Grizzly bear that attacked children and teachers in Canada still eludes searchers

Original article by Leyland Cecco in Toronto

Conservation officers in British Columbia are still searching for a female grizzly bear and her two cubs, four days after the sow attacked a group of schoolchildren and their teachers in an “exceedingly rare” encounter that has shaken the remote Canadian community.

Eleven people, some as young as nine years old, were injured on Thursday when the bear emerged from the forest near 4 Mile, a Nuxalk community near the town Bella Coola and attacked a school group on a lunch break alongside a walking trail.

Three teachers fought the bear off: one emptied two cans of bear spray that appeared to have little effect, another jumped on the bear, pummeling it with punches. A third hit the grizzly repeatedly with her crutches before it finally fled back into the woods.

Three children were taken to a hospital following the incident, including two with critical injuries. An adult was also flown to a hospital in Vancouver. Seven others were treated in the community.

The province’s environment minister, Tamara Davidson, said the teachers “took great risk” when they intervened to protect children. “They were well prepared, and they were the true heroes.”

Conservation officers say that given the size of the group, the attack was largely unprecedented in the region. But it has sent ripples of worry throughout 4 Mile, and put the outdoors-oriented residents on lockdown as officers search for the aggressive bear.

Over the weekend, the province’s conservation service said it had scoured a large, cordoned-off area of the Bella Coola River valley for the female bear and her two cubs, but the rocky and densely forested landscape has offered up few clues.

“This is, speaking from experience, probably the most dangerous thing that conservation officers do, especially dealing with family units with sows,” Sgt Jeff Tyre of the Conservation Officer Service, or COS, at a news conference Sunday.

If possible, teams will live-trap bears and collect DNA samples to identify the likely attackers. But, as Tyre said: “The bears don’t necessarily cooperate.”

The teams, working amid in freezing temperatures and under threat of snow, are also racing against the biological clocks of bears, who will soon begin hibernating as the deep cold sets in.

Grizzly bears have coexisted alongside the Nuxalk nation for generations. But the area, dubbed the “gateway to the Great Bear Rainforest” in tourism campaigns, has seen increased numbers of grizzly bears in recent years that residents say have disrupted a delicate balance. Nuxalk leadership say both human action, such as logging, and the effects of climate change, including forest fires and droughts, have disrupted key food sources and displaced bears.

Residents have reported seeing bears more commonly in their yards and experienced occasional break-ins.

Tanyss Munro, who lives with her husband in the Bella Coola valley, told CityNews that she returned home last month to find their front door smashed in. Inside their house, the kitchen was destroyed and their fridge had been dragged to the yard. A metal trailer in their yard was also destroyed.

“[The bears] had ripped off, and folded in half, the steel-clad door and gone in there and just demolished that,” she said. “They wrecked the furnace. We had just had it filled up with propane. And that was all gone… and just everything was smashed,” she said.

The BC Wildlife Federation (BCWF) warned that Thursday’s attack, which conservation officers called “atypical”, reflects a broader trend in the province. The group, which advocates for hunters, said a decision to ban trophy hunting of grizzly bears in 2017 – a decision the group said was made “due to popular opinion, with no scientific rationale” – was partly to blame.

“In the 10 years preceding the ban, calls to the [conservation officers] concerning grizzly conflicts ranged from 300 to 500 a year, peaking between April and November,” the group said. “Since the ban, calls about grizzly bears doubled, to nearly 1,000 a year.” But the group’s call to revive the trophy hunt has created fissures in the hunting community, reflecting the controversial nature of the hunt.

“The idea of hunting to manage bears, it’s an old way of thinking that we really need to change and examine. And First Nations communities, like the Nuxalk nation have shown there is a different approach. They don’t manage wildlife because it’s not something to manage. They’re stewards,’ said Nicholas Scapillati, head of the non-profit Grizzly Bear Foundation.

Many of the more isolated First Nations communities in the region have bear education programs that reflect a more holistic way of interacting with grizzlies.

“As we see a change in food sources and forest fires, things are fluctuating. Bears are on the move and moving around in different ways. And so we need to think differently than how we have for centuries in this province,” said Scapillati.

“First Nations communities have been leaders in this area. And so not only do they need support for us now in this time with this rare attack, but they also need support on the plans they’ve shown us are needed to do what they’ve long known is possible: coexistence with bears.”