That’s one mad bear.
I’m just glad there was nobody standing behind the camera.
Grizzly bears are a force to be reckoned with.
But when you are a 600 plus pound killing machine, you have the right to be. These bears are massive.
Grizzly bears are fun creatures to watch. Their whole life revolves around food unless it is breeding season. When you’re that big you require a lot of calories. And let me tell you, grizzlies can put them back, up 20,000 calories a day.
This drives grizzlies to devote all of their time to finding food and finding it as easy as they can. This can draw them to areas where humans are so they can get the easy pickin’s.
Bears will eat garbage, gardens and anything else that is edible. When they get used to human food sources, they can become a problem as they won’t be afraid of people and may even get aggressive trying to get food and over territory.
When that happens fish and wildlife officers are often called in to help out the situation. If the bear isn’t a serious problem, they will use live traps and relocate the animal. These traps have bait to get them in there and then officers can hook onto the trap and pull it to a new area where they will not be a problem.
This happened with this grizzly bear in Whitefish, Montana. The officers and a wildlife photographer set up to watch the release of a grizzly bear from a trap.
But after you’re dragged across dirt roads in a metal trailer, the bear might be a little mad.
This bear showed how it felt right away. The trap door comes up and the grizzly comes out on a tare. He heads straight for the set-up camera and takes it out.
He picks it up and catches a video from the bear’s view. He then takes off back into the wild.
Here’s the full description from writer and photographer Aaron Teasdale:
“I captured this video while on assignment for Sierra Magazine documenting the expansion of Montana grizzlies into lands they hadn’t inhabited in a century. This is the release of a 22-year-old male grizzly bear in Montana’s northern Whitefish Range. He’d been getting into chicken coops that were not secured with electric fencing, a must in grizzly country.
Bear biologists set out a culvert trap for him, kept him overnight, drugged and assessed him with measurements, blood tests, etc. A grizzly had recently killed a local man who was mountain biking near the border of Glacier National Park and they suspected this might be the bear. This bear had been captured before and as a result, had a rice-sized microchip implanted under its skin.
They read the chip and were able to look at records to compare the bear’s DNA to the DNA of the killer bear. In the end, it was not the same bear. Consequently, he was released the next day in a more remote area with fewer troublesome temptations.
I expected him to bolt into the creek and set my camera up accordingly. But he had his own idea which involved a bit of revenge on the damn humans with the audacity to trap him. He’s damn eager to get out and explodes from the trap as soon as the door is high enough. Then he almost takes my camera with him. Amazingly, the camera still works, though it’s now scored with grizzly teeth marks.”
What great footage… that couldn’t have turned out better even if he did damage the camera.
