What Does “A Pack of Bears” Mean?
“Pack” is a term borrowed from far more social animals, wolves especially, and applying it to bears is a bit of a stretch biologically. Bears don’t hunt cooperatively or maintain the kind of coordinated social groups that define an actual wolf pack; outside of a mother raising cubs, adult bears spend the vast majority of their lives alone.
Where “pack” starts to make more sense is around concentrated resources. Just as with the salmon-run gatherings behind “a maul of bears,” abundant food can pull multiple bears into the same general area at once, less a coordinated pack and more several solitary animals independently deciding the same spot is worth the trip. Mother bears with cubs represent the closest thing to a stable bear “pack,” a tight family unit that can last one to three years depending on the species, before cubs disperse to live independently.
The term likely persists simply because English has a habit of reusing familiar animal-group words across species, whether or not the underlying behavior matches.
Example: “What looked like a pack of bears from a distance turned out to be a mother and her three cubs.”
Related: Collective Nouns for Mammals