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Certificate - Etheses - Saurashtra University

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(Hedysarum alpinum) roots and main food plants in summer were common horsetail<br />

(Equisetum arvense) and bearflower (Boykinia richardsonii) (MacHutchon and<br />

Wellwood, 2003).<br />

Most commonly, brown bears feeding habits have been quantified by analysis of scat<br />

contents. But because of the differential digestibility of foods, contents of fecal<br />

residue were rarely equivalent to amounts of foods ingested by bears. The resulting<br />

underestimation of highly digestible foods was found to be most pronounced for meat<br />

and fish diets (Hewitt and Robbins, 1996). Grizzly bears were found to consume<br />

herbaceous vegetation commonly during spring and early summer in many<br />

ecosystems. Even in areas with abundant meat and fish resources, grasses, forbs and<br />

sedges were found constituting the major part of the bear diet in spring and early<br />

summer (LeFranc et al., 1987). In North America, fruits of blueberries, huckleberries,<br />

buffaloberry, bearberry and other species were found to be the seasonally important<br />

foods for bears throughout much of their range. Roots, corns and bulbs were found<br />

commonly used by bears in the Rocky Mountains and interior Alaska. Roots of<br />

hedysarum were extensively dug by bears in all mountainous and arctic habits of<br />

Canada and Alaska (LeFranc et al., 1987). Brown bears were also found to be<br />

effective predators. In early summer, neonates were found to be actively hunted.<br />

Moose, caribou and elk calves were found to be seasonally important foods of bears<br />

(Ballard et al., 1981; Larsen et al., 1989; Gunther and Renkin, 1990; Hamer and<br />

Herrero, 1991; Green et al., 1997; Mattson, 1997 and Gau, 1998). Anthropogenic<br />

foods such as garbage, livestock feed, pet food, human foods, garden crops, honey<br />

were also used by brown bears wherever humans and bears coexisted (Herrero, 1985;<br />

Van Daele, 1995; Craighead et al., 1995 and Peirce and Daele, 2006). In Kugti<br />

61

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