A 72-year-old man picking huckleberries in Montana shot and killed a grizzly bear that suddenly attacked him, leaving him hospitalized with serious injuries, authorities said Friday.
A man was alone in a national forest when an adult female bear attacked him on Thursday, seriously wounding him and then shooting and killing the bear with a handgun, according to the Montana Department of Fish and Wildlife.
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Dillon Tabish, a spokesman for the department, said the bear was likely reacting defensively to protect its cubs.
Wildlife activists have set up surveillance cameras in the area to see if there are any cubs, but even if they are found, it’s uncertain whether they will be captured because of the difficulty of finding suitable care facilities, he said.
“Depending on their age, sometimes we leave them in the wild as their chances of survival are greater if we leave them there than if we euthanize them,” Tabish said.
The attack happened in Flathead National Forest, about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) north of Columbia Falls, a city of about 5,500 people in northwestern Montana, according to the state wildlife department.
A 72-year-old man was attacked and killed by a grizzly bear while picking berries. (iStock)
The victim’s name and details of his condition have not been released.
Meanwhile, Fish, Wildlife and Parks Service personnel shot and killed an adult female grizzly bear on Thursday that had become accustomed to foraging for food from people and breaking into homes in and around Gardiner, a town of about 800 people just north of Yellowstone National Park.
Pet food, trash and barbecue grills left outside within reach of the bears contributed to the problem, according to a statement from the department. No one had been injured by bears before the bear was shot and killed in the Yellowstone River.
Wildlife managers sometimes capture and relocate grizzly bears known to cause problems for humans, but they kill those that have attacked people or that are deemed likely to continue causing problems if relocated.
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The Gardiner-area grizzly was killed about 300 miles (500 kilometers) south of the site of an unrelated attack in the Columbia Falls area. An estimated 2,000 grizzly bears live in western Wyoming, eastern Idaho and western Montana, with thousands more living in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and Alaska.
Grizzly bears in the continental United States are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, but elected officials in Rocky Mountain states are pressuring the federal government to remove the protections from the species, which could allow them to be hunted in the future.
