"Did they make it?" It was the question of the spring last year (2002) in Banff and Lake Louise. Did the cubs of grizzly bear #56, the infamous friendly female that was hit by a train in late 2001, make it through the winter on their own? Only a year old, they had denned up together and now everyone was waiting to see if they had survived the winter.

The answer was a resounding ‘YES’, as the cubs appeared in late May, but less than a month later, the female cub was hit by a car as she tried to cross the Trans-Canada Highway. (Click here for more on the story)

While that drama was unfolding before the television cameras and newspapers in media-rich Banff, an equally involving and dramatic tale was developing in central British Columbia, far from the eyes and ears of the general public.

I first heard the story in Jasper in late May – apparently, a grizzly sow had been killed by a semi-truck a week earlier along a remote stretch of highway near Prince George. Her two yearling cubs, the same age as Banff’s famed duo, had survived and been spotted a few times hanging out near their mother’s body at roadside. A Vancouver photographer had reportedly also seen the cubs and tried to photograph them, but had been hampered by bad weather and a lack of cooperation from the cubs.

As soon as I heard the story, I dropped what I was doing and headed up there. For three days I scanned the various roads in the area and talked to the few motorists I could talk to. Several people reported seeing "little brown bears", but it wasn’t clear if they were grizzlies or black bears.

Finally, on the third day, I ran into a local trucker who told me a tale I won’t soon forget. In early May, as the snow was melting from the roadsides, a big bull moose carcass had melted out and a family of grizzlies came in and started feeding on it. The trucker had been told to watch for this on his radio and as he approached the area he slowed down, only to suddenly find himself facing an enraged grizzly bear in the middle of the road. The bear bluff charged his truck several times before he was able to edge by the sow, her cubs and the moose carcass in the ditch.

Less than a week later, the trucker heard that the mother bear had actually charged a semi moving at full speed and that she had been hit and killed, leaving her cubs to fend for themselves in only their second year in the wild. That same day, an hour before he had stopped and chatted to me, he had seen the two cubs hanging out in the same area eating roadside vegetation.

I spent the next two days driving back and forth through the area, and while I found plenty of black bears, I still didn’t have any luck spotting the grizzly cubs, so I returned to Banff.

A week later, the itch was still under my skin, so one morning I piled back into my car and took off up into the middle of B.C. The first person I talked to in the area told me they had "just [seen] the cubs about five kilometres back." So I raced over there and scanned the roadsides until I thought my eyes were going to be stuck open forever, but still, nothing.

The next morning I got up at sunrise and as I was driving along I came across a beautiful big black bear eating dandelions fairly close to the road. As I was photographing him, I noticed a car stopped in the distance, moving back and forth a bit as if it was following something. Taking a chance, I stopped shooting the black bear and drove down towards the other car.

At first, I couldn’t see anything, but then I noticed a little brown head poking out of the bush staring apprehensively at the road. It was soon joined by a second little brown head, and before I knew it, the two cubs were timidly walking out towards the lush grasses and horsetails at roadside.

For the entire day, I sat and watched the cubs and didn’t take a single photograph. In fact, I stayed more than a hundred metres away from the cubs and remained in my car the whole time. In retrospect, the reasoning for it was twofold: one, I didn’t want to disturb the cubs, they were obviously very hungry and very wary of traffic, particulary semi-trucks (they would stand up quickly, take a look, then bolt back into the forest at the first sign of a truck); and two, I still couldn’t quite convince myself that the mother hadn’t somehow survived and might be lurking back in the trees, injured, but ready to rush out and protect her cubs. After all, I hadn’t seen a body anywhere and none of the truckers I had talked to said that they had either.

Several times during that first day cars or trucks stopped and got quite close to the cubs and I started to wrestle with my demons. Should I go and photograph the cubs, trading what could be some excellent shots in turn for habituating them a little further to humans and likely leading to their deaths sooner than later at the hands of man, OR, should I leave them alone and just watch from a distance, letting others get too close and habituate them and keeping my conscience free and clear?

In the end, it was a decision that was easy to make. As a wildlife photographer with a heavily visited website and the potential to reach tens or even hundreds of thousands with my photographs and stories, I figured that I had to photograph the bears. They were obviously getting used to humans very quickly whether or not I was there, so I decided to move in and start photographing them.

In mid-July I came back up to the area to check up on the cubs and was shocked to see them still hanging out by the roadside. For two days I followed them along the road from a distance, but did not take any pictures. I was actually very disturbed by what I saw, people getting out of their vehicles and photographing the bears from close range, as well as semi-trucks driving by without scaring away the cubs anymore.

I returned again in August, September and October, but did not see the orphan cubs again. With any luck, they survived the summer without being hit by a vehicle or being eaten by another bear or wolves and are now denned up next to each other high in the British Columbia Rockies. 

In a strange twist to the story, several truckers reported to me that they had seen the cubs hanging out with an older larger bear late in July.  A brother or sister from another litter?  I hope to find out next spring....

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Looking Forlorn

Perfect Pose

Apprehensive

Semi-Truck

Watching the Game

It's a Tough Life

Kicking Back

Two Bums

Portrait

Perfect Pose II

Standing

Cute Cub

Photo Facts and Details

The images in this set were all shot with Provia film, rated at 100 or 200 speed.  I used my 500mm lens for all shots.

There were several photos in this batch that I was not going to include on the website originally, mainly because I was embarrassed about taking them. The images in question are the ‘close-ups’ including the cub standing up. When the cubs approached my car and the road, even though they were feeding on grass and dandelions, I still felt immensely guilty about letting them get that close (about fifteen metres). 

Even though there was very little traffic around at the time, I did scare the bears away from the edge of the road after taking these shots.