If you're one of the six million people who follow the National Park Service on Instagram, you might already know this, but if not, you will now – the first week of October was Fat Bear Week! This is the week when brown bears at Katmai National Park in Alaska take advantage of the annual salmon migration and absolutely gorge themselves on salmon to bulk up for their winter hibernation (or, more accurately in the case of bears, torpor). It's called hyperphagia. During this week, brown bears will eat up to 30 salmon daily! You can even watch this feasting on the Katmai National Park trail cams. During the fall season, you have a pretty good chance of seeing one, and if you're lucky, it might even catch something!
Katmai National Park, the Katmai Conservancy, and Explore.org created a fun way for the public to get involved (safely, from a distance) - during Fat Bear Week, the public voted on which bear they thought was fattest, and at the end of the week, a winner was crowned! (Or rather, a winning bear was virtually crowned online.) This year, a female bear named Grazer won, and let's just say there's nothing like a mama's revenge. We thought we'd continue to honor our favorite bears by learning about famous fictional bears that are also larger than life!
Smokey Bear
Many famous fictional bears have a place in our hearts, but only one has a mission to protect the forests where real bears live – and that’s Smokey Bear. The National Forest Service created him during World War II as part of a campaign encouraging the public to be more careful about fire safety. During World War II, many men were fighting overseas, and there was a shortage of firefighters, so protecting forests from fire became a matter of national importance.
If you’re thinking, "Well, what about land that isn't forested? Don’t the rest of us matter, too?" you'd be right. In 2001, Smokey's catchphrase "Only you can prevent forest fires" was changed to "Only you can prevent wildfires" to reflect the importance of all natural ecosystems. And no, his name is not Smokey the Bear, although you wouldn't be the only one wanting to say it that way. In 1952, the word the was added to his name in a song to create the correct rhythm pattern, but his real name is just Smokey Bear.
Baloo
"Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, forget about your worries and your strife..." Most of us probably can't read those words without hearing the tune in our heads and having it stuck there for at least a week. (You're welcome.) That classic tune was sung by Baloo the bear, one of Mogli's animal friends in Disney's animated version of The Jungle Book. Baloo and Bagheera the panther, although they had completely different personalities and outlooks on life, both accompanied and guided Mogli on his adventures. Baloo's favorite things in life were honey and back scratches, but he and Bagheera both mentored Mogli on the laws of the jungle and helped him survive as a "man cub."
Paddington Bear
Paddington might be the most quintessentially British bear of all time who even had tea and marmalade sandwiches with Queen Elizabeth, but did you know that Paddington is actually Peruvian? In the Paddington story, he was born in Peru and lived with his Aunt Lucy after becoming an orphan at just a few weeks old when his parents were killed in an earthquake. (Yes, classic children's stories often have a tragic element. It's a thing.) When his Aunt Lucy went to live at the Home for Retired Bears in Lima, she sent him to London as a stowaway on a ship, and luckily for Paddington, a very nice family (the Browns) found him by chance at the station and decided to adopt him as one of their own. Another surprising Paddington Bear fact: Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky (who was an actor and comedian prior to being president) voiced Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian dubbing of the 2014 and 2017 Paddington Bear movies.
Winnie the Pooh
We normally think of Winnie the Pooh as the good-natured, honey-loving Disney character with the grin and the red shirt, but have you noticed Winnie the Pooh appearing in some unexpected places lately? Like random commercials on TV and even in a horror movie? That's because the original, pre-Disney version of Winnie the Pooh, created by A.A. Milne in 1926, recently became part of the public domain. That means the copyright on the original version of Winnie the Pooh expired, and the original version of the character can now be used anywhere. You can read about the legal details of how this came about, see what the original Winnie the Pooh looked like, or read the original book by A. A. Milne. The New York Public Library even owns the original stuffed animals that inspired the characters! 
Berenstain Bears
This isn't one specific bear, it's a family of bears featured in a much-beloved children's book series, and I had many of them when I was a kid. (Who am I kidding - I still have them; I haven't gotten rid of any of my childhood books.) The series was created by a husband-and-wife duo, Stanley Berenstain and Janice Grant, in 1962. Stanley and Janice met right before World War II and married as soon as the war ended. They both worked in illustration and drafting and became magazine cartoonists prior to creating the Berenstain Bears children's book series. The book series focused on solving everyday problems from a child's point of view, and it was so beloved that it eventually became a television cartoon series, which you can now watch on the Berenstain Bears YouTube channel.
Care Bears
Another group of bears that evokes strong nostalgia (at least for anyone like me who was a child in the 1980s) is the Care Bears. If you grew up watching the Care Bears cartoon when you were small, you probably noticed that they have had a recent resurgence in popularity - all of a sudden, they had a brand-new, updated cartoon series and the plush toys were on the shelves again at stores. There's a reason for that – businesses are capitalizing on your nostalgia! A toymaker company recently won licensing rights to the Care Bears, and their angle to seal the deal was to appeal to the nostalgia of people who liked them in the 1980s. There were ten original Care Bears (more were added later), and my personal favorite was always the pink one.
That brings us to the end of our trip down memory lane! What were some of your favorite fictional bears as a child? Let us know in the comments! Want to learn more about real-life bears and the environmental issues that affect them? Learn more in the library's Environmental Studies in Context database.
Julia Reed is the systems librarian and focuses on technology development and maintenance. She's into graphic design, photography, and spending time outdoors in her free time.