A white grizzly bear roaming in Alberta’s Banff National Park is attracting crowds of people who want to catch a glimpse of the animal’s rare light-coloured hair.Sonia Nicholl/Parks Canada/Supplied
A white grizzly bear roaming in Alberta’s Banff National Park is attracting crowds of people who want to catch a glimpse of the animal’s rare light-coloured hair.
This particular white grizzly was spotted at the end of April by a family who shared a video on their Instagram feed. Buzz around the animal has grown since, and people have started to pull onto the side of the Trans-Canada Highway that runs through the Banff park to see it with their own eyes.
While grizzly bears can range in colour, a white one is almost unheard of.
“As far as I know, this is the whitest bear ever seen in Banff,” said Sarah Elmeligi, a local wildlife ecologist and bear specialist. “Most of the time they could be blonde or dark brown, but this bear isn’t even really blonde. It looks pretty white in the photos, so it’s extremely rare.”
As more people have flocked to spot the bear, though, park officials have warned visitors to stay away.
“Bears and other wildlife that become comfortable around people and roadsides are at greater risk of being struck by a vehicle,” Parks Canada said in a statement.
The park tells visitors to not stop on the highway if they see wildlife nor to feed them, and has preventive measures in place to reduce conflict between people and bears. “We all have a role to play in keeping wildlife wild,” it said.
Parks Canada said the unique white colour of the grizzly is believed to be caused by a natural colour phase variation and that it’s unusual for grizzly bears, in particular.
Ms. Elmeligi said that – as with all hair colour types – it’s about the genetic makeup of the parents and how recessive genes combine to create the hair colour.
She compares it to humans who have different hair colours – despite its rarity, the only main difference in the white grizzly is in its genes.
She also notes that this white grizzly isn’t an albino, which tend to have pink eyes or no pigmentation. "It is just a very white grizzly bear.”
The average lifespan of a grizzly bear in the wild is 25 years and they can weigh upward of 315 kilograms. Park officials say this white grizzly is about three years old.
Other well-known bears in the area are Split Lip, known for eating other grizzly bears in Banff National Park, and The Boss, who lives up to his name. The 300-kilogram bear has a reputation for being the largest and most dominant bear in the area’s Banff, Yoho and Kootenay national parks. He’s also been known to eat other bears and has fathered a few of Banff’s bear cubs.
Park officials have known about the white grizzly since 2017 and have been watching the bear and its darker-haired sibling since they left their mother at the time.
A local Facebook paged called Bow Valley Network took suggestions in May to name the white grizzly bear. Nakoda was chosen. It means “friend” or “ally” in the native language of three Indigenous tribes of the area – Bearspaw, Chiniki and Wesley, part of the Stoney Nakoda Nation. This Indigenous group was forced from their land in the late 1800s – land that is now included in the borders of Banff National Park.
The white grizzly is unrelated to the Kermode, or spirit, bear mainly found in the coastal rain forest in British Columbia. The Kermode is a rare variation of the black bear that is specific to that population on the West Coast.
Ms. Elmeligi said that while similar in colour, they are a completely different species – one’s a black bear and one’s a grizzly. In the case of the Kermode, it’s a recessive gene that changes its hair colour.
Kermodes are known as spirit bears because of their significance to the Indigenous nations of the Pacific Northwest Coast. In their customs, it is said the bears are a reminder of when the world was once covered with ice and snow, hence the bear’s colour.
The white grizzly, along with its darker-haired sibling, spends its time between Banff and Yoho national parks.
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