If your interested check out my article on staying safe from bear attacks!

Bobby Southworth
Bear Mace Preventing a Grizzly Attack

Most agencies, including USGS, generally only capture bears March-May. During this time many bears can be found on sea ice fairly close to shore, and the sea ice is thick enough to provide a good platform for helicopters to land on. In past years USGS has done some autumn capture work, but they found low capture rates and did not continue the work.

However, as part of the 2008 USGS collaboration with the University of Wyoming for this project, captures occurred on shore during August. This provided very interesting data because little is known about bears during the summer. These bears were recaptured in October, also providing new data.

Grizzlies, or brown bears, on the north slope are generally smaller than bears from southern Alaska. This may be due to the scarcity of food items on the tundra. Even so, it has been observed that when a brown bear approaches a polar bear feeding at a whale carcass on the beach, the brown bear often pushes off the polar bear.

Personally, I wonder if this is because polar bears have not evolved the tendency to be territorial. Polar bears generally hunt seals at cracks and breathing holes in the ice, at constantly shifting locations in drifting ice; a polar bear would gain little by fiercely defending a given area of sea ice because the cracks and breathing holes may disappear tomorrow. Thus polar bears may not have evolved the tendency to be defensive against intruders – including brown bears.

I do not know if grizzlies often travel onto the sea ice. Some of the USGS folks did relate an interesting observation. They saw a set of caribou tracks headed out onto the sea ice, which was very unusual – and they were followed by a set of wolverine tracks!