Life cut short for a male grizzly bear! Grizzly bear #163, his story!

Male bears right out of the gate have it tough. Mom usually shows it tough love especially when it is time to part ways when they reach 2-3 years of age. These young males will float around in their mother's territories visiting all the locations she taught him, but he is on borrowed time. He will have to leave. Like females especially with cubs, these adolecent bears choose to stay around high human activity knowing large dominant male bears won't enter these areas, using us to shield themselves. At this age these bears have no status or rank and will be ran off by females and potentially killed by males. Usually they start to wander off at the age of 3-5 once they have put on enough size and weight, hopefully with the ability to compete with the big boys. Their travels usually take them to premium food sources much richer than you find in their mother's home range, but sometimes it leads them to becoming opportunistic when it comes to attaining foods. Many males end up being destroyed for getting into garbage, fruit trees, livestock, etc, it is how they become massive and the most dominant bears. It creates human/wildlife conflict issues with the bear losing out in most cases. For me, this bear, GB# 163 was an amazing bear to work with for his first three years, but as soon as he traveled into BC and to the townsite of Elkford I knew he was on borrowed time. I drove 400km to check on him and his growth was huge, he was the biggest three year old I had seen. There was tons of images and videos of him climbing fences to feed on fruit trees, or flipping garbage cans, feeding on roadside carcasses not cleaned up, many times with another bear. With no actual bear aversion management I volunteered to come work him out of town knowing I could, but politics and provincial borders kept that from happening. Like so many other bears his fate was doomed and a decision was made to have him destroyed. I got the sad news that went along with the news GB# 162, also a male from our area in Alberta, followed that route down the Elk Valley and was struck and killed by Sparwood, as well as GB# 148, a Banff/Bow Valley female grizzly who was shot after being relocated in BC, part of the province's last hunts before it was officially closed. 2017 was rough on the bears of the area.