Challenges for Bears This Fall: A Food Crisis

Posted on September 6, 2026 by Leslie

It’s going to be a lean year for bears this fall. Bears are in hyperphagia now, trying to put on as much weight for winter hibernation. With colder than normal extended weather this spring, early spring flowering shrubs didn’t get pollinated. I haven’t seen any chokecherries or buffalo berries. A rare July monsoon wiped out large areas of roses that bears depend upon for hips.

This used to be solid roses with good fall food. Wiped out in the monsoon and slides

Last year our Limber Pines had a bounty harvest. I clocked over 22 unique black bears on just one camera. Limber and white bark pines, both 5 needled pines that have sizable nuts, don’t produce every year. That’s their strategy to outsmart squirrels who cache and eat the seeds, limiting seed survival. This year our limber pines, having outdone themselves last fall, have no cones or cones that never finished maturing. I’ve found hardly any mature cones.

One way to tell in September if there are coning limber or white bark pines is to listen. If the forest is quiet, that’s a bad sign for bears. A forest with a lot of cone production will be noisy with Clark’s nutcrackers cawing and their wing whirl. They arrive in August, waiting for the seeds to mature. They gather, eat, and cache 30,000-100,000 seeds in a season, a crucial strategy for the trees who depend on these birds. Clark nutcrackers have an excellent memory, using those caches during the winter for food, but of course some caches are forgotten.

Yet there are rose hips in other locations. Another plant that is a good fall bear food is Yampa. I’ve seen massive fields of yampa this summer, which I’ve never seen before this profuse. The root is like a small carrot and delicious. In his pamphlet Bear Ecology, Dr. James Halfpenny names yampa as a fall plant food along with sweet cicely and horsetail. In addition, berries that flower in the early summer have been producing well. Raspberries and thimbleberries had an abundant year due to frequent summer storms.

Yesterday I took a drive up to the Beartooths where white bark pine (WBP) trees are still healthy. I wanted to see the nut production for this year. More grizzlies are discovering the Beartooths as it’s one of the very last places in the Yellowstone Ecosystem with WBP. The GYE WBPs are 90% functionally dead. So I was curious about the WBP crop there.

I went to a place where I know there are excellent WBPs on the southern side of the highway. I took a 3 mile hike making a large off trail loop to cover a wider area. I didn’t hear one Clark’s nutcracker or see any producing trees.

Beartooth WBP with no cone production in 2026

This bear had a cub with her in the Beartooths

I followed up with a short drive on the north side of the highway along Clay Butte. To my surprise I encountered a pocket of well-producing trees. Then a 5 mile hike on the south side of the highway to Sawtooth lake. Again 99% of the WBPs have no cones. Occasionally I’d fine a one or two with cones, but they were few and far between. I saw maybe 3 Clark’s nutcrackers.

You can see a few of this year’s whitebark pine cones on this tree

There are just going to be more hungry bears this year. Hopefully there won’t be a sharp increase in hunter-killed bears. It’s going to be a tough hunting season and hunters will need to be extra careful.