A British Columbia man says he sees black bears every day at his job, but he says an encounter he saw last week caused him to pull out his phone so he could film it.
Chris Sroka was on a chairlift at Whistler Mountain Bike Park when he saw two black bears acting strangely.
In the video, Sroka captures a large black bear chasing another black bear before one flies over the edge of a dirt bike path. The bears fight for a few more seconds before finally catching their breath.
“I don’t know how to describe it. It was just a weird bear scenario when we saw them so much,” he says.
The video, which was posted on Sroka’s TikTok account @_sro, has reached over 366,000 views and nearly 19,000 likes. He says he also posted it on Instagram and those views are “soaring like crazy” with nearly a million views as of Tuesday afternoon.
“It’s funny. It’s just that most people […] nobody’s really seen this type of footage, especially outdoors in Whistler,” he says. “I think that’s why people are like ‘wow, that’s pretty interesting to see that’.”
Bears are ‘fairly common to see’ on BC mountain
Sroka works as a marketing manager at Whistler Blackcomb and says he encounters black bears so often in his workplace that he rarely films them anymore.
“They’re just doing their own thing and as long as you don’t get between them and their young, there’s really no real danger,” he adds.
Sroka says he usually sees a mother and cubs or a single bear, but never two adult bears together like in the video.
“We see bears all the time. I’ve never seen them fighting or running after each other,” he says. “They just bolted, both of them just sprinted and I’ve never seen a bear sprint before. As soon as it happened, I was like oh, something is going to happen,” he explained during his interview with Yahoo Canada.
An animal expert speculates the bears may have had a conflict, but says it’s “difficult to know for sure”.
“Bears, like many other animals, have conflicts with each other and may challenge each other over the use of space, or it could be a female protecting her offspring,” says Vanessa Isnardy, head of project at WildSafeBC, in an email.
TikTok video gets a lot of reactions
Thousands of people are reacting to the video on TikTok, with many applauding Sroka for his timing.
“Never seen this before,” one person wrote.
“What a video. Great timing,” wrote another.
“Unreal images,” read one comment.
Others take a more humorous approach.
“Man, the locals are wild,” one person wrote.
“He could handle this landing,” reads another.
Whistler is home to various bear species
The Whistler and Blackcomb mountains are home to up to 60 black bears and cubs that have adapted to life in ski area habitats.
“The habitat below the chairlift is ideal for bears with plenty of food sources and berry bushes,” Isnardy notes. “Watching bears from the chairlift is one of the safest ways to see bears.
The Municipality of Whistler’s website states that it’s not uncommon to see black bears while you explore the trails. It also lists tips for being safe with bears in case a bear is nearby.
If you want to see black bears, Whistler also offers bear watching tours where you travel in a 4X4 vehicle with experienced guides.
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