This grizzly bear had a bizarre response to a trail camera set up by Yukon Wildlife Cams.
A grizzly bear was filmed having a peculiar and unexplained reaction to a motion-sensor trail camera in Yukon, Canada.
The footage, captured in late October and shared on Facebook earlier this month, shows a grizzly bear confronting a trail camera set up by Yukon Wildlife Cams.
In the clip, which was reported by For The Win, the bear appears startled by the motion-activated trail camera positioned in front of it in Canada’s Yukon Territory. The grizzly bear then moves toward the device and removes the rain cover. The sound of Velcro separating can be heard. The animal paws at the camera several times before picking up the rain cover. It then appears to play with the cover briefly before walking away into the darkness.
“I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what is going on here for the most part. I’ve never seen similar behavior from a grizzly,” David Troup of Yukon Wildlife Cams writes of the animal’s bizarre reaction to the trail camera.
Troup further explains the sequence of events in the trail camera footage, writing: “This series of clips begins with a peculiar reaction from a grizzly that quickly moves in to remove the rain cover from my camera (you can hear the velcro separating). It then paws several times at the camera, but my method of connecting cams to trees proves superior. It then picks up the rain cover and appears to “play” with it before lumbering into the night.”
The video has garnered over 360,000 views and hundreds of comments on Facebook since being published on the platform by Yukon Wildlife Cams. Many social media users tried to offer their own explanations for the grizzly bear’s behavior.
One viewer suggests: “Maybe the camera is emitting some sort of ultrasonic or clicking sound that is disturbing him?”
“This happens to a lot of our cameras from our coastal black bears. They hear the click and smell it. They treat it as a threat and a new smell in their marked territories, they will engage,” another Facebook user suggests. “Looks like this guy got spooked and left without wanting to turn his back. This behaviour is my guess – super cool video.”
PetaPixel previously reported on a filmmaker who left a trail camera inside an old grizzly bear den near Yellowstone National Park for over ten years and captured an extraordinary decade-long record of wildlife from inside the cave.
Image credits: Header photo via Facebook/ Yukon Wildlife Cams.