I’m going to end this week with furry vertebrates, and this is a good one. It’s a four-minute video of a grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) noming a GoPro Hero2 camera that was apparently set up to record the bears fishing.
From the YouTube description by Brad Josephs:
When using a GoPro to capture unusually close footage of grizzly bears for the Great Bear Stakeout for BBC, I had a young bear actually chew on the camera. Amazingly there was no damage to the camera! Some of this clip appears in the film Great Bear Stakeoout on BBC and Discovery Channel. Video copyright Brad Josephs.
Look at those teeth and claws! The last two minutes show a bear catching unsmoked lox. Someone give him a bagel and a schmear!
h/t: Michael
That’s pretty fantastic – would hate that view down the throat to be the last thing one sees.
Fantastic what you still have there in America. Don’t spoil it.
Unfortunately, I’d say we’re spoiling it about as fast as we can. Just today, wolves lost their federal protections under the Endangered Species Act.
I’ve seen a couple of times on TV the guy who trained grizzly bears for movies and the like. He does it using only positive reinforcement. I doubt grizzly bears respond well to negative reinforcement.
I can’t imagine there are that many creatures who have seen a close up of a bears mouth like that and lived.
I never thought I’d ever see down the mouth of a grizzly bear and it is every bit as terrifying as I imagined.
Dang, I can’t see it. As for bear claws, they’re sharp as knives; I’d even say they’re sharper than a cat’s claws.
All I could think about watching that was the nasty infection you’d get if those teeth punctured your skin (and you lived long enough to get an infection).