Nature
PUBLISHED
35
A wild new video out of Canada shows two boisterous bears challenging each other to a dramatic duel in the middle of the British Columbia wilderness.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.At first, the two bears growl at each other, seeming to test each other’s boundaries before standing on their hind legs and pushing each other like two dudes in a bar brawl. A couple of shoves and thwacks by the two eventually leads them stumbling into the middle of the road, where they lock each other into a full nelson while pawing at one another’s necks.
Press pause around the 47-second mark and slowly creep your curser forward for the show-stopper – a wolf down the road casually watching the whole thing. Unknowing of their audience, the two bears continue to grapple off the street and into the bushes, tumbling off the side of the road and chasing each other back into it.
“This was by far one of my favorite wildlife encounters I have ever had!!” wrote Cari McGillivray, the woman who captured the video, in the comments. The video was captured on the Stewart-Cassiar highway, a long road through the British Columbia wilderness connecting Alaska with the lower 48. Its remote location makes it a prime viewing area for incredible scenery and wildlife – including massive, brawling bears.
Though pushed to near extinction in the United States from human activity, brown bear populations – of which grizzlies are a subspecies – in much of Canada and Alaska are still abundant, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In British Columbia, where the footage was captured, the Canadian government notes that there are approximately 15,000 individual grizzly bears, or about one-quarter of the entire North American population.
Ursus arctos can reach up to 2.4 meters (8 feet) tall and weigh around 363 kilograms (800 pounds), making them a top-of-the-food-chain predator when they need to be (though they tend to feed off of nuts, berries, fruit, leaves, and roots).
It is unclear why the two bears were fighting. Grizzlies will use a combination of sounds, movements, and smells to communicate with one another but will rarely fight, notes the National Wildlife Foundation. Such behavior typically occurs when two male bears are interested in the same female and will fight for the opportunity to mate with her. However, grizzlies tend to mate between May and July and head into hibernation in the late fall or early winter.
The video was first posted to Facebook on Friday and had more than 54,000 shares at the time of this publication.
