The Current - How a grizzly on a B.C. island sent a community into crisis

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

It had been a century since Texada Island had seen a grizzly bear. So when one swam 5 kilometres from the mainland over to the community off the B.C. coast, it created curiosity, panic and division about how to live with a giant predator — a giant predator they named, Tex. Molly Segal brings the story of that island community, and the bear, in her documentary, A Bear Called Tex.

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It is home to 1,200 people in industries like forestry and mining. But it is not home to predators, or at least that's how many people there like to think of it. And so, last May, when a grizzly bear swam about five kilometers from the mainland to the island, it threw that community into crisis. This is Molly Siegel's documentary, a bear called Tech. We're going to head up onto a bluff that we've personally just named Juniper Bluff because there's lots of juniper trees up here. Hilary Stiles climbs over rocks covered in moss.

I don't know I've got under this tree. Back in July, she and her husband were sitting on this ridge. They were looking out at the ocean. Enjoying the view and the sun starting to set. And there were whales over to the west. You could hear their blows. But then they heard something else. It sounded like a, maybe a shotgun or a hunting rifle.

It was a four bursts, like a pikoo, pikoo, pikoo, pikoo, but really loud. and then it stopped and then we heard two more and we looked at each other and both instantly were like that wasn't target practice and maybe that was somebody shooting a bear. They asked themselves

that question because just seven weeks earlier a grizzly bear swam to the island from the mainland which for Texada Island is not normal. The grizzly bear has been spotted on an island near Powell River local residents on Texada say they're not used to seeing any bears there, let alone a grizzly.

Always the biggest thing to talk about at the time. Morgan Redmond moved to the island, partly because of its reputation for not having bears and wolves and cougars. I'd usually go out in the morning and the evening walk around the ocean. And I just stopped doing that because it was a bad place to have a surprise encounter. people were afraid to let their kids play I didn't go for walks in the woods or around the lake you know because I didn't want to meet the bear no place felt safe no place

but not everyone was scared of the bear I was actually I think I was the only one on this island that was really excited and in the same second I knew knew this is not going to be good, and I knew this was asking for a disaster because this community is just completely unprepared from a hundred years not having predators on this island. It was not going to work. Tex was not hurting anybody. He didn't as much as knock over a garbage can. He didn't deserve to be vilified and treated as a monster.

And division started to emerge about what to do next. It felt like an angry place to be. It was a community in crisis. We named Tex because if he was just a number, nobody would have remembered him and he wouldn't have reached the fame he got with this named Tex. I hate that name. It's a grizzly bear. It's not a pet.

It's not a mascot. He's an apex predator, not a pet. So there were kind of two schools of thought. One was rooting for the bear and hoping that it would survive somehow. and the other was trying to keep the island safe. In a community of just over 1,000 people, news has a bit of a high school gossip feel. Everybody seems to know each other by name, if not personally.

Texada is 50 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide. There are cottages, farms, and acreages dispersed across it. So if you don't want to live close to your neighbors, you don't have to. But nothing here is actually that far for a group. grizzly bear. Within days of arriving, the bear made its way to Lynn Johnson's place. Lynn's home is at the end of a road, nestled in the trees. Nice to meet you. There's a paddock for her horse, Padra. That's my horse. Good boy. Good boy. And a stash of firewood.

We're heading down a trail where two or three times a week I walk my horse and my dog. Lynn didn't think the bear would show up here. He'd been spotted at a beach where there's plenty for him to eat like shellfish and clams. So she went out for her regular walk. Her horse's lead rope in one hand, the dog leash in the other. The horse is eating. The dog is yipping. And then all of a sudden, the horse, the horse lifts up his head and so does the dog. And they're on full alert. They're just high alert. And so I'm looking around. And I hear this weird sound, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Do you know that?

Nobody does. That is a sound a bear makes with their jaw, and it means you're too close. But at that moment, Lynn thought maybe somebody's in the woods. So I called out hello three times. Conservation said that might have been what I did the most wrong that day, which I did everything wrong, but that might have been the first thing. And it stopped. The story just tumbles out of her, but the encounter was so quick.

It's almost like she's still trying to figure out what exactly happened. My horse is going crazy beside me. He's dancing and prancing and he can't sit still. I turned around to look back to see what he was looking at, and it was the bear. There was the grizzly bear in the woods off the trail. The bear started running towards her. And he was coming so fast that his back legs were passing his front legs. And, yeah, I thought that was, my thought was I hope this is fast.

I hope this is really fast. And we started running. I was waiting to feel his jaws on the back of my neck. Lynn kept running up the trail with her dog and her horse until she saw her place. I thought, oh my God, we might live. And then we got. in the yard, and all three of us just collapsed. She isn't sure why the bear didn't follow them.

I think the bear just ran over there, jumped into the creek, and I'm trying to remember if it was that same night or the next day that he was at Sandy McCormick's, which is just down at the end of the creek. The creek empties into her property. Sandy McCormick's place is on the west side of the island at an address that Google Maps doesn't seem to know. Hi! Hi, I am. Hi, Sandy. So I follow her and her husband in their black Jeep.

They've lived here for nearly two decades. And Sandy's been the island's only elected municipal official for 11 of those years. Come on over. Can I get you some ice tea? Like Lynn, Sandy never expected a bear to arrive at her place. It was a very calm, breezy day sitting on our property right beside the beach. pulling weeds out of the garden and I was kind of lost in thought and then my husband starts yelling at me from the porch

and I look up and I look to where he's pointing in oh my god there's a bear a grizzly bear and it's looking at me and I'm thinking oh no what do I do now so I did all the wrong things I jumped up and ran for the house

which fortunately was close enough that I made it to the deck without any issue. The bear looked at me and turned around. Within about 10 seconds, it was way down at the beach. It could sure move fast. Her first reaction was to call 911. So within about five minutes, the conservation officers showed up. Two of them had rifles with big sights on them. The third officer was in a different vehicle, and he had a drone. And they kept walking and searching in the beach and the forest and I kept waiting for a gun to go off and I was really praying that I wouldn't hear that sound and then they left. I was in a state of shock at that point, not because of what happened

with seeing the bear, but because of what happened with the conservation officers, they were serious. If they found that bear, they were going to kill it. And so I felt really badly at that point that I'd even called them. We reached out to the province about this and were told there was no kill order, but that the bear had initially been identified as not suitable for relocation due to its conflict history. Conservation officers knew this bear. He'd been relocated twice in 24 to a remote area in Jervis Inlet. That's because he'd been spotted at a school and in communities on the Sunshine Coast. But in 2025, he was back near people again. In the spring, there were reports that the grizzly bear broke into fishing boats in Powell River.

And he was following people on a trail just days before he swam to Texada. It acted like a teenager out for a party on a weekend, you know, like just looking for some action, looking for some fun. It didn't act aggressively in any way toward me. For a very few seconds that I actually looked at him, I was really amazed at his color and his health. He looked so strong. He was a beautiful animal.

But for Sandy, Texadea wasn't the right home for a grizzly bear. The responsibility I felt was to advocate long and loud for the wishes of the people of the island. And because the wishes were mixed, it was a combination of trying to protect the bear and protect the people at the same time. Some people on the island worried politicians weren't doing enough. People like Katrin Glenn Bittner. Well, it's a very remote property. My closest neighbor is like almost four kilometers away. Katrin has horses.

I have my cows in this little pasture here. This is the coop. It's nothing fancy right now. Chickens. These are selfies. And this is a rooster I picked up on the road. And meatbirds. It is a lot of birds.

She's planning to build a perimeter fence, which will have two strands of electric wire at the top. I wouldn't do if it wasn't for the bears. Katrin never saw the bear. But she did see. bear tracks on her property twice. The first print was, that was on the Saturday, the 31st of May. Katrin is the one who named the bear text.

Because if he was just a number, nobody would have remembered him, and he wouldn't have been famous the way he wouldn't have reached the fame he got. Why do bad mothers make for such compelling stories? According to the writer Emma Knight, the messiness of motherhood is exactly what makes it interesting. And we talked all about that on my podcast bookends. Every week on the show, I sit down for honest conversations with today's literary stars. We cover a lot of different ground about their lives, their inspirations, their writing.

And of course, also we talk about their mothers. If you have a mom good or bad, you should check out bookends with Matea Roach, wherever you get your podcasts. She started a Facebook page called Save Tex, the Texada Island Grizzly Bear. From the get-go, I spoke for Tex. I wanted to be his voice in a human language and show the people that this bear has done nothing wrong to the last day. He has done nothing wrong. So I want to pick up on something.

You said that you wanted to be Texas' voice. Why? Well, what one loves, they protect. I just really like bears. I love bears. And I spoke up because of it. this reason. And through the Facebook page, she connected with a grizzly bear guide and a bear biologist. They wanted the bear moved. So they also started reaching out to nonprofits and raising

money. And in early June, I reached out to Slam and First Nation in Paul River for asking for help if they can help me. I got given the extension number and I've left voice messages. I kept calling and I've been ignored to the day. So we moved on. She contacted the Mamalili Kula Nation on Vancouver Island. And together, they came up with a plan to translocate the bear to an area far up the coast from where he had been living. Then she reached out to two provincial ministries. We provided the two ministries on the 9th of June

with a fully funded plan, solid, translocation plan for techs. So what did you hear from the province? Nothing. Their only statement was he's not a candidate for a third relocation. We put in a request to both the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship and the Ministry of Environment and Parks. Both declined an interview, citing the ongoing investigation into what ultimately happened to the bear.

In an email, a spokesperson said, province was aware of Katrin's proposal, but that the government was working with First Nations whose territory the bear had spent time on. The Klauman Nation was one of them, a first nation on the mainland of B.C. near Powell River. My name is Tiap Thot, and my traditional name comes from my great, great, great, great-grandfather, and my English name is Eric Blaney. And I'm a legislator with the Talamma Nation government, but also acting Lands and Resources Director with the Sheeshaw First Nation.

Eric had taken over the job from a colleague who had passed away. Stepping into that role, there was already media attention, plenty of Facebook posts, and lots of opinions about what to do about this bear, now known as Tex. I didn't realize how many grizzly bear professionals

we had on an island that had no predators, right? They all had an opinion on what needed to happen and we were being criticized in the media of, you know, the First Nations are supposed to be the stewards of the land and the territory. Why aren't they doing anything? So it just turned into a bit of a gong show where I wasn't really interested in 90% of the things that people were bringing forward. They just were not realistic. Grizzly bears are listed under the Species at Risk Act as special concern. So the rules about what happens to a grizzly are a lot different than what happens to a black bear. When a black bear swam to Texeda Island in

2024, conservation officers shot it. Because grizzlies are protected, you could say they get more chances when they travel through our communities. Texada Island is shared territory by the Shishaf Nation and the Talamination. The Klauman Nation has a self-government agreement, and as part of that, they have to work with the Crown on resource issues. And Eric wanted to give this bear another chance. And I knew that we needed to step in and we needed to say, hey, this is in our territory. This is our quote unquote resource to manage. And we are making the plans to do that. Eric says it took time to make a plan to capture the bear and relocate it further up the Sunshine Coast to Butte Inlet, a spot that ultimately Katrina Glenn Bittner didn't agree with. She's the one who

worked on the other plan? We've always worked in what was best for techs. And putting him in an area where there was lots of other grizzly bears is not in favor of tax by any means. And so therefore, we did not support this plan because it was, it would have been in our, and I'm talking about, when I say we, I'm talking about bear experts, bear biologists, saying it would have been a third failed attempt to move. In an email, a provincial spokesperson said the government had initiated a relocation plan on July 8th,

but wanted to find the bear before making a public announcement about the plan. Eric had his own reasons for keeping the plan quiet. A few people in the community wanted him dead. So if they knew that the efforts were there, we were going to be on the island with the team to trap him, they were actively hunting him. They wanted him dead. wanted a trophy, and they wanted to be the one saying, I got rid of the predator in our community.

And Eric says, by the time they did get the trap onto Texeda Island, someone had already taken matters into their own hands. Six minutes now past 5 o'clock. Well, this week, a grizzly bear was shot dead on Texada Island. When we found his remains on Texada, I did a ceremonial brushing with cedar. He covered his eyes with cedar, and started from his head and worked all the way down the body

just to brush away any of the negative energy that might have been surrounding him at the time and allow his spirit to go on its next journey. It's illegal to shoot a grizzly bear in British Columbia. The BC Conservation Officer Service says an investigation is underway. But of course, on a small island like this, there are rumors circulating. Hillary Stiles is the one who heard the gunshots from up on the ridge the day the grizzly was killed.

I am very confident that I know what happened to that bear because I am a little closer to this. But there's a really large amount of people on this island that do at least know who it was. One name did come up a few times, so I called them up. They did not want to talk to me about the bear. But there are some people who think it's not just the person who pulled the trigger who's responsible. Sandy McCormick is the island's regional director. I don't know who shot the bear, but I feel that it was an overriding concern for public safety that drove that person to take the action that was taken.

I believe that had we known that government did have a plan to relocate the bear, that it wasn't just going to be shot and killed, people would have been a little more patient. Lynn Johnson, who had the encounter with the bear while walking with her horse, horse and dog. There are good people on this island. And what happened was a travesty. There are so many people responsible for this little bear's death. Lots of people.

Not just the people that shot him. So these are my two whistles that I wore all the time. Every time I left the house. Lynn is starting to rebuild her own sense of safety out in the woods. Here's my bear bell. Conservation told me this is as good as useless. How is the community moving forward now? I'm not sure because it seems like we've decided, in my opinion,

to just put this all into the carpet and move on. And what are we going to do the next time the bear shows up here? I don't know. There still is no leadership. Tex won't be the last. because Tex was not the first. The Black Bear in 2024, and before that, wolves and cougars.

Eric Blaney with the Clammon Nation worries about what will happen next time. You look at the grizzly bear population, and why are they at risk? They're at risk because they were overhunted, and they're at risk because we've overtaken their territory. There's so much pressure on our planet, right now and our territories due to climate change, that we're seeing erratic behaviors or we're

seeing really big swings or shifts that are creating different conflicts. So how are we going to manage those conflicts? Eric says they learned a lot through this process. Next time, he wants less red tape and policies in place that take into account both Western views and traditional knowledge. Texas has taught us a lot more about how we need to look ahead. Katrin Glenn Bittner. We need to prepare for the future bears because there's so much more developments on the Sunshine Coast,

so much more logging, where are they going to go? We need to adjust as much as they have to adjust with what's happening around them. And it cannot be our choice that we want to or not to. We have to welcome them. We have to prepare for them because it will happen again. We reached out to the BC government about its future plans.

A spokesperson referred us to existing protocols on potentially dangerous wildlife and reiterated that relocating an animal is often not the first choice, as this is stressful to the animal, expensive, and not always necessary depending on behavior. There's still a lack of detail around what exactly happened.

I think now I'm at peace. I mean, he's here, he's resting. Here, is back on the mainland. The bear that came to be nicknamed Tex is buried on Eric Blaney's family farm. There's a makeshift wooden cross. One piece is yellow with Tex written on it.

Goodbye, Tex. After he buried the grizzly bear, Eric sang his family song at the grave. Oh no, hey, You know, when I brought him to this spot with the conservation officer, we kind of both looked and said, yeah, I think this is it. This is the spot. Hopefully we're not burying any more bears here in the near future.

Oh, no, hey. I'm a week of my friend. The documentary, a bear called Tex, was produced by Molly Siegel with help from Liz Hoathe at the CBC. audio documentary unit. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening.

I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.