JOAN CARTAN-HANSEN, HOST: Bears eat up to 15 percent of their body weight in one day.

If you weigh 60 pounds and you ate like a bear, you'd have to eat nine pounds of food.

That's like eating 14 large pizzas every day.

Let's find out more about these amazing animals.

[MUSIC] CARTAN-HANSEN: Cade Bowlin is a grizzly bear biologist.

CADE BOWLIN, BEAR BIOLOGIST: So, there's eight different species of bears in the world.

Here in Idaho.

We have black bears and grizzly bears, also known as brown bears.

There're also polar bears, Asiatic black bears, sloth bears, spectacle bears, sun bears and panda bears.

The most common bear in Idaho is the American black bear.

Black bears can be found in colors other than black.

Baby bears are called cubs, female bears are called sows and male bears are called boars.

Grizzly and polar bears are the biggest bears.

They can by over six feet long and weigh up to 600 pounds.

Bears have a very good sense of hearing, and an even better sense of smell.

Bears are omnivores.

That means they eat both plants and animals.

And they live according to the seasons.

BOWLIN: So, our black bears and grizzly bears in Idaho have similar annual cycles.

So late spring, early summer, our bears come out of den.

One of the first things that our bears want to do when they come out of the den is eat as much food as possible.

CARTAN-HANSEN: Bears have special adaptations that allow them to uncover a variety of foods.

They use their strong claws to rip at the bark of trees.

Underneath, they find insects to eat.

Another special bear adaptation is their ability to pluck berries or flowers from a bush with their prehensile or flexible lips.

A bear's lips can bend and grasp much like our fingers.

In Idaho, berries make up a critical part of a bear's diet in late summer and fall.

BOWLIN: We transition from that phase into the mating period.

After the bears mate, the focus is again on food, trying to put on as much weight before fall as possible.

As we get closer into fall and early winter, our bears become what we call hyperphagic, which just means they want to eat as much food as often as possible to basically get as fat as they possibly can before they go into the den.

Our bears will den in October to November, again, depending on weather conditions, and they'll stay in the den until the following spring.

CARTAN-HANSEN: So, how do you tell the difference between a black bear and a grizzly?

BOWLIN: So, our black bears have short, sloped faces.

They have very big ears, and they also have short, very sharp claws.

And our black bears do not have a hump on their back.

Our grizzly bears have a longer dished profile.

When you look at their face, they also have shorter ears and much longer claws.

And the hump on a grizzly bear's back also distinguishes it from the black bear.

CARTAN-HANSEN: Bowlin and his colleagues are putting out a bear trap.

Their jobs are to find out how grizzly bears are surviving in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem or the GYE.

This area includes Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, and parts of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.

BOWLIN: So, our grizzly bears in the GYE face, a whole host of challenges, loss of habitat, loss of traditional food sources, human encroachment on traditional grizzly bear habitats, CARTAN-HANSEN: In the 1800s, more than 50,000 grizzly bears roamed the lower 48 states.

Now less than 2 thousand live in a very small area compared to where they historically survived.

Grizzly bears in the lower 48 were added to the threatened and endangered species list in 1975.

So, these scientists are doing what they can to help grizzly populations come back.

BOWLIN: So, our research and monitoring efforts for grizzly bears here in eastern Idaho is very diverse.

We research trap grizzly bears, which just means we catch grizzly bears, chemically immobilize them, and then put radio collars on them.

Why we put collars on the bears is to track bear movement, to look at reproduction of females.

So how many cubs those females are having, cub survival, how often those females are having those litters.

CARTAN-HANSEN: But just tracking bears isn't enough to understand their habits.

So, scientists use something else to help with their research.

BOWLIN: So in our efforts to monitor the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, grizzly bear population here in Eastern Idaho, we put out 21 monitoring cameras throughout the Island Park area.

The purpose of these monitoring cameras, again, is to record females that have cubs of the year, also, any individual females that might have yearlings or 2-year-old.

These efforts again are just to keep our finger on the pulse of our population of grizzly bears here in the GYE.

CARTAN-HANSEN: The pictures are informative and help scientists learn a little more about the character of each bear.

[MUSIC] CARTAN-HANSEN: Bowlin and his colleagues take the information from the radio collars and monitoring cameras and decide the best way to manage bear populations.

BOWLIN: I think one of the biggest misconceptions with grizzly bears is that all grizzly bears are bad bears or aggressive bears, when in reality, for the most part, grizzly bears don't want anything to do with people.

CARTAN-HANSEN: And the only bear you should get close to is one like Teddy.

Bears are an essential part of an ecosystem, so protecting them is important.

And it's something you might think about doing as a career.

BOWLIN: Some of the main reasons why I like my job is I get to spend almost every day in the field following grizzly bears around.

I love my job.

CARTAN-HANSEN: If you want to learn more about bears check out the Science Trek website.

You'll find it at ScienceTrek.org.

[MUSIC] ANNOUNCER: Presentation of Science Trek on Idaho Public Television is made possible through the generous support of the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho.

By the Idaho National Laboratory, mentoring talent and finding solutions for energy and security challenges.

By the Friends of Idaho Public Television and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.