COURTENAY, B.C. — When wildlife photographer Catherine Babault captured images of a female grizzly bear with two cubs encountering a herd of elk on Vancouver Island last month, she knew she had witnessed something special.
"I feel very privileged — not everybody has the opportunity to see grizzly bears in nature and it was a very rare moment for Vancouver Island," said Babault.
“I like to think of grizzly bears as the great cultivators. They are digging up the landscape. They're eating berries and moving the seeds around,” said Scapillati."Those forests and those salmon runs are trying to rebound, so a grizzly won't just disperse seeds, like black bears, they will also drag more salmon out of the rivers and into the forest and that's basically fertilizer," said Scapillati.
"They are so small that they couldn’t have made the swim across from the mainland, hopping those islands through the treacherous waters of the Johnstone Strait,” Scapillati said.Female grizzlies can delay implantation of a fertilized egg. They may mate in the spring then delay implantation to give birth in their den over the winter.
"And I was a bit concerned about what would happen next because the Roosevelt elk were in bigger numbers than the grizzly bears they started to run towards the grizzly bears," said Babault.Babault said she wouldn't disclose the exact location of the sighting to protect the family from others hoping to see them.
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