Bearberry Bears

A black bear family plucks little red berries from a patch of bearberrry in Glacier National Park.

Montana's bears usually begin denning up with the first mountain snowstorms in October. Reaching towards mid-November now, and we still haven't had a major snow. Scanning the Glacier Park webcams (permanent link in right-hand column) currently shows that all of the park's valley bottoms are still snow-free. This may be good news for bears.

Open slopes in late-fall means that some bears can stay out a little later and pack on a little more fat to survive the winter with. Food preferences vary somewhat between individuals and substantially between regions. In late summer and early fall, Glacier's west side bears rely heavily on huckleberries, while east side bears rely more on whitebark pine nuts and buffaloberry. But in the fall, both groups of bears feed on kinnikinnick berries (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi).

One ripe bearberry

Kinnikinnick's other common name is "bearberry," and for good reason.

In recent weeks, we've seen lots of bears feasting on a good bearberry crop along the lower slopes, on the east side of Glacier. While the black bear family (above) was moving from one clump of bearberry to another, other bears on the mountain were doing the same.

Just around the ridge to the east, a very obese, lone black bear (a boar?) was very preoccupied gorging on the little red berries. High up and farther west on the same slope, a lone grizzly bear spent most of the evening feeding in what looked (through binoculars) like bearberry patches. Across the valley to the south, another big black bear studied the other bears for a while before climbing down the ridge and crossing the creek just before dark - heading for the bearberry patches?

Bears hibernate because it prevents a net energy loss. At some point, the amount of calories gained from eating plants is less than the amount required to find food that's buried under snow. From south to north, the length of bear hibernation increases from a few weeks to a few months. But until we get a really good snowstorm, some of Montana's bears seem to be staying up late.

Name That Native Plant

Our native forb with a bushell of names

Do you recognize this little native plant? It's evergreen foliage and long-lasting, red berries have decorated many a holiday home in Euro-American culture. What is it's name? Or more precisely, what is your culture's name for it?

This humble heather has a heaping hoard of historic names -- phew! -- that might just leave your head spinning.

It's scientific name (from the 1700's) is one of my all-time favorites, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi (ark-toh-STAF-ih-los OO-va ER-see). Those words feel good rolling around in your mouth -- especially the uva-ursi part. And the funny thing is, this name is Greek-Latin double-talk; the first and second words mean the same thing.

The genus, Arctostaphylos, is Greek. Arkto means bear, and staphyle means a bunch of grapes, so this part translates into "bear grapes." The species, uva-ursi, is Latin. Uva means grape and ursi means bear. So when you sing-song Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, you're really saying "bear grapes bear grapes."

Currently, one of the most common names for the plant is kinnininnick, which is an Algonquian (Delaware Indian) word that means "mixture." That's because the dried leaves were often mixed with tobacco to mellow out the flavor and, especially, to make the tobacco supply last longer. Just ask Lewis and Clark.



Lewis and Clark's very own
pressed Uva-ursi specimin

Their expedition finally reached the Pacific Ocean late in 1805, drenched by non-stop rain and in need of emergency winter shelter. And just as worrisome, their supply of Turkish tobacco was dwindling. So even before their shelter was finished, Captain Clark, "dispatched two men to the open lands near the Ocian for Sackacome, which we make use of to mix with our tobacco to Smoke, which has an agreeable flavour."

That's right, Clark called it, Sackacome. Earlier that same year, Clark had misunderstood the plant's name when he received some dried leaves as a gift from a French fur trader. But this name was derived from the erroneous transliteration of Segockiniac, the Chippewa Indian word for mixture. Other confounding transcriptions included sac á comis, sagakomi, and segockimac.

Earlier, in about 1625, European botanists gave the plant another one of its common names, Bearberry. In 13th century England, medicinal uses for uva-ursi leaves were described in the "The Physicians of Myddfia," a Welsh Herbal ("Herbals" are books of plant medicinal uses). But -- as you might have guessed -- many of the old Herbals had another name for this plant, Arbutus.

Whatever name you might know it by, this short heather has a long history.


Uva-ursi berry under snow in winter

Because uva-ursi stays green year-round, and tends to keep its berries through the winter, it is a food resource for wildlife and humans alike. In winter, deer browse on the leaves while Grouse and Wild Turkeys eat the berries. When food is otherwise scarce in the spring, black bears seek out these berries.

But the red berries taste rather mealy to many people, including Meriwether Lewis. "The natives on this [the west] side of the Rocky mountains who can procure this berry invariably use it. To me it is a very tasteless and insippid fruit," he wrote. Native Americans fried or boiled the fruit, which is high in vitamin C, to make them a little sweeter. They also mixed the berries with fat and dried buffalo meat to make pemmican (a method invented by Native Americans to store surplus food for future need).

Dried uva-ursi leaves were often mixed with tobacco, and they were also smoked instead of tobacco. One traditional tobacco-substitute recipe that was smoked in the northwest consisted of equal parts dried leaves of uva-ursi, bayberry, Labrador tea, and wormwood mixed with the inner bark of red osier dogwood, chokecherry and alder.

Uva-ursi berries in summer

Native Americans smoked uva-ursi tobacco in a sacred pipe, and the rising smoke was believed to carry the smoker's prayers to the Great Spirit. They used the plant in religious ceremonies as well, and as a smudge (a type of incense). They also used uva-ursi to treat kidney stones and urinary tract infections -- uses that were adopted by early settlers -- and made a tea from the berries to use against obesity.

Modern-day herbalists still use uva-ursi. The dried leaves contain arbutin and tannic acid. Arbutin is an astringent with antiseptic properties, and it is useful for killing bacteria in the urine. And tannic acid from uva-ursi is used commercially in Scandinavia for tanning leather hides.

Of course, Scandinavians have their own names for this little heather. They include: mjølbær (Norwegian), hede-melbærris (Danish), sianpuolukka (Finnish), and grainnseag (Gaelic).

Here in Montana, the Salish name for bearberry is skw lsé, and the Blackfeet call it kakahsiin.

Just don't ask me how to pronounce any of those names.  My head's still spinning a little, so I'll just stick with my favorite, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi. Now didn't that just feel good rolling off your tongue?


Kinnikinnick flowers in spring