enough fat for the winter, will come to you in the winter. By the way, a bear can try human food without showing charity or special invitations. Spoiled sauerkraut, pickles, mushrooms, mash grounds, potato peelings, etc., everything that dogs, birds and mice will not eat in the trash near the house will be a set of free delicacies for the bear and an invitation to future visits.
Having shot one bear of the owner, you will immediately get another or several strays at once, remember those very crippled and offended ones. When studying animals, it is not harmful to look at yourself or at other representatives of human society. What happens if you give power to the crippled, the offended, the poor and the hungry? Mayhem! The same lawlessness towards you will begin with the arrival of offended and crippled bears to the vacated area, new owners, by the way, obvious candidates for the title, connecting rod.” A completely normal bear, a neighbor from another area who is not familiar with the rules of behavior, when getting to know a new territory, can also do a lot of trouble.
Leave everything as it is. You have a reliable, well-fed, healthy security guard who knows you and his job well, and forgive him for some liberties in his behavior, because he doesn’t bother you and protects his territory, and at the same time your hut with you from visiting bears completely free of charge. The behavior of other bears will probably be much worse and will certainly be more costly.
Bears' curiosity and love of adventure have no boundaries. Bears, if possible, go to look at ships, cars, trains, etc. They can spend hours, during the day and completely openly, without hiding, watching the working equipment of lumberjacks or collective farmers.
Bears love to restore order in the huts of lumberjacks, hunters and other forest dwellers during their absence. The smells of human food, certain spices (black pepper) and gasoline drive bears crazy. For the sake of a piece of cracker or a tiny dried fish head, a bear is ready to destroy half of a rather small hut. Cans and barrels with gasoline (or gasoline) will definitely open, somewhere on the side or below. Gasoline will spill out, and empty containers, including two-hundred-liter Soviet-made barrels, will at the same time become flattened and very beautifully chewed at the edges.
By the way, many other animals also like the smell of gasoline; perhaps it is the smell of gasoline that attracts wild animals to human housing.
In order to get what they want, bears often use nearby objects as tools for their own purposes, showing great intelligence and miracles of ingenuity in some of their affairs. It also happens the other way around, according to the principle: “You don’t need strength to eat intelligence.” Any heavy stone, log, snag can become a toy, exercise machine, tool and enemy for a bear.” Naturally, bears find entertainment not only around humans. Several books are not enough to describe all the various pranks of the naughty bear. By human standards, most of the bearish “entertainment” is not particularly smart. During such often unsafe “entertainment,” bears often drop stones and logs on themselves, fall from quite a great height from rocks and trees, but after groaning and groaning for three days, maximum a week, the bear is again as good as new and looking for new adventures there.
As winter approaches, bears begin to prepare for hibernation. They look for a place for dens in advance, check familiar caves and scatterings of suitcases” (these are huge cubic stones, the remains of collapsed rocks), dig holes, drag branches and fallen leaves into them. They try to spend the night in their favorite places. But they will actually lie down in dens only after freezing off fleas and other skin parasites during the first severe frosts. They lie down during heavy snowfalls so as not to leave traces to the den. Before going into the den, they walk a lot near the den for several days and confuse the tracks. From these traces it is not difficult to determine the approximate area of the den, and if you also logically determine the convenience of the places for the den, then you can calculate the location of the den quite accurately. During severe frosts, frost on the branches of the trees closest to the den can be used to determine the location of the den with an accuracy of several meters. At the beginning of winter, you cannot approach the den; a frightened bear may go to another place.
Identification of dens by frost at the beginning of winter may not be correct. The ground is not frozen deeply, and water outlets (springs) appear in the most unexpected places. These keys can also cause frost to appear on nearby trees in severe frosts.
Another way to identify old bear dens is by looking at nettles. For some reason, nettle “loves” to grow near human dwellings and near bear dens. The most accurate (summer) method for fleas. You climb into the supposed den and if after a moment you start to itch, it means that you have definitely found a former den and a bear slept in it last winter.
Bears can overwinter by simply lying down under the nearest tree or stone, burying themselves in the snow. Bears often make their dens in the most unexpected places, in tree hollows, in haystacks and haylofts, in hunting huts and under them. But sometimes, for example, in placers of giant stones (suitcases) where there are a lot of places convenient for dens, bears use these places from year to year and from generation to generation. Near such places you can see the green remains of bear skulls hanging on nearby trees or lying on the ground and on stones images of family signs and pisanitsa (drawings on rocks) of hunters who lived perhaps hundreds or thousands of years ago.
In most of Russia, winter comes much earlier than expected. Many bears go to dens a month or two after the start of winter and severe frosts. Such bears, usually very large and well-fed, not respecting boundaries and adhering to some general direction of movement, go somewhere in other people's areas and along the way rob mouse and chipmunk supplies. The footprint of such a bear looks like a trench in deep snow. In the spring, perhaps these same bears leave their dens much earlier than other bears and walk back through the snow along approximately the same path. In any case, it can be assumed that some of the bears make rather long journeys at the beginning and end of winter and do not look for special meetings with other bears, avoiding their owners’ dens at a considerable distance. In the Primorsky Territory and in the Carpathians, many bears, despite the occasional severe frosts, generally do not go to dens throughout the winter and lead a fairly active lifestyle all winter. True, the winters there are short; in early February, on a sunny, windless day, butterflies and mosquitoes fly on the warmed-up southern slopes of the mountains, and on the northern slopes, some hundred meters away, at the same time, the ears curl up from the frost.
During the winter, bears repeatedly crawl out of their dens to warm up and quench their thirst. They lick ice, eat snow and freeze fleas. In the Far East, little snow falls during the winter and closer to spring, everything within a radius of 50-100 meters from the den is covered with bear tracks of varying freshness. The most interesting thing is that dens, as a rule, are located near populated areas or busy roads, and are completely independent of orientation to the cardinal points. There was once a hunting saying: “The bear lies down so (in the den) so that he can listen to the village rooster.” It seems that the bear really goes to his den with the hope of at least some winter entertainment.
When the spring sun begins to get hot, bears without fail crawl out of their dens for the whole day, do not go far, bask in the sun and climb back into the den at night.
Siberians have a tradition that a bear crawls out of a den together with a chipmunk. This is not entirely true, some bears leave their dens almost in winter, others live in dens almost until the first greenery.
Bears spend most of their fat reserves in the first month after leaving their dens. At the same time, bears accustom their stomachs to food. Imagine a 300-kilogram bear fed from a 20-30 gram portion of food per day, but gradually the weight of the portion increases. When the first greenery appears, the bear no longer limits itself to food.
Before the first greenery appears, bears entertain themselves by hunting. Naturally, depending on where you live. They chase wandering reindeer, try to catch capercaillie and black grouse (black grouse) on leks, look for baby hares, etc. During spring fires in the Far East, bears sometimes very skillfully take advantage of smoke from fires or smoldering snags, sneaking up on roe deer. The caught game is saved for later, since bears practically do not eat at this time. Having accustomed their stomachs to food, they begin to eat their food within half a month, and around May and June (with the appearance of leaves on the trees) the mating season begins for bears. Only one lucky male tramples the female bear, the rest determine by smell that the “sacrament” is completed and they no longer pester such a female.
But there are a lot of fights, screams and deaths among the bear population at this time. A new division of territories, spheres of influence and clarification of the rights to paternity and motherhood begin quietly.” As you remember, a strong bear tries, not only in a figurative sense, to devour a weaker one, including an intractable female, but an accommodating female easily eats her weak or small-sized gentleman.
Bears, as the main orderlies and scavengers of the forest, are often sick with trichinosis, and lovers of bear meat kebabs should know about this. Bears shed once a year in the summer and bears have the best quality fur from approximately August, September to January, February. Closer to spring, the bear’s skin is covered in scars from scratching and matted fur in shreds, trimmed” by mice. Bear fat and bear bile are also valued, but in terms of healing properties, the bile of wild boars and even burbot is no worse.
Photo from the Internet. A bear against the backdrop of Russian souvenirs: a hat with earflaps, a balalaika, a machine gun, a Kalashnikov and an intercontinental missile on a tractor behind. In general, there is something to drink and something to have fun with later.
See also: "Spear for the Survivalist"
This monograph was intended for the magazine "Young Naturalist", but was rejected by the editors for censorship reasons. They, you see, think that bears don't have sex.
A bear is a type of large walking monkey with two paws in front and two more in the back. There is also a small tail behind the bear, the purpose of which is unknown to science. On the bear's head there are two ears, eyes and a snout located at some distance from each other, with which the bear can smell. The bear senses very well and, under favorable weather conditions, can smell around itself over an area of up to three to four kilometers. A bear’s eyes can see, but they can’t smell as well as their snout, so the bear sees much less and relies much more on its snout in its perception of the world around it.
A bear can walk in two ways: on four legs or only on two, and always on its hind legs. Modern science knows no facts when a bear would prefer to walk on its front paws, or two left or right paws. However, it should be noted that this possibility should not be completely rejected, because the bear is very secretive and cunning by nature, and it is likely that, being able to walk on an arbitrarily chosen pair of paws, it deliberately keeps such abilities secret from others, resorting to them only in cases where he wants to stun his potential victim in order to then devour him.
The bear eats a lot and always with gusto. The bear loves to eat honey. He pulls honey from empty beehives. To make the hive empty, the bear sticks its snout into the hole of the hive and roars loudly inside. Bees that do not have time to cover their ears die from shock. The bear also eats dead bees.
Among other animals, the bear also likes to eat ants. It is well known that ants have a sour taste, which is why mother bears especially like to eat them during pregnancy. The bear eats ants in a different manner than bees: he approaches the anthill, lies down next to it on his side, and sticks his paw into the anthill. Having waited until a sufficient number of ants are tangled in its fur, the bear pulls out its paw, licks the ants off it with its tongue and eats them. Sometimes, to simplify the process, the bear sticks its tongue into the anthill and eats directly from there, without the participation of its paws. This is probably what bears do when they don’t have time to wash their paws before eating.
Also, according to popular belief, the bear loves to eat porridge. The bear is a big owner and never eats from someone else's cup. Each bear always has his own cup, and, having filled it with porridge, as a rule, goes for a walk, probably to work up an appetite, which can sometimes be used by hungry people (especially little girls) lost in the forest. However, after eating porridge from a bear's cup, it is not recommended to remain within the latter's reach, since the bear is a big owner and in the vast majority of cases does not approve of anyone eating from its cup. In addition, one should take into account the fact that the bear also eats meat with pleasure, treating its origin with great liberalism. A bear can eat from twenty to one hundred, and sometimes more, kilograms in one sitting, depending on the weight of the victim.
In hungry years, a bear can also dig up the roots of various, usually small, plants from the ground and eat them. To dig roots out of the ground, the bear's paws are equipped with claws. When digging roots, the bear uses only its front paws so as not to dull the claws on its hind paws, with which it never digs. Why this happens is unknown to science. Probably, the bear saves the claws on its hind paws so that, trampling the potential victim with its hind paws, it can inflict additional physical and moral damage with its claws.
Since digging dulls the claws on a bear's front paws, the bear has learned to sharpen them. Considering the fact that ready-made sharpening stones are extremely rare in nature, the bear sharpens its claws by using them to scrape the bark of trees.
There are several species of bears, differing slightly in color and viciousness of character, as well as in their habitats. There are white, brown and panda bears. There are also unconfirmed rumors about the existence of the so-called Himalayan bear, but perhaps this is simply a poetic metaphor or an expletive, such as “Holland horseradish,” which was long considered a special subspecies of a plant from the horseradish family, until the true origin of the term was proven.
The most common type of bear is brown. The brown bear lives in forests, preferring dense old forests to young open forests. He digs a large hole in the ground, called a den, fills it with branches and trunks of small trees, makes small windows around the perimeter for air circulation and all-round visibility, and installs a light machine gun on a turret at the entrance. Some zoologists therefore suggest that the bear originated as a result of the guerrillas going wild, but this version seems untenable, because the brown bear is completely devoid of any sense of patriotism.
There is also information that some brown bears are able to build houses and then live in them, but since this data goes back to oral folk art, it is generally considered unreliable.
As noted above, the bear is very secretive. This does not come from the bear’s modesty, as some scientists believe, for the bear lacks it, but from his desire to lead a solitary lifestyle, as well as from the fact that the bear does not like interference in his private life. The bear eats people and animals that encroach on his privacy, unless he wants to leave the violators crippled as a warning to others. The bear maims such people and animals in the same way: he grabs them with his front paws and tears them, or breaks them in half, sometimes in several places.
The brown bear is very vindictive. Hunters and little girls lost in the forest often become victims of the evil and vengeful nature of brown bears. In the literature on bears, a case is described when a family of bears tried to kill and devour a little girl in retaliation for eating porridge in their absence. Fortunately, the girl managed to escape.
According to unverified data, if a living bear’s paw is cut off, he makes himself a wooden prosthesis, usually from linden.
During the winter, the brown bear falls into an unconscious state called hibernation. To hibernate, a brown bear climbs into a den, curls up there in a special way, putting one paw (usually the front) in its mouth, and falls asleep. All winter the bear does not eat anything, but only sucks its paw. It can be assumed that the bear’s paw is filled with some kind of nutrients from the inside, but, unfortunately, no one has been able to verify this so far, since any attempt to cut off the paw of a sleeping bear wakes up and resists.
However, in most cases the bear sleeps very soundly and does not wake up even if it is abused in some way. Bears who have reached sexual maturity often take advantage of this: they enter the dens of hibernating female bears and commit acts of violence against them. This is how bears reproduce. However, sometimes a bear makes a mistake and ends up in a den in which another bear has hibernated. Such cases are especially frequent in areas where a relatively small number of bears live. This leads to an increase in sexually transmitted and other diseases among bears.
The polar bear, unlike the brown bear, lives in the Far North. It owes its unusual coloring to the fact that in the Far North there is practically nothing to eat except snow, which therefore forms the basis of the polar bear’s diet. If a polar bear manages to catch a seal or penguin, the bear eats them. The bear terrifies penguins so much that they try not to live in the Far North at all, living instead in the Far South, where the polar bear practically never wanders.
The polar bear also likes to eat fish, but it is rarely possible to catch it, since the fish is very afraid of the polar bear and, upon seeing it, tries to swim away. Polar explorers and indigenous people of the Far North add some variety to the polar bear's menu.
The polar bear builds its den from ice and snow, since it has no other materials at its disposal. It is always very cold in a polar bear's den.
The polar bear is covered with thick fur, but in severe frosts the bear still freezes, and then its howls and obscene swearing can be heard far over the tundra. Having heard such swearing, it is recommended to immediately leave the polar bear’s habitat, since the polar bear smells very well with its snout, and in cold weather all its senses, including the feeling of hunger, become aggravated.
Since winter lasts 12 months a year in the Far North, polar bears hibernate not in winter, but at night. Night in the Far North lasts only six months. During this time, polar bears sleep, feeding on their front paw. Polar bears reproduce in the same way as brown bears.
The panda, or black and white bear, lives in China and eats the Chinese, which contributes to the government's population control program. For this, the panda is highly respected in China and is affectionately called “the orderly of the People’s Republic of China.” The panda is very cultured and never eats with his paws: he makes himself bamboo sticks, with which he carefully picks up the Chinese and puts them in his mouth. Some pandas snack on the Chinese with various spicy seasonings and seafood.
The panda does not build a den, but lives in the empty huts, houses and apartments of the Chinese. A sign that a Chinese home is occupied by a panda is usually a pile of bones from the previous owners, piled at the entrance, since a panda never litters the house. It is recommended to avoid houses and apartments near which there is such a pile, so as not to give the panda a reason to eat you.
The panda is lazy, and after devouring a family or two of Chinese, it can remain inactive, daydreaming and basking in the sun, for three to five days. All this time, the panda is relatively safe and even affectionate, he allows children to stroke him and play with him.
The panda, unlike other bears, never hibernates. This probably comes from the high consciousness of pandas, who, understanding the importance of the state task entrusted to them, do not dare to waste a long time. How pandas reproduce is unknown to science.
External enemies
It is well known that some ants sting very sensitively, while others bite very painfully. It is much less known which enemies from the world of animals, birds and insects the sharp ant jaws, their sting and poison are directed against.
But if it is simply unthinkable to remember here all the fifteen thousand ant species registered by scientists, then, of course, it is even less possible to talk about even the most common enemies, of which each type of ant has an uncountable number. Therefore, what follows are given only individual, more or less characteristic, but inevitably scattered examples that introduce the variety of external enemies of the ant tribe.
If we start our review with the mammals of the middle zone, then the first in the line of ant fighters should be called the bear. He is glorified among us, however, more as an enemy of bees and an admirer of bee honey, and the meaning of the old saying that you can’t feed a bear with an ant is not entirely clear: whether this is a good-natured joke, or a sober conclusion. There is, however, a Bulgarian proverb that states that an ant cannot overcome a bear. The bear fights ants. Hungry for the pupae and the ants themselves, the bear uses its paw to rake through the ant heap and from time to time lick the insects clinging to it from the fur. And although it is impossible to feed an ant to a bear, it is capable of destroying a mass of them in one sitting.
However, moles cause much more harm to ants. It’s not every day that a bear tears apart an anthill, and in the stomachs of moles, which zoologists gut by the hundreds, ants are invariably found among other insects. However, for moles, ants are still not the main food, just as for toads, which will not fail to lick off a gaping forager, but also cannot be satisfied with ants alone.
In tropical regions, where the ant population is many times denser than ours, there are species of mammals from the order of edentates that feed only on ants. They are called anteaters. These animals have a small, elongated tubular muzzle with a tiny mouth and a long, worm-like wriggling tongue.
Impenetrably thick, standing hair on end reliably protects the predator from ant bites and stings. Slow, lazy, leisurely, it rakes the ant heap with strong clawed paws and, when a mass of insects pours out of the nest, licks them off with a long, thin tongue covered with sticky mucus.
Anteater meat is black and smells like ants. But in Central and South America, from Guiana to La Plata, it is considered edible.
African sandeaters are generally similar to American anteaters. Having settled down near the nest, the sand-digger extends its tongue as far as possible, to which the insects stick like flies to sticky paper; when the ants thickly cling to the tongue, it retracts and the insects disappear into the throat. Moving from one nest to another, the sand digger laps up the ants until he is satisfied.
Armadillos, lizards of tropical regions, also catch ants with their long tongues.
Birds also feed on ants.
Among the birds of the middle zone, the whirligigs, which also have a rather mobile, long and sticky tongue, are especially zealous in exterminating ants. With extraordinary speed and in unlimited quantities, they eat both adult ants and pupae.
Woodpeckers of all kinds can rightfully be placed next to the whirligigs.
Woodpeckers have a special sense of smell for ants. They smell them even through bark and wood. The tail feathers of woodpeckers are arranged so that when the bird walks along the trunk, the feathers rub against the bark and sweep and scoop out insects from the crevices. That is why you can always see torn off parts of various insects on the tail feathers of woodpeckers.
In the eastern regions of the Himalayas there are red-haired, indescribably foul-smelling woodpeckers. The feathers of this bird are covered with a sticky, resinous substance, and the tail is thickly covered with countless heads of those ants common in the Himalayas, which, once they have grabbed something with their jaws, do not release what they have grabbed, even if the ant is torn in half.
Here we should also mention the golden woodpecker, which also examines the roots of trees; the green one, which deftly runs not only along the trunks, but also goes down to catch ants on the ground; finally, the black one, the yellow one, which, with its elongated, long tongue with spines at the end, never tires of catching ants from under the bark of trees.
Among the feathered ant killers, there should also be approximately four hundred different species of antbirds living in South and Central America. Many of them fly very poorly, but run perfectly on the ground. The Brazilian pyrylemma antcatcher from the passerine order, a long-legged, black bird, lives in bushes, which it leaves only to attack anthills. This bird, unlike four-legged anteaters, is famous for the delicate taste of its white meat.
It is interesting to conclude the story about the vertebrate enemies of the ant genus with the story of one Indo-Chinese fish - the splasher - from the scale-finned family.
In appearance, this swimming anteater is similar to an ordinary perch, but in terms of its lifestyle, and most importantly, in terms of its diet, it has to be recognized as a phenomenon out of the fish series.
Strong fins give the splasher the ability to maneuver extremely accurately in the water, moving not only forward, but also backward. Thanks to this, the fish is able to quickly take a position that is most advantageous for striking and grabbing prey. The fish has huge eyes with black pupils, which are clearly visible against the bright yellow background of the iris. And these are not just decorative details: the fish is distinguished by enviable vigilance, thanks to which from a long distance it detects even small insects crawling along a stem bent over the water.
With precise blows of the fins, the fish is thrown in the water closer to the stem and, swimming up and backing up, takes aim for an attack, and the black pupils are noticeably squinted. A blow follows immediately.
The fish does not have the long and sticky tongue of a sandcop or armadillo, a whirligig or a woodpecker, and therefore its weapon is a one-of-a-kind splashing mouth device: the prey is overtaken by a targeted stream of water, beating a meter or two or even higher above the surface.
A fish water jet, in short but quick bursts, one after another, knocks ants into the water that were just crawling on the grass. In the water they immediately become the prey of the hunter.
In connection with the story about a targeted spray device that allows fish to hunt ants, one cannot help but recall another ant enemy, which also knocks down its victims with a targeted jet of spray, but not of water, but of fine sand. True, here we are already going beyond the vertebrate world.
In the south and in forest-steppe regions, in the forest, along the edges of roads, especially in dry places where bare sand is covered with saggy turf, in dry fine dust somewhere under a wooden staircase, under a rock ledge in the summer you can often notice a regular conical funnel with steep slopes walls
If you bring a ribbon to the bottom of the funnel, a little freak covered in sand will immediately grab onto it. However, you can do without this: the inhabitant of the pit does not burrow very deeply, and it is not difficult to blow him out of the funnel.
Placed in a test tube, this freak is capable of living without food for six months, a year, even more. This ability is very important for the antlion, as this insect is called.
Antlion - Myrmeleon - reticulate; in the state of a perfect insect, it looks like an ordinary dragonfly.
A known species of antlion is Formicarius, discovered even at the latitudes of Leningrad; in the south there are many species of this family.
The antlion has an elegant oblong body, as if hammered out of bronze, four transparent wings, as if slightly touched by rust, and a large-eyed head bearing two short antennae, crowned at the ends with small swellings, making the antennae look like a mace.
The feeding methods of perfect insects are not entirely clear. One thing is certain - they do not pay any attention to either anthills or ants.
The female of this antlion, which is not interested in ants, lays her eggs on a twig or on a stone in dry and sandy areas. The egg hatches into a larva, which is initially quite small. It is at this stage that the insect is the enemy of the ants.
The larva has a trapezoidal head with relatively large curved jaws, a movable neck, sometimes stretching into a thin stalk, and a wide, flat body of a yellowish-gray color.
Among the numerous attractions of the described larva, it should be noted the absence, firstly, of a mouth opening for food intake and, secondly, of an anus for the eruption of its remains. Despite this, the larva feeds.
Its large jaws are pierced by a canal in which a long, thin plate moves back and forth, replacing in this case the second jaw. The pharynx, lined with strong muscles, and the oral cavity, in which the jaw canals are connected, act on the principle of a good pump. The larva, without opening its jaws, sucks out its prey.
The waste food that is digested by the larva accumulates in its stomach and then passes into the body of the pupa, and then into the body of the imago.
When the antlion turns into a winged insect, it throws out meconium, that is, the remains of all the food that was once eaten by the larva.
A tiny larva, hatched from an egg, crawls in search of a place where it will hunt, feed, and grow. When a suitable place is found, the larva begins to build its trapping hole, a snare.
It slowly screws itself into the sand, drawing a circular groove with the end of its abdomen. Passing the same circle a second time, she scoops up sand with her front foot onto her flat head and, using it like a shovel, throws it out of the circular furrow. Further, inside the circle thus formed, a second furrow is laid, followed by a third. The larva continues to throw away sand, going deeper and deeper into the loose dust of the funnel. It ends with her head buried in the ground and sticking out some ends of her jaws. Here the larva can spend a day, a week, a month.
She obtains food not through strength and courage, but most of all through patience.
As soon as an ant running on the ground crosses the edges of the crater dug by the larva, the soil begins to disappear from under its feet, dragging it into the depths of the sand trap. The more decisively the insect tries to stop, turn, and leave, the faster the sand flows into the depths of the funnel, from where a head armed with sickle-shaped jaws rises.
A moment passes, then another, and if the insect resists the force dragging it down, a flat, spade-shaped head emerging from the sandy bottom of the funnel with sharp movements throws the sand in the direction from which grains of sand flow from under the legs of the insect. The shelling is always successful, because both overflights and underflights equally increase the flow, which carries the insect down.
Floundering and tumbling, the ant slides to the bottom. At the same instant, the living trap is triggered, and the jaws close, capturing the prey. If the prey is grabbed awkwardly, the predator lets it go or even throws it onto the slope until, when the ant falls again, the jaws close on the abdomen.
The ant drinks through its unclamped jaws. The empty shell is ejected from the funnel.
The slopes that crumbled and were destroyed during the battle had already been repaired by morning, and nothing else reminds of yesterday’s incident.
Hiding in the sand, the larva continues to hunt until the time comes for it to curl into a cocoon and pupate.
When the insect matures and emerges from the cocoon, it, having warmed up in the sun, flies off to look for a mate.
The antlion, or more precisely the antlion larva, is one of the most peculiar in habits of the enemy of ants from the insect world. One, but not the only one; extraordinary, but not the most malicious.
To be convinced of the validity of what has been said, it is enough to remember the Bengal latro fly, which watches at the anthill of foragers hurrying home with a load of caterpillars, worms, larvae and other living creatures.
The fly not only takes away the prey, but also kills the loaders carrying food to the nest, and the families are completely exhausted by this robber from the big ant road.
And what about the Aphilanthops wasp, which feeds its larvae on the bodies of winged ants? Each burrow cell dug by these wasps for their larvae is filled with the bodies of young Formica females, which the wasps paralyze with a sting.
All the while the ants are swarming, the Aphilanthops wasp continues to bring the bodies of stung Formica into the burrows.
How, however, do they defend themselves, how do ants defend themselves, what gives them the opportunity to repel tricks and tricks directed against them, what allows them to withstand and survive in the face of insidious enemies and destroyers?
The first in the ant's arsenal of protective devices are the mandibles.
Not all species are armed with poisonous glands, and of those that are poisonous, not all have a sting. Therefore, some ants can sting an enemy and inject poison into the wound with their stinger, while others, in essence, only bite the enemy with sharp jaws and then spray the wound with poison. In the latter cases, the ant's abdomen is usually bent forward or thrown onto its back.
The chemical composition of the poison produced by different types of ants is different. It almost always contains formic acid. But this is not always pure formic acid.
The South American ant Solenopsis sevissima - “the most ferocious” - is armed with a sting designed approximately in the same way as a bee’s.
In addition to mandibles, stings, and poison, which are widespread weapons of active defense and attack, certain species of ants have their own unusual adaptations for passive self-defense.
An example of such an adaptation can be seen in those ants that so deftly manipulate their larvae, sewing nests from leaves. It turns out that the sticky threads secreted by the larvae are also used to construct real trapping rings. By entwining tree trunks with them, ants protect their pastures on these trees from ground-based competitors.
There is another very interesting device: to lull the attention of enemies, ants pretend to be dead in case of danger.
The red-cheeked Formica rufibarbis ant, taken from the road to the nest and transplanted into a glass cup, can continue running here for hours. If, however, you lightly press its head with your finger, the insect immediately freezes in the position in which it was caught.
A minute passes, two, three... You can touch the most sensitive places on the insect's body - it does not respond to touch in any way and continues to remain motionless, as if dead.
Quite a long time passes before the ant begins to show signs of life, but even after that it does not immediately resume running.
However, the main protective device of ant species is not the jaws of individual ants, not their sting and poison, not their ability to become less noticeable to enemies.
Wha? made an insignificant, lean insect an object of greedy attention and a bait for many enemies, including large animals or birds? They often wouldn’t even notice a milligram ant if it were alone.
It is quite obvious that the overwhelming majority of enemies of the ant genus are aimed not at an individual ant, but at the entire anthill with thousands of insects swarming there, with packages of eggs and larvae collected in it, with underground scatterings of ripening pupae.
But it is precisely in this - in the number of insects that make up the family, in the vitality of the family - that the ability of ant species to endure with the least damage the disasters inflicted on them by every enemy and by all, taken together, exterminators of their breed.
No matter how many ants from the nest are licked by the tongue of a bear or anteater, pecked by a woodpecker or antcatcher, or drunk by antlion larvae or Bengal latro flies, the family will weaken, but will survive.
The ant family, even if there are only a few ants left, is rebuilt, continues to develop, and maintains vital activity. It is not for nothing that ants are considered a very tenacious breed, and often completely ineradicable.
Even where the all-destroying fire of a forest fire has passed through, living anthills are soon discovered. It turns out that in the depths of the nest some of the young ants and pupae were still preserved, saved from the flames, and when the fallen had passed, they dug passages in the ashes of the fires and restored the life of the family, which, like the fabulous Phoenix bird, is able to rise even from the ashes.
From the book Fundamentals of Animal Psychology author Fabry Kurt ErnestovichExternal factors of instinctive behavior When they talk about the autonomy of internal factors of behavior, about their independence from the external environment, it must be remembered that this independence is only relative. From the above experiments of Holst it is clear that
From the book The First Settlers of Sushi author Akimushkin Igor IvanovichEnemies Among fish, experts say, the worst enemy of spiders is the trout, among amphibians - the toad, among reptiles - the lizard, among birds - the starling, and among animals - the shrew. But of all the enemies, the enemy is another spider. A spider is a wolf to a spider - we could say so, changing the old proverb a little.
author Khalifman Joseph AronovichExternal enemies It is well known that some ants sting very sensitively, while others bite very painfully. It is much less known which enemies from the world of animals, birds and insects the sharp ant jaws, their sting and poison are directed against. But if it is simply unthinkable to remember
From the book Password of Crossed Antennas author Khalifman Joseph AronovichEXTERNAL ENEMIES It is well known that some ants sting very sensitively, while others bite very painfully. It is much less known which enemies from the world of animals, birds and insects the sharp ant jaws, their sting and poison are directed against. But if it is simply unthinkable to remember
From the book Insects Protect themselves authorI. ENEMIES OF INSECTS
From the book Little Toilers of the Forest [Ants; illustrations by V. Grebennikov] author Marikovsky Pavel IustinovichPlant Enemies This title may seem strange to the reader. Plants are the enemies of insects! Does this happen? Rather, on the contrary, insects are enemies of plants. In general this is correct. But life is so diverse!...The female of a tiny gall midge mosquito laid a thin ovipositor
From the book Journey to the Land of Microbes author Betina VladimirAnimals are enemies of insects Not everyone knows that many animals feed on insects. Meanwhile, such animals exist in Australia, inhabited by primitive marsupial mammals. The most primitive egg-laying mammal is the platypus, similar in appearance to
From the book Ants, who are they? author Marikovsky Pavel IustinovichEnemies Shoes. A strange ant is crawling along the sandy slope at the very base of the anthill. There were some round things attached to both of his front legs. It’s as if the ant has put on shoes that don’t fit and is experiencing the greatest discomfort in them. Before he steps, he strongly
From the book Life of Insects [Stories of an Entomologist] by Fabre Jean-HenriEnemies of health It is known that pathogenic microbes can be transferred from a sick body to a healthy one. However, the possibility of transmission and disease is limited to one degree or another. A number of factors play a decisive role in this case. First of all, this is the quantity
From the book Animal World. Volume 5 [Insect Tales] author Akimushkin Igor IvanovichPart four. Our enemies in the kingdom of microbes After the plague, many buildings in cities, towns and villages completely collapsed due to the lack of inhabitants. Small villages and farmsteads were completely deserted; however, there was not a single abandoned house, but there were only dead people in them.
From the book Animals author Bespalov Yuri GavrilovichInvisible Enemies Man has been threatened by serious enemies from the very beginning of his existence. They appeared unexpectedly, insidiously, without rattling weapons. There was nothing to fight them with. It is unknown from which side to expect an attack. They attacked without warning, struck invisibly and without missing a beat,
From the author's bookEnemies big and small White-legged Rider Over the edge of the anthill of a red forest ant, a tiny insect hung in the air, working hard with its wings. So it darted to the side and froze again, moved a little forward, stayed in one place and,
From the author's bookAnts are enemies of humans Ant from the pharaoh's mummy Among the large and diverse ant population, there were also those harmful to humans: several species of ants have adapted to live in houses. Of these, the most annoying ant, Monomorium pharaohus, deserves
From the author's bookEnemies of Osmium The entire gallery is filled with cells, egg laying is completed, the last partition has closed the entrance to the last cell. Now Osmia is building a door to deny all enemies and thieves access to the home. She builds a massive plug, which she spends a lot of time on
From the author's bookEnemies Among fish, experts say, the worst enemy of a spider is a trout, among amphibians - a toad, among reptiles - a lizard, among birds - a starling, and among animals - a shrew. But of all enemies, the enemy is another spider. A spider is a wolf to a spider, we could say so, changing the old proverb a little.
From the author's bookChapter 1 Prey, friends and enemies of primitive hunters In ancient times, human life was closely connected with the animal world. Animals were prey for hunters, a source of food and materials for clothing, and in many places a source of building material. Where not