When you envision a black bear, you may picture our state’s second largest mammal as being a big, meat-eating killer. Technically, black bears are omnivores.

Omnivores eat plants and animals. But did you know that a black bear male that could reach over 700 pounds feeds mostly on plant matter.

In fact, almost 75% of our black bears’ diet is grasses, berries, mast (acorns/beechnuts) or even leaves or plant tubers which they’ll dig up. I’ve often viewed bears eating grasses in a field much like a “whitetail.” They do eat grubs, insects, carrion and sometimes young deer or other animals they can catch. In a nutshell, they are opportunists.

The white-tailed deer is actually a browsing animal. Yes, they’ll eat corn, soybeans, alfalfa or clover from a field, but they were and are adapted to eating the buds and young shoots of trees and shrubs. After snowy winters, I’ve found that they’ll even eat the less palatable leaves of rhododendron.

I love taking a walk in late winter when there is still some slushy snow cover and get into some thickets of rhododendron and am amazed at the amount of deer scat there and the telltale browse line evident with very few “rhodo” leaves within 4 or 5 feet of the ground.

Unfortunately, many housing communities in the Poconos have too many deer (with no hunting permitted areas) and they resort to eating much of the prized landscaping plants around the homes. Deer are true herbivores.

I’ll think smaller now and discuss some of our smallest predators, the shrews.

There are a number of shrew species in our region. Most must eat twice their own weight in food each day. They eat slugs, salamanders, earthworms and even mice larger than they are.

Many years, while sitting on my stool in the cold December rifle season, shrews and red-backed voles would scurry in and under the leaves near me. I discovered that if I scattered some of my trail mix of nuts and peanuts at my feet, that shrews eat nuts, too. They would scoot from under the leaves, grab a piece of walnut and disappear. Moments later, they’d grab another. Thus, nuts must be an addition to their carnivore diet.

Bluebirds and robins, both thrush species, eat invertebrate (spiders, earthworms, etc.) in our warmer months, but in winter, these thrushes will eat autumn olive fruits, multiflora rose hips, desiccated ornamental crabapples, or even staghorn sumac berries.

The American kestrel (our smallest falcon) also changes its diet through the seasons. It may seem surprising that a type of hawk would eat dragonflies, cicadas, grasshoppers, moths or crickets. But these make up much of their diet in the warmer months. In the colder seasons, meadow voles and shrews fill the menu.

Our two largest squirrel species, the gray squirrel and red squirrel, have different food preferences.

The red squirrel, more common in forests with more conifers, eats “tons” of pine seeds. The gray squirrel in spring eats many buds off deciduous trees, some bird eggs, and whenever they can find acorns and nuts, those are their mainstay. Red squirrels will eat nuts too, but their habitat preference offers them more pine and hemlock cones to chew apart.

I’ll finish the column with a few multiple guess questions regarding animal diets. See how you do.

1. This animal eats mice, small birds, earthworms and even small fish: A. muskrat; B. screech owl; C. Cooper’s hawk; D. black rat snake.

2. This animal eats skunks, rabbits and rats: A. great horned owl; B. red-tailed hawk; C. mink; D. porcupine.

3. This animal eats snakes, frogs, fish and mice: A. red-tailed hawk; B. red fox; C. great blue heron; D. long-tailed weasel.

4. This animal eats juncos, starlings and sparrows: A. Cooper’s hawk; B. broad-winged hawk; C. black rat snake.

Test Your Outdoor Knowledge: This shrew is our only venomous mammal in the United States. A. short-tailed shrew; B. water shrew; C. masked shrew.

Last Week’s Trivia Answer: No gulls breed in the Times News region.

Email Barry Reed at breed71@gmail.com

Answers

1. B — screech owl

2. A — great horned owl

3. C — great blue heron

4. A. — Cooper’s hawk