Bear Tours – Meeting the Real Animal
Sometimes when you mention bear tours, you may get a lukewarm reaction. That’s because many people may have seen bears in their local zoo, or in documentaries about parts of North America where you can see them rummaging for foodstuffs in camping sites or hovering around roads waiting for passing motorists to throw them scraps of food. Although both of those images are valid, and a reflection of one form of reality, they actually have little to tell you about the true nature of bears.
Bears in zoos
There is little dispute that many zoos do excellent conservation work, and they also try very hard to give their bears the best simulation they can of a natural environment. Yet, by definition, they can only partly succeed in that. Bears in the wild venture over very large territories; something no zoo can hope to replicate and that, in turn, may affect their bears’ behaviours to be very different from what you can expect to see on specialised bear tours.
Semi-urbanised bears
In some parts of the world, bears have been significantly affected by human presence. Even though the bears may still live in their natural surroundings, their behaviours have been changed by close interaction with humans. Bears are typically, in part, natural scavengers and they will move into campsites if they smell food. Unfortunately, humans feeding them simply exacerbate the tendency, and this is another reason why they sometimes hang around roads, parking lots and campsites, waiting for scraps. This stationary “waiting to be fed” is simply not part of a bear’s natural behaviour, and today various agencies are trying to educate people (and bears) away from this undesirable, and possibly very dangerous, practice.
Why bear tours are different
Bear tours are not about seeing bears in captivity, or those that are living lives highly affected by humans living in close proximity to them. They are about experiencing bears in their natural environment and demonstrating natural behaviours. That means going to places that are relatively isolated and not on the normal tourist radars.
So, for example, you may be in a hide in Alaska and be able to observe a female with her cubs. That natural interaction between the female and her cubs can be something that is hard to experience in a zoo or some of the more populated tourist spots.
A specialised bear tour suits people that want to see the ruggedness of nature and how these animals use it to their advantage. You can go to various parts of the world, including British Columbia, Russia, Cambodia, Norway or Finland, and your expert guides and tour leaders will show you a very different sort of bear lifestyle.
Paul Stanbury is the Operations Manager for Naturetrek, a tour operator specialising in expert-led natural history and bear tours worldwide. Naturetrek bring over 25 years of experience to their bear tours in some of the most spectacular regions on Earth.
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