Are mainland grizzlies taking long-distance swim lessons? An exercise in wildlife ecology speculation. Words :: Andrew Findlay.
Joanna Annett blinked twice when she looked out her kitchen window one spring morning in 2021 and saw a big cinnamon-coloured bear with a hump on its shoulders ambling across the lawn. She was sitting around her Quadra Island table with her husband Rory and two biologist friends, one of whom said emphatically, “That’s a grizzly!”
“We were in awe, shocked,” says Joanna, a retired nurse. “I’ve lived on Quadra Island for 30 years and had never seen a grizzly here before.”
That’s because grizzlies don’t officially live on Quadra Island, nor on nearby Vancouver Island. And yet, in recent years, it seems they’ve been showing up more and more frequently.
Late in the evening of that same day, Ben McGuffie was awoken by a noise. McGuffie, who owns and operates SouthEnd Farm Winery with his wife, Jill Ogasawara, headed outside in his boxers and spotted a bear trying to get at one of their Nigerian Dwarf goats. Ogasawara joined him and they grabbed what was close at hand—a deck broom and a chunk of plywood—hoping to scare the bear away. It was undeterred until McGuffie pegged the intruder with a rock, which sent it into the woods.
“One of our other goats was missing that morning and we sent our kids and some of their friends out looking for it in the forest,” said McGuffie, who was raised on this family farm near Cape Mudge on the south end of Quadra Island. “In hindsight that was a terrible idea.”
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In 2020, at least seven grizzlies were reported on Vancouver Island’s east coast, with some speculating that at times there have been up to a dozen. “The truth is we don’t know for certain,” says Mike Newton, a sergeant with BC’s Conservation Officer Service based in Black Creek between the Comox Valley and Campbell River. “We do track the calls we get. However, they are only a part of the story as I’m sure many sightings go unreported to us. When the odd bear does swim over, it generates a lot of calls, so it’s sometimes tough to separate calls versus individual bears.”
Across Canada, grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) are listed as a “species of special concern” and provincially as “vulnerable uncertain.” There are an estimated 25,000 grizzlies in Canada. Half of them roam around BC. Mature males can weigh up to 500 kilograms and range across rugged territories spanning 2,000 km2. As apex predators, grizzlies inhabit the top of the food chain (the terrestrial equivalent of a great white shark), which means they’re also a keystone indicator species—if grizzlies are healthy, so are myriad other species, from salmon to huckleberries to the riparian forests fertilized by the nutrient-rich fish carcasses bears leave behind on the forest floor.
However, their wide-ranging habitat also makes grizzlies highly vulnerable to industrial logging, commercial recreation, oil and gas development and any other human activity that fragments the wilderness. In 2017, the BC government banned the grizzly bear trophy hunt. Eight years since the ban, grizzly populations have shown signs of recovery in a number of areas including the Central Coast, the South Chilcotin and Sea to Sky corridor between Vancouver and Pemberton. Consequently, there have been calls to renew the hunt. Though it may be too early to draw a causal link between the mainland recovery numbers and more grizzlies heading to Vancouver Island, Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of the Grizzly Bear Foundation, believes it’s a subject worth studying.
“It’s a fascinating question why grizzlies haven’t colonized the island,” Scapillati says. “There are mountains and there’s salmon,” Scapillati said. “It’s great grizzly habitat.”
As apex predators, grizzlies inhabit the top of the food chain (the terrestrial equivalent of a great white shark), which means they’re also a keystone indicator species—if grizzlies are healthy, so are myriad other species…
Add in remote valleys and mountainsides ripe with plump summer huckleberries and blueberries, and the idea becomes even more plausible. But so far, all grizzlies identified on Vancouver Island have been young males, typically juveniles. They arrive by island-hopping across the Broughton Archipelago to the North Island or across the Discovery Islands, which includes Quadra. Grizzlies are strong swimmers, but traditionally haven’t been seen straying far from shore. This makes their Vancouver Island forays particularly intriguing.
One theory is that mature males, or boars, may be chasing younger males out of coastal mainland valleys. Another is that recovering grizzly populations are prompting randy young males to venture further afield—and across Johnstone Strait—in search of mates and food. It’s quite likely a combination of these factors. According to the Ministry of Forests, however, none of their on-staff biologists know of any “confirmed observations of grizzly bears denning on Vancouver Island.” Nor have there been any females spotted or identified, an obvious prerequisite for a grizzly population to be seeded on the west side of the Salish Sea.
But what if, one day, a female griz does decide to make the island-hopping journey over from Rivers Inlet, Knight Inlet or some other bear-rich mainland valley? Could that event be the genesis of a Vancouver Island grizzly population that would thrive alongside their black bear kin?
It makes for a fascinating “what if?” thought experiment. Adding grizzlies to Vancouver Island would significantly alter the predator-prey matrix. Certainly, the bears would quickly join the range of creatures (including human fly anglers) that gather for the salmon feast every fall on island rivers (which would likely reorganize the feeding hierarchy at the best fishing holes). Seeing as how Columbian ground squirrels—part of the marmot tribe—are a favourite summertime snack of grizzlies from the BC interior, the already endangered Vancouver Island marmot would likely face an even more uncertain future should the bears show up on its turf.
Vancouver Island’s bountiful black-tailed deer have a habit of taking refuge in urban areas (they are the bane of gardeners from Port Hardy to the Cowichan Valley). Would the massive grizzlies follow them on a suburban walkabout? Gardening becomes a lot less relaxing if green thumbs have to shoulder-check for bears with that telltale silver hump.
Grizzlies are strong swimmers, but traditionally haven’t been seen straying far from shore. This makes their Vancouver Island forays particularly intriguing.
Back to reality, Quadra Island’s Joanna Annett says the wonder of seeing a grizzly in her backyard was tempered by the knowledge that when this animal and humans get too close to one another it often goes bad for people. “As a nurse, I’ve seen people in ER who have been attacked by bears,” she said. “You don’t forget that.”
And when it goes bad for people, it usually also goes bad for the grizzly.
While it’s interesting to consider, the odds of grizzlies actually colonizing Vancouver Island any time soon are likely remote. So far, these ursine visitors have been either trapped and relocated—or shot—or they’ve simply swum back to the mainland. However, ecosystems are never static. Over time they adapt, evolve and change. All it would take is one fertile female with an adventurous nature to take the plunge and swim to the Island. Males would be sure to follow and then, well, things could get very interesting.
UPDATE: May 2, 2025: Vancouver Island resident Tracy Hodgins reached out to tell us that in 2024 a female grizzly and two cubs were reported to have spent most of the summer in the estuary near the North Island community of Sayward.
“She has just returned again within the last two weeks,” Tracy writes, “and have been seen over the far side of the estuary at Port H’Kusam.”
Tracy adds that she hopes Island conservation officers pay more attention to the bears now that this is their second subsequent year on the island. “If she and the cubs had been tagged last year we could have learned if they did, in fact, den here over the winter—which has never been documented before.”
Thank you for the update Tracy!
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