| 1 | Transylvania takedown |
In the dark heart of Transylvania, there’s one beast which even Dracula in his castle fears – Balu the bear. This 6 year old Eurasian brown bear is prone to wanton displays of aggression at the mere sight of another brown bear. One such incident happened in 2019, and was captured on a midnight bear cam installed in a forest clearing, creating a washed out hellscape of altered colours and glowing eyes.
The one minute video shows Balu and another brown bear wrestling proudly on top of a large stone rock. For some reason, this rock is very important to the two bears. Both then fall to the ground, and the next minute, they’re circling the rock like a merry go round, swiping at each other repeatedly. A family of wild boar stop to watch in the background, before smartening up and moving on quickly. The bear brawl then shifts to the left, like a tornado propelled by forces beyond its own control. One bear pins the other, delivering a few bites, before a sudden burst of strength forces it backwards again.
The two bears then grow reluctant, and after a staredown, one starts to wander off. But there’s an agonising twist – the camera has shifted position and therefore never reveals whether the departing bear had conquered the rock or given up. Maybe they’re saving it for a sequel.
| 2 | Roadside rumble |
In September 2019, Cari McGillivray was driving along a forested road on the outskirts of Stewart, Alaska, a small village of 500 people. While she knew it could happen, she was probably surprised to see two male grizzly bears facing off on the edge of the tarmac.
At first, the bears look down to the ground and pant calmly, as though giving up. But this isn’t a human fight – this is a bear fight, with body language that our species cannot comprehend. Seconds later, the bears stand on their hind legs and launch into a flurry of swipes and bites, far faster than any human being can manage. The battle takes them to the opposite side of the road and back again like a swirling tornado. The sheer velocity of blows would leave a man dead in seconds, but neither bear can land a finishing blow. At one point, the larger bear seems to belly flop, but miss and land on the road. This bear is noticeably bigger, with a thicker body and much more rounded muscular hump. About 40 seconds in, he gains the upper hand, charging the other bear forward, and knocking him over. The next second, they’re rolling through the undergrowth.
Perhaps the best part comes 55 seconds into the video where a wolf emerges from the trees and crosses the road in the distance, before stopping to watch the fight with a hungry-for-popcorn expression.
The video ends with one bear chasing the other towards the camera at high speed, which would be worrying if McGillivray hadn’t posted the video on Facebook from the comfort of her home a few days later.
| 3 | Border fence battle |
May 11th 2020 was the day that China and Russia got too bored to fight a real war and sent along a couple of bears instead. All was peaceful at the border fence in the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia’s east. A light breeze was blowing, and researchers from the Amur Tiger Centre had established webcams to keep watch for this endangered tiger species.
Instead, they got a shock as a large brown bear walks into the foreground, followed by a huge bear on the opposite side of the barbed wire fence. Almost instantly, the two begin swiping at each other through the border fence, as though they’d arranged the duel previously. One bear pokes its head through the barbed wire, as though impervious to pain.
Now the bears are wrestling each other, fighting to establish dominance, in the midst of the fence designed to separate two countries. They swipe, they grab each others’ necks, and seconds later, the fence is obliterated. The fence isn’t even considered, it’s just an after thought, a mangled mess on the floor. The footage ends with both bears on all fours, staring each other down, ready to fight again. Nobody knows who won the battle. No corpses were found and the camera footage suddenly cuts off.
| 4 | Salmon thief savagery |
In 2015, Brad Josephs was sitting by a tidal flat in Katmai National Park. It was bear bulking season, the period of hyperphagia where they eat as much as bear-manly possible for 2-4 months to pack on the pounds for winter hibernation. Normally, this area was a bountiful salmon spot with bears congregating peacefully, but this year supplies were unusually scarce.
Josephs watched as one bear dived into the water and emerged with a plump, tasty looking fish. The problem was that a few meters away from bear 1, bear 2 also noticed. The two began a ferocious duel which was mostly spent on their hind legs, wrestling and biting each other.
No-one seemed to have the upper hand until 30 seconds into the footage, when the fisherman bear suddenly began to back off from the wildly biting mugger bear. There was no killer blow – the first bear just got spooked by the sheer aggression. Eventually, the greedy mugger bear stole the salmon and ran off. All the fishing bear’s hard work was wasted. It wasn’t a case of attitude versus size, as bear 2 (which had lighter-coloured fur than bear 1) seemed to be more muscular and aggressive in temperament. Neither of the bears noticed a much larger meal standing behind a camera 30 meters away.
| 5 | Banff bear brutality |
One of the meanest, roughest and gnarliest bears in Banff National Park is undoubtedly “The Boss”. He’s a legend in the area. “The Boss” has preyed on black bears, survived being hit by a train, and scares off nearly all fellow grizzlies he encounters.
In July 2020, wildlife photographer John E. Marriot was heading to a recycling bin 75 meters from his campsite near Banff, when a large grizzly emerged from the forest. It turned out to be “Split Lip”, a bear which Marriot had only encountered a couple of times over the last decade. His name came from a large rip scar stretching from his mouth to his lower chin. Also called bear 136, he was another of Bow Valley’s most massive grizzlies. Marriot yelled for his wife to hand him some bear spray, but thankfully, the bear wasn’t aggressive. Marriot spent the next 40 minutes watching him eat dandelions from a distance, scooping up his 18 month old son who seemed eager to stroke him.
Suddenly, another bear emerged on the scene – “The Boss”. Marriot watched through binoculars as the notorious bear took a swipe at Split Lip. Who would win this battle of the grizzly heavyweights? Two notorious bears – there was no easy answer.
But Split Lip responded with a well-timed duck. Then, he dashed off into a nearby meadow almost instantly.
Marriot and family revved the car up, and followed as The Boss chased Split Lip for a full 3 kilometres down the highway. The whole time, they were weaving in and out of the yellow lines and a ditch running parallel. The chase petered out, with The Boss failing to land any blows. Split Lip had escaped, but The Boss had reasserted himself as king of the forest.
| 6 | Finnish ferocity |
Most of our bear fights so far have featured ursus arctos horribilus, or the grizzly bear, the main brown bear subspecies of North America. What about the other 15-20? Could they have a different fighting style? This video captures two members of the Eurasian brown bear subspecies, the most common in the world, in the spacious yet remote forests of Finland.
Photographer Tero Pylkkänen had watched the bears follow each other for 2 hours without tiring. He knew full well that bear-on-bear violence could erupt, and sure enough, the two bears closed the gap to 1.5 meters. Panting, drooling and keeping their heads down, they showed all the subtle signs of imminent aggression. Then it happened: both bears shot up on their hind legs and erupted in a savage, blinding display of flurrying bear blows.
At first, the bears appear evenly matched, but the slightly larger one slowly drives back its opponent, never keeping its paws still. The different thing about this fight is the sheer speed of the bears’ limbs. They seem to have been drinking from a river of caffeine. Could the bears of Finland have lighting speed as their speciality?
Halfway through the video, the bears stop. It almost looks like they’re hugging each other. The smaller one retreats to behind a tree, panting, visibly in pain. Bear 2 stands its ground. This continues for 30 seconds, before bear 2 absent-mindedly wanders away. Bear 1 stays still behind a thin tree, and dashes off at the opportune moment. Bear 2 turns around, looking confused, and that’s the end of the fight. Pylkkänen uploaded his footage to youtube and decided on the name “Best Bear fight ever!”.
| 7 | Whale carcass wars |
One epic duel took place in 2015, in Alaska’s Katmai national park. The Expedition Alaska team had watched two male bears stare each other down for 20 minutes while competing for a whale carcass. The bears pulled every trick out of the bag for intimidation purposes: strutting, jaw clacking, beating their chests, posturing. While they were distracted, several small bears had arrived to feed on the carcass, including a female and her 1 year old cub. Eventually, bear 1 gives up on the staredown and joins the carcass himself.
So what does bear 2 do? Instead of facing up to his old rival, bear 2 took the easy option and launched an all out assault on the mother bear. With its greater size, he pushed her back with a series of swipes. The cub slinks away, while the mother stays standing with a series of nimble backward steps. But the next minute, she gets rescued when male bear 1 reenters the fray and comes slamming straight into bear 2.
Finally, the two are coming to blows, on the edge of the water. The bears pulled some advanced moves out of the bag for this fight, as bear 2 used a “sweep the leg manoeuvre” to knock his rival over, unsuccessfully. Meanwhile, the mother bear walks away unharmed, saved, although unintentionally. After 1 minute of grappling, the two males give up, and back off slowly, looking reluctant to continue. Each bear manages to get a piece of the carcass in the end. The cub seems transfixed by the battle and keeps looking over his shoulder.
| 8 | Alaskan forest faceoff |
Our next fight was another salmon dispute, but this time, the outcome is a mystery, on par with the JFK assassination or where the city of Atlantis is located. 60 year old Japanese photographer Shogo Asao was exploring a forest trail in Katmai National Park, heading towards a waterfall, when he came across two bears engaged in a stare down. They appeared to be 6 years old, 900 pounds and around 8 meters tall. One had a salmon, the other intended to have a salmon.
Then the duel began, as the towering bears ran head on and started wrestling with each other, getting whatever swipes in they could. One bear landed a solid blow on the other’s nose, which did little to deter it. Neither bear noticed Asao, even when one dashed off to give itself some breathing room and stopped 3 meters short of him.
According to Asao, the fight carried on for 5 minutes, as he watched quietly. Gradually, the fight shifted into the forest and out of sight, but with no let up. The entire forest was lit up with the echoing roars of the duelling bears. “I was so close to the violent animals that I felt like a dead man walking”, Asao later said.
| 9 | Yellowstone river royale |
Yellowstone Park had one of its most eventful seasons ever in 2020. A bear called 791 became famous when he targeted a bull elk with a broken hind leg, chasing his prey into the water until it was drowned. 791 then dug a hole and buried the carcass, to keep the meat fresh and mask the smell in case other predators wanted to steal his kill. This happened by Yellowstone river just adjacent to the main road, and 971 was visible for a whole week, sitting by his lakeside carcass mound in a ferocious defensive posture.
During September, so many American bear enthusiasts flocked to Yellowstone that authorities were worried about road blockages. But then photographer David Angelescu decided to visit, and captured an amazing 10 minute piece of footage. At first, the grizzly bear waddles calmly through the water. All is well in the bear world. But 4 minutes in, a fellow grizzly charges from nowhere out of the left side of the picture. Grizzly 1 reacts without a second thought, swiping and wrestling with all his fury and all his might. This goes on for 20 seconds, before grizzly 2 thinks twice and leaves the picture.
Another 1 minute of calm waddling, before bear 2 reappears. This time, he doesn’t get a swipe in before a roar deters him and leaves the frame again. 6 minutes into the video, the paddling bear has reached the shoreline, to reveal the other bear looking uncertainly at him. This time, he makes no effort at all, swiping unsuccessfully at some birds instead, and that’s the last we see of him.
There’s one final twist in the tale though – which grizzly was which? Nobody has worked out whether grizzly 1 was the original elk-killer, or whether that was the second grizzly, retuning to defend his prize against an interloper.
| 10 | Mother bear mayhem |
Hallo Bay is a place where bear history runs deep. It’s a wide, open grassy space where bears come to feed in their hundreds during summer, but it’s also where grizzly man Timothy Treadwell was killed in 2003, after naming it “the sanctuary”. In 2011, photographer Jim Abernethy was walking this hallowed ground when he saw an 800 pound male bear named Secretariat approach a mother and two cubs.
Unfortunately, this bear was hungry, and as it dashed into the water before the mother could comprehend things mentally, it scooped up the bear cub in its jaws, with cannibalism no concern. The mini-bear attempted to resist, but the laws of physics were against it. With water splashing everywhere, Secretariat prepared for a killer blow. But then the mother came charging. Defying all weight and size rules, she launched a savage assault on the male grizzly, beating him back for meter after metre.
Secretariat fought back, but as he approached the sandy shoreline, he decided enough was enough. After one last display of rage from the mother, he fled. Meanwhile, the cub was poking itself out of the water, covered in blood, but alive. His fellow cub approached in greeting. As the other returned, she seemed to comfort him for 3 seconds, before the 3 waddled out of the water and set off for their next adventure. Secretariat did not return.
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