Buddy the bear was euthanized on Aug. 12, 2022.
The last I saw of Buddy, the day prior, his huge butt and swinging ballsack (who knew, right?) were beating a hasty retreat over the wall of the Creekside Market parking lot. He was fleeing the likely intimidating sight of my car, adorned with a canoe like some giant colonial bicorn, and its alarmingly annoying horn (thank you, Mazda) after appearing suddenly from the right as my partner Asta and I entered the lot. I made the split-second decision to haze him in this manner as he walked with strange impunity toward a row of RVs that had been parked there for days during Crankworx. It had the necessary effect of sending Buddy back over the wall from whence he’d come. I say “necessary” because this wasn’t early morning or late at night when one might expect a stealth, Yogi-style interrogation by a curious bear, but at about 5 p.m.—the hottest, busiest part of the day with the lot full of vehicles and seething with people. The dozens of men, women and children in the lot and general area (sidewalks, adjacent Valley Trail) within 50 metres of Buddy included confused bikers, terrified tourists and not a few stray locals on quotidian errands thinking “Meh, another bear.”
Asta and I live in Creekside and well-knew Buddy (we called him that because, well, Canada). Although he was an intimidating sight to behold, we had only ever observed him bearishly skulking about doing bearish things. Those details aside, the situational reality that afternoon was that a massive adult black bear had just intentionally stepped into a busy crucible of humanity—RV hangouts, post-ride mountain-bike bro downs, darting kids, strollers, (mercifully) leashed dogs, barbecues, beers and many bags of groceries. That he wilfully chose to do so was troubling enough, but given his apparent determination to cross through it, any further advance could have sparked a chaotic mêlée.
After Buddy departed, Asta and I exchanged WTAF looks. That was weird… Sketchy… Dangerous… What was Buddy thinking? And yet, we had no thought to report such a clear anomaly to the Conservation Officer Service (COS); first, Buddy responded to the hazing and nothing had happened; second, how many calls do the COS get a day from worrywarts saying they saw a bear on a trail/road/parking lot? More on our minds was that with so many people around, Buddy had nowhere to go and might dart across a roadway and get himself killed. He managed the latter anyway. At 2 a.m. the next morning he walked through the motion-activated front door of Nita Lake Lodge, grabbed a snack and left. Then he visited Roland’s and made a mess trying to get into the kitchen. As a final act, literally, he sniffed his way into the second floor of a home and decided to stay even when the COS arrived, despite an obvious way out, sealing his demise. Did he need to be killed? At that point, yes; he’d clearly put himself on an irreversible trajectory of being a threat to public safety. Could this have been averted if we’d reported the parking lot escapade? Likely not.
What suddenly turned Buddy into a menace to himself is hard to say. The people in the RVs—some of them illegally camped there—had been cooking and snacking there for days, so Buddy might have found easy food rewards and returned for more. Illegal vehicle camping in Whistler right now is off the hook—people literally living in the Interpretive Forest parking lot and other areas of Cheakamus, as well as side streets and lots around Function and Creekside. The smell of food-tinged garbage and human waste is everywhere, anathema to us but tempting to a bear. There’s also the issue of Whistler’s bears acting weirdly all summer, related in whole or part—depending who you ask—to an anomalous berry season; FireSmart activity taking away both habitat and food; an illegal, wildlife-displacing clear-cut of a key berry patch south of Whistler; bears spooked by construction of the new Creekside gondola.
When things don’t go according to the rhythms animals live by, they try to adapt. But if that proves difficult or insufficient, they get stressed, and their behaviour can change in an instant. This much we know. What we don’t always know are what those stressors are. Food is obvious, but what of other potential pressures like widespread habitat loss, an increase in noise, people and vehicles, or a shift in the times people are active? Most animals will counter by altering their own rhythms or space utilization away from the new paradigm, but there will always be some that go the opposite way of learning to exploit changing realities—such as female bears with cubs choosing to sleep close to human infrastructure as protection against large males. Whistler’s high number of bears is artificially subsidized, meaning that anthropogenic increases in food sources like ski runs and golf courses support a larger population of them than the normal environment, which would typically see fewer cubs and larger territories for individuals. These considerations lead to interesting questions: How is this excess number of bears in a growing urban environment playing out? What adjustments are individual bears making to adapt to people? To each other? How do they move around in this environment? (I could actually draw a map of surreptitious bear trails/beds in Whistler that would freak many people out.) What happens when outsiders like Buddy (he wasn’t tagged and we’d never seen him before April) show up, whose mom maybe didn’t teach him about how to navigate Whistler’s human footprint?
If anyone is conducting empirical studies of such things in Whistler, I haven’t heard about it. And if not, that’s a massive opportunity for the Resort Municipality of Whistler to get involved in proactive wildlife research by partnering with a post-secondary institution; if it can afford $4.6-million washrooms, it can probably scrounge up a $10,000 bursary or fellowship for an MSc or PhD student to study bear movement and behaviour in the community and return very useable data on how to better manage our relationship with the bruins.
In the meantime, What happened to Buddy? We’ll never know precisely, but I’m pretty sure it was all of us.
Leslie Anthony is a biologist, writer and author of several popular books on environmental science
