Imagine washing dishes by hand, minding your own business, when you look out the kitchen window and see a couple of adult black bears playing on your children’s swing set. Believe it or not, this happens more often than you might think. Although we believe black bears to be very serious and dangerous animals, the truth is that they like to spend some time playing when they sense that there is no danger.
One of the most recent cases occurred in Connecticut, United States, where a family was able to record a family of three bears playing on their children’s swings in the backyard.
A Bear on the Family Slide
What looked like a regular Saturday at the Loving house ended up being quite eventful. The couple had just returned home from lunch when they spotted the happy bears taking a stroll in their back garden.
Soon the bears spotted the wooden castle the Loving family had set up for their kids. The bear skillfully climbed the ladder… as if it knew exactly what it was doing. Then, it settled in and slid down the plastic slide, landing near the sandbox. They were so suspiciously at easy in the play set that Sara later confided to the media: “We joked that they had probably done it before, but we had never seen a bear slide down the slide before.”
The thing is, admission to play centers is very expensive, so it’s normal for bears and other wildlife that don’t have access to credit cards to sneak into residential gardens to play on the children’s swings. A third bear approached these two, appearing out of nowhere while they were playing on one of the swings. It seems they still don’t know how to sit on the swing, but they had fun with it anyway.
After 10 minutes of playing, they left as calmly as they had arrived.
Why Do Bears Play?
How can a bear, such a powerful predator, spend time playing on a slide or swing? It all comes down to the black bear’s innate intelligence and curiosity, a species that is remarkably adaptable to its environment. Play in nature is a crucial learning mechanism. Through play, predators hone their survival skills. Just like human children, bears improve their coordination through play, developing the balance necessary for hunting or climbing, and developing problem-solving skills.
For both bears and human children, a slide is a large, colorful, three-dimensional object with a strangely soft texture. They have an instinct to investigate it, often with their snout or paws. When they try it out, they discover that the object provides an interesting sensation of movement or allows them to slide easily. Their reaction is very similar to that of a child or even a dog when they find a new toy and feel the urge to interact with it. Bears simply demonstrate their high cognitive level by being able to have fun with novel objects.
Other cases of bears playing
Remember how crows are capable of passing information down from generation to generation? Well, experts are beginning to suspect that bears learned how to go down slides a long time ago and simply teach their young how to do it. And there is recorded evidence of this: one of the most endearing and viral videos on this subject was filmed in September 2021 in Asheville, North Carolina.
There, a teacher at Isaac Dickson Elementary School was able to film a mother bear and her cub in the schoolyard. The mother bear first demonstrated how to use a large slide as if it were a lesson. Then she encouraged her cub to slide down the lower slide.