An annual event sponsored by the National Park Service that is meant to celebrate the wildness of Alaska’s brown bears was delayed earlier this week when netizens were reminded in a brutal live-streamed video of just how wild and savage those bears can be. The live video recorded in Katmai National Park in southwest Alaska Monday morning showed a large male bear attacking and killing a female bear. This unsettled viewers and spurred the NPS to postpone the start of Fat Bear Week by one day. (The most “unsettling” part of the video comes at the end, after the female bear is already dead, although many hunters who’ve seen predators in action won’t find it all that shocking.)
“National parks like Katmai protect not only the wonders of nature, but also the harsh realities,” the Park Service wrote in a statement acknowledging the incident Monday. “Each bear seen on the webcams is competing with others to survive.”
The incident occurred at Brooks Camp, a popular tourist destination inside Katmai National Park that is home to Brooks Falls, one of the world’s most iconic bear-viewing locations. (If you’ve ever seen a photograph of brown bears fishing for sockeye salmon near a waterfall, chances are it was taken here.) The spot is so popular, in fact, that NPS and a partnering organization, EXPLORE, maintain some live cameras near the falls, allowing anyone with an internet connection to watch the action 24/7.
Those live feeds had no shortage of viewers on Monday morning, and many of them were getting excited about the kickoff to Fat Bear Week the following day. The bracket-style competition features some of the fattest bears from Brooks Camp and allows online visitors to vote for their favorites. The annual event is now in its 10th year, and the bracket of bears was supposed to be announced Tuesday morning.
Those plans were derailed, however, around 9:30 a.m., when a large male brown bear, known by the NPS as 469, attacked a large female bear, known as 402, in the Brooks River. The deadly attack, which lasted about 30 minutes, was captured in full by one of the cameras. The footage shows 469 wrestling with and drowning 402, and then dragging the dead bear’s body out of the water and into the nearby woods.
“The first folks to see it were the viewers,” NPS ranger Sarah Bruce told Alaska’s News Source Tuesday. “Some of [the park staff] had heard bears fighting — which, you hear roars and grunts all the time out at Brooks Camp, and you kind of think nothing of it, you know, they’re fighting over a fish — and then once they heard that it was actually something a little bit bigger, they were able to identify the bears that were involved.”
In an effort to bring some comfort to viewers and put Monday’s incident in context, NPS and EXPLORE released a nearly hour-long explainer video that evening. The video featured three bear experts, who gave a play-by-play of what occurred and explained that fatal attacks are not out of the ordinary in the brown bear world.
“It’s an uncommon thing to see,” Sarah Bruce explained in the video. “But it’s not completely out of the question.”
Bruce added that she wasn’t sure why 469 attacked 402, and NPS media ranger Naomi Boak cautioned viewers against anthropomorphizing the bears by assuming their behaviors or motives are anything like ours. There are, however, several basic reasons for why a bear would kill another bear, including competition for resources, mates, and territories. Male brown bears are also known to kill cubs on purpose because it forces the sow to go back into estrus, or so the theory goes.
Even though the experts took a scientific approach to breaking down the grisly footage, they were clearly troubled by the video and said it was difficult to rewatch.
“It’s amazing to have this unique opportunity to get a peek into the lives of these wild brown bears. And this is the reality of it,” Bruce said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s an easy reality to accept, and it’s certainly not an easy reality to watch.”
The NPS carried on with Fat Bear Week on Tuesday, and the first day of voting takes place Wednesday. It’s unclear if 402 was supposed to be included in the original bracket, but you can find an updated list of the bears here.