Grizzly and American black bears may be cousins, technically, but that certainly doesn’t take the whole bear-eats-bear scenario off the table.
Last month, Susan Griffith posted footage to Facebook which she described as “one of the craziest things we have seen on a drive home” in east-central British Columbia: a grizzly roughly handling the carcass of a black bear right along a road.
The grizz looks as if it’s attempting to drag the dead bear up the fairly steep roadside slope.
It’s not clear whether the grizzly killed the black bear, or was simply taking advantage of a scavenging opportunity – perhaps the black bear had been struck by a car.
Whether or not this was a predation event, grizzlies – a North American subspecies of the Holarctic brown bear – are known to occasionally prey on black bears. Though relying heavily on plant and invertebrate foods, both bears are opportunistic predators, and grizzlies in particular can become quite adept at preying on larger mammals, such as adult elk and moose.
Speaking about the B.C. video to Hannah Osborne for Live Science, U.S. Geological Survey biologist Frank T. van Manen, leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, said grizzly predation on black bears had been documented multiple times in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
He further noted to Live Science that, given this is the time of year when bears are in the intensive, pre-winter packing-on-the-pounds mode known as hyperphagia, a seasonally fattened-up black bear – already dead or not – represents quite the boon of a meal for a grizzly.
However common or not grizzly predation on black bears is, it’s certainly rarely seen by people
Lest you start worrying too much about the well-being of American black bears in grizzly country, bear in mind (apologies) that they’ve coexisted for tens of thousands of years, and that black bears are skilled at steering clear of their bigger brethren.
And research indicates black bears may be more frequently active during the day, perhaps to avoid the more dawn/dusk-active (crepuscular) and nocturnal grizzly.