Mama don’t play.
Unfortunately for animals like deer, elk, moose, and pretty much any other living creature in their diet, bears like an easy hunt. And that generally means bad news for the calves and fawns.
Smaller, slower, not much of a fight, calves and fawns are ideal targets for hungry bears and if you follows Riff Outdoors, or spend any time on the internet, you’ve undoubtedly seen a poor elk calf get mauled by a ruthless grizzly bear. It’s just the circle of life.
However, much like a ferocious sow, moose cows will fight HARD to protect their young, and this ol’ grizz learned that the hard way.
In the video, which seems to come to us from Alaska or British Columbia, Canada, you can see a mother moose and her young calf booking it away from a grizzly bear who is hot on their tail. But as the moose leave the view, and the bear gets closer to the camera, mama moose comes flying back into view, in full retaliation mode.
And like a bat outta hell, mama runs that grizz off in no time.
Brown Bear Kills Dozens After Waking Up From Hibernation
Woke up feeling dangerous…
According to Live Science, a “highly predatory” brown bear woke up from hibernation, and his first mission? Kill 38 reindeer.
The 13-year-old female brown bear killed 38 reindeer calves in only a month, then 18 young moose the next month in northern Sweden. The bear was one of 15 bears examined by researchers in an effort to better understand how they use their landscape. They discovered that the bears change habitats to target reindeer and moose calves in the springtime, with some bears, like the 13-year-old female, killing more than others.
Study co-author Uzal Fernandez, a senior lecturer in wildlife conservation at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom, weighed in on why some bears are more predatory than others:
“It must be a combination of different factors… such as innate behavior related to personality (for instance, some people are more aggressive than others).”
Bears aren’t nearly as effective hunting larger adult prey, so they prey on the weaker, younger, and more vulnerable animals. They focus on hunting calves until July, and then rely on berries for food until hibernation season.
Fernandez continued:
“Our study shows differences between individual bears’ predatory behavior and how this helps to explain individual variation in their habitat selection.
Differences among individuals are also important from a management perspective; for instance, mere predator removal, without targeting specific individuals, may not necessarily reduce conflict.”
Although there have been a number of brown bears that are way more predatory than others, the study says that they are not anymore of a threat to humans.
Damn… mama bear on a rampage.
