A Kelowna family driving to Calgary say they feel they had a once in a lifetime experience near Banff.
"We saw a grizzly and a spirit bear on our way to Calgary this weekend (April 26, 2020)! A once in many lifetimes experience," Castanet reader said in an email, who didn't provide their name.
The bear has now been spotted several times and with video captured by staff of the Rimrock Hotel.
The pair of grizzlies were spotted along the Trans-Canada Highway, with the white grizzly eating something in one picture.
Mike Gibeau, considered one of North America’s top grizzly bear experts and a retired Parks Canada carnivore specialist, said a white grizzly bear is “exceedingly rare.”
“I have never in all my time working with grizzly bears – since the early 1980s – seen a white grizzly bear. I’ve seen a really, really blond grizzly, but never a white one," Gibeau said.
The bear spotted in Banff is not actually a "spirit bear" or Kermode bear, which is a white variant of a black bear seen on B.C.'s north and central coast.
“A white colour phase in black bears is seen more often than in grizzly bears. I don’t know of a white grizzly bear,” said Gibeau, who lives in Canmore, Alberta.
Gibeau doesn't think this particular bear is an albino – an absence of pigment in the skin and hair, which are white, and the eyes, which are usually pink.
“It’s not an albino because an albino is something different again,” he said.
Gibeau said the rare colour in bears is caused by a recessive gene that makes fur white.
“Black bears can be everything from black to white and in between, and in grizzly bears, it doesn’t happen as often,” he said.
“You do get black grizzly bears, like coal black, and I’ve seen a number of those, but to have the opposite, very, very light, is uncommon, and to have one that is absolutely white is just unheard of.”
-with files from Rocky Mountain Outlook
