I, like many people, badly want to take a trip up to Alaska to experience the raw beauty of the natural landscape first hand, and I certainly want to see some bears, but under no circumstances do I ever want to come this close to them.
Kodiak bears are actually just brown bears that live in the Kodiak Archipelago in south western Alaska. They are the second largest species of bear on the planet, trailing only polar bears, with mature males averaging over 1,000 pounds. Females come in around 600-700 pounds, which makes them no small animal, but with a serious size differential from their opposite sex partners.
While this video is admittedly pretty shaky, it shows a phenomenal display of a mother bear doing what she has to so her cubs will stay safe.
A group of people were (I believe) doing some fishing when they got a visit from a young male Kodiak bear. He doesn’t show any signs of aggression and they begin taking a video of the encounter when suddenly one of them notices a mother and two cubs also making their way to the water.
Obviously, stuck between those three is not the ideal place to be but these guys seems to not ever recognize just how much danger they were in, laughing and making jokes the entire time.
As the cameraman is doing yet another terrible job of capturing the moment, the mother charges at the young male and runs him straight across the river. The two eventually square up on the other side, where we don’t exactly know what happens, but given the differential in maturity between them, I’m betting the house on mama bear.
Let this video serve two lessons to us all:
One, be more aware and cautious than these guys were. Had either of those bears turned their sights on them, it would have been a much worse video.
Two, if you’re going to film, can we stop trying to zoom in so much? What is it with these people and their zooming, we can crop the video later but we can’t expand it to catch everything you missed with your shaky ass hands.
Gosh, these people get on my nerves.
