The Largest Bears Ever Recorded in the United States
Alaska grows the biggest bears on Earth. Here is how large they get, how anyone knows, and why the record books come with a few caveats.
Bear records are tricky. Very few wild bears are ever put on a scale, the same animal can weigh a third more in October than it did in May, and stories grow in the telling. A bear that looked like a ton to the person standing in front of it usually turns out to be half that.
What follows are the figures most often cited by wildlife agencies and record keepers, with an honest account of how solid each one is. Three bear species live in the United States: the brown bear, which includes the grizzly and the Kodiak bear, the polar bear and the American black bear. Each has its giants.
Nearly all of the true heavyweights have one thing in common, and that is Alaska. The polar bears of the Arctic coast and the brown bears of Kodiak and the Alaska Peninsula are the largest land-dwelling meat-eaters alive today. A big male of either kind outweighs the largest Siberian tiger two or three times over.
To understand why, it helps to look at the records one at a time, and then at what these animals eat.
Read all the way to the end. We save a bear bigger than any alive today for last.
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Brown bear
1. The Kodiak giants
Bigger than you expected?Kodiak bears are brown bears found only on the islands of the Kodiak Archipelago in the Gulf of Alaska. They have been cut off from mainland bears for about 12,000 years, since the end of the last ice age, and are recognized as their own subspecies. About 3,500 of them live on the islands, a density few places on Earth can match.
AdvertisementThey are the largest brown bears in the world. According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, a mature male can stand more than ten feet tall on its hind legs and about five feet at the shoulder on all fours, and the biggest reach 1,500 pounds. Typical adult males weigh between 800 and 1,400 pounds depending on the season. Females are about 20 percent smaller in frame and roughly 30 percent lighter.
AdvertisementThe heaviest wild Kodiak bear on record is usually given as about 1,650 pounds. Bears of that size are extreme outliers, old males in their prime at the very end of a good feeding season.
The brown bears of the nearby Alaska Peninsula, including those of Katmai National Park, are nearly as large and live in much the same way. The two populations are separated by 30 miles of water and thousands of years, but by very little else.
AdvertisementA big Kodiak male on all fours can look a tall person in the eye. Standing up, it could look into a basketball hoop.
For scaleA 1,500-pound Kodiak bear weighs about as much as eight grown men, or a full-grown dairy cow. -
Polar bear
2. The heaviest bear of all
Bigger than you expected?The polar bear is, on average, the largest living bear and the largest land carnivore on the planet. It is longer and taller than a brown bear, with a longer neck and a narrower head. Most adult males weigh between about 800 and 1,300 pounds and measure eight to nine feet from nose to tail. Females are about half that weight.
AdvertisementIn the United States polar bears live only in Alaska, on the sea ice and coasts of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. They are true carnivores that live almost entirely on seals, and a male that has fed well through the spring carries a layer of fat several inches thick.
The largest bear of any kind commonly cited in the record books was a male polar bear shot at Kotzebue Sound in northwestern Alaska in 1960. It is reported to have weighed about 2,200 pounds and to have stood more than eleven feet tall when mounted upright.
AdvertisementThat figure deserves some care. It has been repeated in reference books for more than sixty years, but it comes from a hunting report and not from a scientific weighing, and nothing close to it has been measured since. The heaviest polar bears weighed by researchers in recent decades have been well under 2,000 pounds. The 1960 bear stands as the accepted record, and as an exceptional one.
For scaleA 2,200-pound polar bear would weigh as much as a small car and, standing upright, could touch the ceiling of a room with an eleven-foot ceiling.Advertisement -
In captivity
3. Zoo bears grow even bigger
Bigger than you expected?A wild bear's weight is held in check by work. It walks miles a day to find food, fights for the best fishing spots and loses a large share of its body weight every winter in the den. A captive bear does none of this. It is fed all year, moves little and may skip hibernation altogether.
The result is that the heaviest bears ever weighed have often been zoo animals. The best-known American example is a Kodiak bear named Clyde, who lived at the Dakota Zoo in Bismarck, North Dakota. He was estimated at more than 2,000 pounds late in his life in the 1980s, heavier than any wild Kodiak on record.
AdvertisementCaptive polar bears and brown bears elsewhere have reached similar weights. These animals show what a bear's frame can carry when food is unlimited, but they tell us little about bears in nature. Much of the extra weight is fat that no wild bear could afford to haul around, and modern zoos now manage diets carefully to keep their bears lean and healthy.
AdvertisementCaptive bears do have one legitimate claim on the record books. They live longer. A wild brown bear is old at 20 or 25. In zoos, brown and polar bears regularly reach their thirties.
For scaleCaptive weights are not counted as natural records. Think of them as the upper limit of what a bear's skeleton can carry, not what the wild produces. -
Black bear
4. Bigger than you would think
Bigger than you expected?The American black bear is the smallest of the three species and by far the most common, found in about 40 states. An average adult male weighs 150 to 400 pounds and a female 100 to 250. Seen in the woods, most are about the size of a very large dog.
AdvertisementExceptional males are another matter. The heaviest black bear commonly cited in the United States was taken in Craven County, North Carolina, in November 1998 and weighed 880 pounds. That is heavier than most inland grizzlies.
It was no accident that it came from eastern North Carolina. The state's coastal plain has mild winters, a long growing season and vast fields of corn, soybeans, wheat and peanuts set among swamp forests where bears can hide. Bears there feed heavily for most of the year, den only briefly and sometimes not at all, and males of 600 and 700 pounds are recorded in most hunting seasons.
AdvertisementOther farm-and-forest regions produce big black bears for the same reason. Pennsylvania and New Jersey have both recorded animals of more than 800 pounds. In the lean mountain forests of the West, by contrast, a 400-pound black bear is a large one.
For scaleAn 880-pound black bear weighs more than four average black bear males put together, and more than most grizzlies in Yellowstone. -
Grizzly
5. The bears of the lower 48
Bigger than you expected?The grizzly is the same species as the Kodiak bear. It is simply the name given to brown bears that live inland. South of Canada it survives in parts of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington, with about a thousand bears in the Yellowstone region and a similar number in and around Glacier National Park. It has been protected as a threatened species in the lower 48 states since 1975.
AdvertisementThese bears are far smaller than their coastal cousins. The National Park Service gives the weight of adult males in Yellowstone as 200 to 700 pounds and of females as 200 to 400. A male of 700 pounds in fall is a very big grizzly, and one that reaches 800 or more is remarkable.
The reason is diet. A Yellowstone grizzly lives on roots, grasses, pine nuts, moths, ants, elk calves in spring and carcasses when it can find them. It works hard for every calorie.
AdvertisementHistory suggests the lower 48 once held larger bears. The California grizzly, which lived on acorns, salmon and beached whales in a mild climate, was described by early settlers as enormous. It was hunted out, and the last one was killed in the 1920s. No reliable scale weights survive, only the bear on the state flag.
For scaleA typical Yellowstone male grizzly weighs about 400 pounds, roughly a third of a big Kodiak male.Advertisement -
Why Alaska
6. It is all about the salmon
Bigger than you expected?Brown bears on the Alaska coast have access to something inland bears do not: salmon, in runs that last from June into October. A single sockeye carries about 4,500 calories, and a big bear at a good stream can catch and eat dozens in a day. Late in the season, bears eat only the richest parts, the skin, brain and eggs, and leave the rest for gulls.
AdvertisementThis feeds a yearly cycle of feast and fast. Bears emerge from their dens in spring thin and hungry. Through late summer and fall they enter a phase of nonstop eating, and a large male can gain several pounds a day. By October a coastal brown bear may weigh 30 percent or more above its spring weight. It then lives on that fat for five to seven months without eating or drinking.
AdvertisementKatmai National Park celebrates this each October with Fat Bear Week, when the public votes on the plumpest bear at Brooks River. The largest males there are estimated at well over 1,000 pounds.
Polar bears run on a different calendar. They are fattest in early summer, after the spring seal-pupping season, and leanest in fall after months ashore.
A grizzly in Yellowstone and a Kodiak bear are the same species. The difference is the menu.
For scaleFood supply, not genetics, explains most of the size gap. Any record weight depends heavily on the month in which the bear was weighed.Advertisement -
The fine print
7. How bears are weighed, and why records are uncertain
Bigger than you expected?Weighing a wild bear is hard work. Biologists dart the animal with a sedative, often from a helicopter, then roll it into a net or sling and lift it with a tripod and a scale, all before the drug wears off. Only a small number of bears are weighed this way each year, and researchers do not go looking for the biggest ones.
AdvertisementMost claimed records come from hunting, and hunters rarely have a scale that reads to a ton in a remote camp. Weights are often estimated from chest girth, or from the field-dressed carcass with a percentage added back. Such estimates can be off by hundreds of pounds.
Height claims are worse. A bear's hide stretches when it is skinned, so a ten-foot bear rug did not necessarily come from a ten-foot bear. For this reason the main record-keeping body for North American big game, the Boone and Crockett Club, ignores weight and hide size entirely. It ranks bears by the length and width of the cleaned skull, which cannot be stretched.
AdvertisementMore recently, biologists at Katmai have used laser scanning to measure the volume of free-roaming bears from a distance and estimate their weight without touching them.
For scaleTreat any bear weight that was not read off a scale as an estimate, and any weight from before the 1970s as a good story with a number attached. -
Ice age
8. The giant short-faced bear
Bigger than you expected?The largest bear ever to live in what is now the United States is gone. The giant short-faced bear, known to science as Arctodus simus, ranged from Alaska to Mexico during the ice ages and died out about 11,000 years ago, at the same time as the mammoths and ground sloths.
AdvertisementIt was built differently from any living bear. Its legs were long, its body relatively short, and its muzzle broad and blunt. On all fours it stood about five and a half feet at the shoulder. Reared up, the largest males stood eleven or twelve feet tall. Weights have to be estimated from bones, and the biggest individuals are put at 1,500 to 2,000 pounds, with most animals smaller.
AdvertisementIn other words, an average large male short-faced bear was about the size of the most extreme polar bear or Kodiak ever recorded.
For years it was pictured as a fast-running super-predator. Study of its bones and teeth now points to an omnivore, much like a modern brown bear, that ate plants as well as meat and probably drove smaller predators off their kills. Its remains have been recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and from caves across the country. Its closest living relative is the spectacled bear of the Andes.
AdvertisementFor scaleAt the shoulder, a big short-faced bear stood as tall as a man. No living bear comes close on all fours.
The short version
The biggest bears in America are Alaskan: polar bears along the Arctic coast and brown bears on Kodiak and the Alaska Peninsula. Mature males of both commonly pass 1,000 pounds, and the largest wild individuals on record are put at about 1,650 pounds for a Kodiak bear and about 2,200 pounds for a polar bear. A captive Kodiak in North Dakota topped 2,000 pounds, and a North Carolina black bear reached 880.
For comparison, a large male Siberian tiger weighs 400 to 600 pounds and a male African lion about 420. Nothing else that hunts on land is in the same class as a big bear. Only the extinct short-faced bear was consistently larger.
Keep the caveats in mind. A bear's weight swings by hundreds of pounds between spring and fall, few wild bears are ever weighed, and the oldest records rest on reports no one can now check. The safest statement is also the most impressive one: every autumn, on the salmon streams of Alaska, there are bears walking around that weigh more than half a ton.
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