A grizzly bear followed its nose to a bait site in the Coeur d’Alene Mountains earlier this month, where it was captured by a black bear hunter’s game camera.
The hunter reported the sighting near Skookum Saddle to the Idaho Department of Fish and Game and shared the game camera photos.
“It looks to be a healthy, adult grizzly bear out there doing normal bear things,” said Morgan Pfander, Idaho Fish and Game’s regional grizzly bear biologist.
The hunter has been directed to remove the bait in accordance with state regulations, Pfander said. The agency is also trying to get a DNA sample from the bear to learn something about it.
There’s a long tradition of grizzlies turning up in the mountain range east of Coeur d’Alene, an area where biologists don’t know of any resident grizzlies.
North Idaho’s grizzlies generally belong to populations centered in the Cabinet and Selkirk mountains in Bonner and Boundary counties. But the federally protected bruins are known to take long walkabouts, which is how they end up in relatively unusual places.
The Coeur d’Alenes aren’t far from the Cabinets – they’re just across the Clark Fork River. Pfander said the most recent sighting is the third that Fish and Game has received for the range since spring. In recent years, a grizzly has been reported in the Wolf Lodge area.
She doesn’t view this month’s sighting as a surprise. She would categorize it as “infrequent,” but said it’s something people should expect as populations in the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak ecosystems grow.
“They’re adding a couple bears each year,” Pfander said. “We are going to see bears over time in places where we aren’t used to seeing grizzly bears.”
In late August, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife got reports of at least one grizzly bear west of the Pend Oreille River near Cusick. Annemarie Prince, the district biologist for the area, said it was unclear from photos the agency got if it was one or two bears.
Either way, the bear seemed to move on after a short time and hasn’t been heard from since.
There are grizzlies in the Washington portion of the Selkirks, which lie east of the Pend Oreille River. Reports of them on the west side of the river are somewhat unusual, but it happens.
“We know that bears occasionally cross the river,” Prince said.
One such river crosser was a bear that was relocated after raiding a chicken coop in the Onion Creek area near Colville in 2023. It was collared and moved into the Selkirks.
The following spring, it was spotted raiding another chicken coop near Chewelah.
Bear activity tends to spike in spring and fall – the time bears are leaving the den and the time they’re preparing to enter the den.
In the fall, they’re in hyperphagia, eager to pack on the weight before hibernation. That sometimes means conflict with people.
This year, Pfander said a poor berry crop has resulted in an uptick in black and grizzly bears being reported getting into garbage or other unsecured attractants in North Idaho.
“Whenever natural foods are less abundant, bears start getting a little bolder,” Pfander said. “They’ll end up looking for food closer to humans.”