Amorous bear billboard reappears, this time with a cub
Spokane’s favorite bear couple is back, this time as parents.
The grizzly bear couple depicted having sex on a downtown Spokane billboard last week made a reappearance Thursday after their original billboard was taken down. This time, there’s less sex and more bears.
On the new board, the male bear is standing on his hind legs, wearing the same dazed-but-pleased expression he displayed while mounting his partner in the earlier iteration. That position is not how the bears mate in the wild, according to pre-eminent grizzly biologist Chris Servheen, a University of Montana wildlife conservation professor.
The mother is off to the left, and a cub makes an appearance on the right side.
If you’re wondering whether bears reproduce in nine days, the answer is no.
The boards are advertisements for Spokane clothing company The Great PNW. Owner Joel Barbour said they were intended to be amusing and not “overly educational.”
Fair enough. But the newspaper aspires to be at least moderately educational, so let’s have at it.
When the first billboard went up, Servheen explained that female grizzlies will carry around fertilized eggs in their bodies for months before the eggs implant.
That’s an evolutionary tactic designed to make sure females are well-nourished enough to support another mouth before they go into hibernation. If the bears are on the thinner side, the egg will not implant, ensuring the mother just has to take care of herself.
Gestation for a grizzly bear is about four or five months. Females give birth in their dens between January and March, and a typical litter is two cubs, though litters from one to four are not uncommon.
Male bears often spend a long time with a female – as much as a month – repeatedly mating, so the short duration of the billboard bears’ partnership is unlikely. Females may also have multiple male partners, Servheen said, and in some cases give birth to multiple cubs with different fathers.
But after impregnating a partner, male bears take off, leaving the female to dig a den, give birth and nurse her cubs. Our Spokane cartoon bear is less of a deadbeat, but goes against thousands of years of biology in doing so.
Grizzlies have the lowest reproductive rate of any North American mammal, in part because they don’t begin reproducing until they’re 5 years old, and females space litters out by as much as three years. That’s made conservation for the threatened animals an extra challenge.
Of course, if you were just here for the sex, you can still buy a cherished Spokane memory for just $27.99.