| 1 | Blond bear play fights for six hours |
Katmai National Park is one of the undisputed bear capitals of the world. Located in Alaska, it’s where the famous Grizzly man Timothy Treadwell hung out for 13 straight summers before being eaten alive in 2003 and achieving immortality on the silver screen.
In 2010, 40 year old photographer Steve Kazlowski had heard rumours of a blond grizzly bear wandering the opposite shores of the icy bay he was camping close to. Soon, rumours turned to fact, as a 700 pound blonde grizzly approached a 700 pound brown grizzly right in front of him. This had all the makings of a brutal conflict, but as the bears growled, stood on their hind legs and locked paws, Kazlowski noticed that the usual aggression was lacking somehow.
Instead, the bears played with each other on the shores of the bay until the sun set. Over the hours, they lost their balance repeatedly on the slippery rocks. With plenty of salmon swimming around nearby to attract their attention, it’s a wonder that the feeding bears didn’t suddenly turn aggressive.
This blond bear was a consistently creamy colour, unlike other blond bears, who occasionally have brown legs or hind quarters. It stood 8 feet tall on its hind legs, and appeared to be slightly larger than its brown playmate. According to Kazlowski, who approached to within 50 feet at one point, “This was a game that was friendly, but could always turn to a fight if things got out of hand“.
Blonde bears, friendly and playful bears – this was a double rarity.
| 2 | Banff 2020 |
It all started on April 26th 2020. Cara Clarkson was enjoying a relaxing hike with her family in Banff National Park, when she spotted two grizzly bears feeding near a wire mesh fence by the trans-Canada highway. One of the bears stood out, as its entire coat was the lightest shade of blond, almost matching a polar bear. Because its eyes lacked the telltale pink colour, it clearly wasn’t an albino bear, but rather an incredibly rare genetic colour phase. As Canmore-based grizzly expert Mike Gibaeu put it: “I’ve seen a really, really blond grizzly, but never a white one“. Cara Clarkson thought that the bear was a wolf from a distance.
The internet quickly burst into action, and the blond was granted the nickname of Nakota. She was estimated to be 3 1/2 years old, but by May 5th, local authorities were warning of a flood of tourists that could put her life in danger. Drivers were ordered not to stop and take pictures, even if Nakota turned out to have a friendly yogi bear temperament. By June, Nakota had already escaped collision with a transport truck by a narrow margin.
Local bear trackers announced that they’d known about Nakota for a while. The blond and brown grizzlies were actually siblings, who had already caused mischief that spring when they tucked into grain spillages by a train derailment. They’d even forced a highway fence to be made higher after using a snowdrift to climb over it.
| 3 | The Ininkari bears of Japan |
In the northernmost reaches of Japan, where samurais slung their swords and extinct wolves once roamed, perhaps the rarest bear of them all lies hidden. It’s called the Ininkari bear, and is a subspecies of Japan’s native Ussuri brown bear which has evolved a rich blue-blond coat.
These bears live in the Kari mountains of the southern Kuril islands, themselves located in the north-western reaches of the Pacific ring of fire. The mountains are part of an archipelago of islands which begins with the huge Hokkaido and stretches northeast from Japan to the easternmost tip of Russia.
Instead of a consistent lighter shade, the Ininkari bears’ upper half is a very light blond similar to the grizzlies of Denali, while their lower half is darker, but with tinges of blue like the Tibetan blue bear. There’s plenty of standard brown bears on these islands, but the bears who are blond stick rigidly to this divided pattern.
Unlike normal brown bears, whose fur can gradually change over time, Ininkari bears have blond fur from birth. They look like no other bear on Earth. They were first documented in 1791, in a Japanese painting called Ininkari-zu by an Ainu chieftain. His name? Chief Ininkari.
Sometimes when reading the news, it feels like any unique animal is at automatic risk of extinction, but happily, these bears have survived well on the Kuril islands. There are no natural predators, and local Russian hunters always claim to treat them with reverence.
| 4 | Denali’s unusually blond bears |
Denali National Park is located in the Alaskan interior and is home to America’s highest mountain, the 6190 metre high Denali (or Mount McKinley). The park currently has 300-350 grizzlies, and for whatever reason, a disproportionate amount have shaggy blond fur. The phenomenon hasn’t been studied by scientists, but pictures uploaded to the internet by tourists once they return home are incredibly easy to find.
This youtube video, for example, shows a mother blond bear and two cubs tucking into vegetation on an open plain. A 1991 article in the LA Times talks about a huge blond grizzly with no fear of humans, who was attracted to a campsite in Denali by the wafting smell of shrimp Cantonese. The campers crammed the food into a bear-resistant plastic container in a half panic, and thankfully, the blond bear decided to move on. One hiker spotted an amazing grizzly with black hind quarters, black legs, and a white-black mixture on the face and torso, while this fantastic video shows a blond grizzly in full flow, galloping down a Denali mountainside and ruling over its native habitat, complete with melting patches of snow in the background.
The most likely explanation is genetics, of course, a pool of blondness which mother and father bears have passed down to a steadily growing list of descendants. As a side note, grizzly bear tracks have been spotted all the way up on Mount McKinley glacier.
| 5 | Mistaken grolar bear shot dead |
In May 2016, a gigantic white bear was shot dead in Nunavat, Canada by local hunter Didji Ishalook. It sounded like nothing unusual, but this massive white bear had the body shape of a grizzly.
Ishalook had seen the blonde bear standing on a hill near Arviat, around 230 miles north of the notorious polar bear hub of Churchill. He initially mistook it for a polar bear or arctic fox, and it evidently wasn’t an albino, lacking the obvious pink eyes.
To the tabloid media it was perfectly obvious: this was a rare grizzly-polar bear hybrid. The two species can not only produce offspring, but fully fertile offspring, having diverged on the evolutionary tree of life only 200,000 years ago. For decades, pizzlies were solely the domain of overenthusiastic zookeepers, but on April 6th 2016, a hunter near Banks Island in Canada shot one dead on the tightly packed sea ice. For the first time, local Inuit were forced to come up with their own word for pizzly, and global warming was widely blamed.
Soon though, Nanuk’s Department of Environment stepped in, collected DNA samples from the new bear, and sent them off to a genetics lab. Their conclusion was resolute: no polar bear parent. Instead, this was a blond grizzly, an equally fascinating fluke of nature. The majority of its fur was blond, but all 4 paws were pure brown, and the torso also had a faint brown undercoat. Ishalook announced that he would make a rug from its fur.
| 6 | The Yukon spirit grizzly |
Another tragic blonde bear shooting, this time in the Canadian province of Yukon. Over in British Columbia, there’s a unique population of black bear called the Kermode bear, but more popularly dubbed the spirit bear, because of a significant proportion which have pure white fur. Their paleness is said to give them an advantage while fishing in the sheltered forest creeks, and naturally, when a white-tinged grizzly was discovered in Yukon, social media users dubbed her the “spirit grizzly”.
Her fur was slightly different to the playfighting blonde grizzly above, as she had a clear brown undercoat, but overlaid with a thick layer of ash-white coloured hair. For the past 2 summers, the white spirit grizzly had entertained parked drivers by turning up to nibble on dandelions by the highway.
Unfortunately, the spirit grizzly was shot dead on May 22nd 2013. A hunter simply parked along Tagish road and fired at close range when she emerged from the undergrowth.
This triggered an eruption of rage on social media. Edna Helm, a member of the Carcass Tagish first nations community, said that seeing the bear grow into adulthood had brought joy to their hearts. “I hope he haunts your soul, if you have one“, she warned. Even hunting proponents slammed the callousness of waiting by a roadside and shooting the first animal to turn up. A man called Greg Karais started an internet campaign to ban roadside hunting along all major Yukon highways.
| 7 | The Syrian brown bear |
Not an individual bear, but one of the 9 confirmed brown bear subspecies to inhabit Eurasia. The Syrian brown bear numbers in the hundreds to low thousands and is now restricted to Turkey, Iran, Armenia and Lebanon, with occasional tracks being spotted in Syria itself. Being a citizen of scorching desert climates, it isn’t surprising that the Syrian brown bear has a much lighter coat on average. It tends to be light brown to straw blond, and is the only bear species on Earth to have consistently white claws. This Armenian camera trap footage taken in 2013 is an excellent example. It shows a small bear approaching the camera in mountainous terrain, before looking spooked and dashing off quickly after about 10 seconds. The fur seemed to be a straight mixture of brown and blond hairs, with no consistency, creating a multicoloured bear.
Back in 2018, a bear broke free from an animal shop (god knows what it was doing there) in Basra, Iraq, and wandered the streets for several hours, causing everyone to whip their mobile phones out. This bear had a more consistent light brown/dark blond colour, while another video of rescued Syrian brown bears in New York shows a pure blond tone.
That said, there are no hard rules in the bear world. Private Wojtek of the Polish army was a rich brown colour, and he was undoubtedly the most famous Syrian brown bear of all time, fighting in the battle of Monte Cassino of 1942.
| 8 | The Sailugem bear |
Perhaps the most mysterious bear on planet Earth, outstripping even the Tibetan blue bear for mystery. The blonde-coloured Sailugem bear hadn’t been sighted in the Altai mountains since the mid-20th century, when Russian zoologist Dr Genrikh Sobamsky made the first primitive sketches and asked ICUN to list it under red for extremely endangered.
One day in 2018, Kaichi Guides was conducting a bird watching trip in the same mountains, searching for species like Himalayan vultures. On June 22nd, the group was sitting on the Russian side of Point X, the point where 4 countries intersect, also including China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. Suddenly, the tour guides Erkin and Alexander waved at the rest of the group, and urged them to follow down a rocky beige slope.
There, after 6 long decades, was a Sailugem bear. Its fur was incredible, with three distinct colours. A blond section included its head and back, while the upper limbs were a ghostly white. Finally, the lower limbs were brown, combining into a fantastical whole to create a Harry Potter appearance. This “brown” bear looked totally different to the bears of Alaska, yet the Sailugem bear is so rarely sighted that scientists have no idea whether it’s a fully fledged subspecies, or a weird subpopulation like the Ininkari bears of Japan.
| 9 | Blond bear captivates Italy |
Blond bears are much less common in western Europe compared to the United States. The blond genetics must have only become prominent after they crossed the Alaskan land bridge 100,000 years ago, but as of 2015, things may be changing, as Italy had its very own blond bear roaming the countryside.
The Alpine region of Trentino is home to 80 bears, clashing with local civilians, with politicians arguing constantly over whether a cull is necessary. One day, a local goat farmer was analysing a camera he’d installed to monitor his flock at 1700 metres, but instead saw a huge blond bear rummaging around for food. This bear had a particularly massive hump on its back, and was consistently blond, with the odd brown patch on its legs. Coincidentally, it was only the second bear sighting in Val Bregaglia, Lombardy of the last 20 years. This particular bear didn’t have a radio collar, meaning that tracking it was impossible.
The mayor warned local residents not to venture into the forest to try and meet the bear. If anyone spotted tracks, he warned, they should turn around and exit the area immediately. According to local police, the bear “had an anomalous blond colour“, but was also “good natured“. He had already been spotted once in 2014, scratching his back against a tree, but had become fairly elusive since.
No news on whether he’s a friend of Papillon, the world famous escape artist bear.
| 10 | Alaskan lakeside fun |
Lake Clarke National Park lies in the southwest of Alaska, and is a popular holiday location for hikers and campers alike. It’s also a popular holiday location for bears, and in July 2019, Shayne McGuire from California received a nice surprise when a blond bear wandering straight into her campsite near a wooden lodge, before hanging around for a few days. This bear was fairly normal within the overall abnormal phenomenon of blond grizzlies – a blond bulk of its body with darker brown patches on its lower legs.
It seemed that this blond grizzly was 3 years old and had recently been rejected by her mother. She was probably finding her way in the world, and didn’t seem aggressive in the slightest.
One of the best bear moments of 2018 arrived when the blond grizzly stopped and inspected a grizzly bear warning sign. Was she having a laugh? She seemed particularly mischievous, as according to one tourist, “she sat down batted those expressive eyes at us“, before suddenly scooting closer. The blond bear was captured in photos playing with a ball, wandering along the shores of a lake, and frolicking in the wild grasslands.
Lake Clarke is a major salmon hotspot, often attracting 20 bears at once to the popular feeding grounds like Chinitna Bay or Silver Salmon Creek. McGuire claimed that she’d only seen one blond grizzly on previous expeditions.
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