There’s a very good reason you probably don’t know this, but a group of bears is called a sleuth or a sloth.
And while grizzlies can gather around concentrated food sources, females travel with young, and bears overlap during breeding season, seven moving together is still something you don’t see every day.
Dylan Isakson captured video on Saturday of seven grizzly bears traveling together near Pendroy, Mont., an unusual sight for animals that spend most of their lives largely on their own.
A Sleuth of Bears
So, does it say anything about the number of bears on the landscape?
Not by itself. One video isn’t a population survey, and without knowing more about the individual bears, there’s no way to say exactly what brought this group together.
It does come against a bigger backdrop. Grizzly populations in Montana have grown and expanded their range over the past several decades, with bears increasingly showing up in places they haven’t occupied in generations.
So no, seven bears in one video doesn’t mean Montana is suddenly crawling with grizzlies.
But it is a pretty remarkable snapshot of a changing bear landscape.
And one hell of a sleuth.
