A rock climber in Japan had an experience most of us only get in our nightmares. While free climbing up a cliff on Mt Futago the climber heard a noise and looked up to see an angry momma Japanese Black Bear (Ursus thibetanus japonicus) coming down towards him baring her teeth. He begins yelling and making noises and is able to use the bear’s weight against her as she charges tossing her down several feet to the next ridge. She keeps trying to come up at him and he is able to punch and kick at her face and scare her away with more noises. Japanese Black Bears are mostly herbivores and are not known to hunt humans but can be omnivorous at times and may attack large prey when needed such as livestock. They live in heavily forested / wooded regions preferring mountainous forest areas.
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Why was the bear attacking the climber? This appears to be a momma bear protecting her cub which we can see towards the end of the video just before the two of them run off. The momma bear was at the top of the cliff and her cub was below the climber initially meaning the climber had separated them. Bears tend to interpret this as a potential attack on their young. She was likely trying to scare or fight off the human to keep him from hurting her cub. When the climber fights at her she starts looking around and eventually finds her cub and the two of them take off.
This is the absolute best outcome when an outdoors person comes across a momma bear. Both the bear and the human survived with minor injuries and the cub was safe and sound.
Conservation status: This article is about the Japanese Black Bear a subspecies of Ursus thibetanus. Japanese Black Bears are a critically endangered species of bears that currently only inhabit 2 islands of Japan Honshu and Shikoku. They once inhabited the island of Kyushu but no wild bear sightings have been seen there since 1987. The creator of this video states that it happened on Mt. Futago which is on the island of Kyushu, if confirmed this would be amazing news.
Map to Mt. Futago on Kyushu Island
Featured photo a compilation of two images, a photo licensed under CC BY 2.0 and a screenshot from the above embedded video on YouTube.
Photo of a Japanese Black Bear (Ursus thibetanus japonicus) by Flickr user Pelican. Original photo titled Ueno zoo, Tokyo, Japan shared under the CC BY 2.0 license. Small modifications were made including resizing and cropping from the original.
