A Prize Fight in the Wilderness

With thanks to Pat Steffes, one of our most loyal guests, for the video clip.

I’m not usually one for prize fights. The spectacle of two jacked-up blokes beating the hell out of each other is just not something I ever really got into.

But as I sat with my guests in a ringside seat last month I couldn’t take my eyes off the two heavyweight contestants as they slowly approached each other.

Even from where I was sitting, in a verdant British Columbia valley a few hundred yards from the action, the roars of the combatants reverberated off the slopes. It was as if the air itself was charged with energy, intent and a sense of impending violence.

And then the larger of the two bears, moving quickly, lunged at his opponent burying his teeth briefly into the other’s midriff. The smaller animal took a few steps back and then, quick as lightning, countered.

Nearby a female grizzly bear – she was the prize – watched the contest intently.

In nearly two decades of guiding guests to watch wild bears I reckon I have seen up to two thousand bears in the wild and guided almost as many intrepid wildlife-lovers. But I had never before seen two grizzlies have a no-holes-barred brawl.

To add to the bewitching thrill of the experience the setting was a snowy avalanche chute topped by a vista of jagged peaks in the middle of nowhere (or as we say more colourfully in Hungarian ‘behind the back of God.’)

Of course marketing brochures are full of slogans such as ‘nature at it’s most raw.’ They often top a photo of a tourist in designer outdoor clobber on a well-marked trail taking a selfie in front of a waterfall that has appeared on Instagram a thousand times before.

But this experience really did feel like something that deserved that accolade. We got to sit and watch the grizzly bears scrap for the best part of half an hour. And we didn’t see another tourist all day.

It’s been an unusual year here in the wilds of south-eastern British Columbia. The Kootenay region – which I call home – had a low-snow winter.

Then – even more unusually – we had a long, cold spring that kept the snow on the ground in the high country and the bears lower down the slopes.

In the past week I have spent two days on snowshoes in sub-alpine regions where normally I would have been in hiking boots among emergent alpine flowers.

Perhaps as a result – and if, of course, you know the secret spots to head for – the bear-viewing has been remarkable.

Without the midday sun beating down into the valleys the bears have been less crepuscular – a fancy word that means dawn and dusk-oriented – and spent long hours out in the middle of the day.

Perhaps the ban on grizzly bear hunting in British Columbia in 2017 – something we fought long and hard for – is also finally beginning to bear fruit with increased bear numbers.

Either way, with the three groups of guests that came this spring (we also had a group of injured Ukrainian veterans and combat medics – more on that very soon as promised) we saw many grizzly bears and even more blacks.

We watched tiny cubs-of-the-year (in the sense of ‘newly-born’, not in the sense of ‘employee of the month’), a large dominant black bear that only reluctantly stood aside to let us pass, and two brown rocks asleep on the snow that turned out top be napping grizzlies.  

But to return to the top-of-the-bill event, just why were the two grizzly males bashing the hell out of each other? And how do grizzly bears, those most iconic and mesmerizing of Canada’s megafauna, mate?

For newcomers to the world of bear biology, there are actually a few surprises.

For one, bears have, at least in comparison to humans, remarkable staying power. When a male and female get intimate, a roughty-toughty affair that often involves lots of huffing, puffing and neck biting, the coupling can last for up to an hour.

At a biological level this is necessary because it is intercourse itself that stimulates the female bear to ovulate and produce eggs than can then be fertilized by the male’s sperm.

But what is the secret of the male’s performance? There is no viagra for grizzly bears. Instead he has a secret weapon in the stamina stakes, a penile bone called a baculum that slips into place at exactly the right moment.

Along with rough and prolonged sex another characteristic of bear mating is that females are notoriously (forgive the anthropomorphic adjective) promiscuous.

There are good evolutionary reasons for this, too complex to go into in this brief post.

But a result is that when a female grizzly has tried out the big guy in town she will sometimes move on to the also-rans. And so it is that grizzly bears will frequently give birth to cubs from a number of different fathers in the same litter.

We had a small window into this behaviour when we returned a second time to the scene of the duelling bears a week later. Surprisingly the two males and the female were still close together and still next to the same avalanche chute.

By this time the larger male had clearly prevailed and, although he occasionally chased his smaller rival away, there was no more physical contact.

But each time the victor returned to the female she would, after an appropriate pause, lead him on a slow meandering route back into the orbit of the smaller bear.

The smaller bear, doubtless drawn by the irresistible smell of a female grizzly, would then try a new approach.

Sad to say this ursine peep show is now over for this year. Our spring season is finished and, even though the weather has not yet turned, hot days are on the way.

The bears are pretty much done with romance and will be heading high into the sub-alpine to fatten up on huckleberries.

The next time they will return to the valley bottom will be very early October when the red salmon are running. We will, of course, be waiting for them, armed with binoculars and secreted in quiet spots on the river.

If you are tempted to join us we still have some spots left in early and mid October. Drop me a line on julius@wildbearlodge.ca.

I can’t promise you bear sex and fisticuffs. But the sight of a grizzly scooping up fish in the wilderness is also up there in the pantheon of all-time great wilderness experiences.