Tourists on a bear viewing tour in Alaska had to fend off a charging brown bear recently by yelling and staying in a tight group.
In a video posted June 17 to their Instagram account, Scenic Bear Viewing was leading a guided bear tour in Chinitna Bay on Lake Clark’s Cook Inlet. During the video, tourists are seen observing a pair of brown bears that are close by, but not in any aggressive posture. Suddenly, the camera pans to show one of the bears charging toward the group of tourists who, taking the lead of the guide, start to growl and yell. The guide then waits until the charging bear trails off its charge to then take several steps forward to get the bear to run away.
“Never run from a charging bear, even though your instinct is to run,” the caption reads. “This is a bluff charge. They are just trying to get you to run. They have a natural chase instinct.”
The caption says the tours never get closer than 50 yards to the bears and that the company has been doing guided bear tours in the area for 10 years. It also states that humans have been visiting brown bears in this region for 30 years and the bears have become used to tourists observing them.
“Bluff charges are rare and this is the first time by an adult male for me,” Martin Boland, the guide in the video, told FTW Outdoors, part of the USA TODAY Network. “It’s usually just the smaller sub-adult bears. It’s mating season so he was not from this area.
“This was a bear I had never seen before. He was just in the area to mate with the females and move on up the coast. He may have not seen humans before this encounter. The female bears in this area we see every year and they know we are not a threat. You can see in the video the female brown bear doesn’t care about us and is digging up clams.”
According to the caption, the tours are ones in which the aim is only to observe and photograph the bears and their environment. Hunting and feeding the bears is not allowed. Per Scenic Bear Viewing, there has never been an attack on humans “in the 30 years people have visited.”
