Grizzly sow and two cubs spotted on Vancouver Island

A wildlife photographer filmed a grizzly bear and two cubs on Vancouver Island, British Columbia this summer. The footage documents the first verified sighting of grizzly cubs on the island.

The professional photographer, Catherine Babaultfirst saw the bears in July and posted a video of the grizzly sow and her two older cubs to YouTube on August 10. The footage shows the trio retreating from a herd of Roosevelt elk at an unknown location between Port Hardy and Campbell River on the north side of the island, the Western standard.

“This is a very rare sighting,” Babault said World News. “I was a little concerned about the Roosevelt elk, but they showed a lot of … strength. They were also a herd, so they were large numbers. And they started chasing the grizzly bears, which was very, very unusual. And I’m glad it didn’t end up the other way around.”

Grizzly bears have been spotted swimming from the British Columbia mainland to Vancouver Island several times over the past 10 years, said Garth Mowat, a large carnivore specialist for the province of British Columbia. View Newsalthough these are usually younger male bears. Johnstone Strait is 1.6 miles long, even at its narrowest point, making for a difficult swim for young cubs.

The bears in Babault’s video are too large to have been born this year, and Mowat estimates they were born in January or February 2023. It’s impossible to know whether they were born on mainland British Columbia or Vancouver Island, but Mowat suspects they swam across the strait this year, as no one reported sightings of the sow and her cubs last year.

At least one expert disagrees. The cubs were probably too young to swim this year, said Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of the Grizzly Bear Foundation.

“That’s probably what this mother did, and then she probably met a male there on the island – an island boy – and then had a couple of cubs,” he said World news. “It’s pretty exciting.”

However the three grizzlies got there, the family group’s presence could mean that grizzlies have settled on the island permanently, something that hasn’t happened since the last ice age, when Vancouver Island was still attached to the mainland.

Scapillati believes a larger grizzly bear population will be good for Vancouver Island’s ecosystem.

“Grizzly bears are the big breeders,” Scapillati said. “You know, they eat berries, they eat glacier lily bulbs, they eat all kinds of plants, and then they poop all over the landscape and they expand and sustain these populations.”

While the sightings are exciting, Mowat says grizzlies won’t take over Vancouver Island anytime soon. A significant breeding population will grow slowly.

“I don’t think people will notice any major changes other than going camping and seeing a grizzly bear instead of a black bear.”

Read more: Alberta brings back grizzly bear hunt, but only for ‘problem bears’

According to the report, there are between 7,000 and 12,000 black bears living on the island. Protection of bearsmaking it one of the most densely populated populations on the planet. (There are as many as 150,000 black bears in British Columbia alone and somewhere nearby 15,000 grizzly bears in BC) Vancouver Island black bears are a subspecies, Ursus americanus vancouveriwhich is slightly larger than mainland black bears.

Exactly how an increased presence of grizzly bears will affect black bears on Vancouver Island is not yet clear, although it is known that grizzly bears kill and eat black bears in areas where the species overlap.