Name: A bear found my GoPro and took a selfie
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T17:24:49.000Z
Duration: 6 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I've got to admit to a little bit of a lie.

Adverbs of degree

If you saw last week's video about grizzly bear product testing, the bit about the camera seemed pretty simple.

When the bear turned the can over, it stopped recording.

And then later the bear picked it up, chewed on it a bit and then dropped it in a pond.

And obviously I was able to recover it because the footage from that camera is in the video.

Yeah, ok. That's not what actually happened.

It's how my editor and I chose to tell the story because the reality was a bit more complicated and it wasn't relevant to the main points.

It recorded for about 30 minutes before overheating, which honestly was far longer than I thought it would, given it was in a big protective case in direct summer sunlight in high temperatures.

It did its job and once the bears had gone back into their den, I just picked it up off the floor.

The other GoPro was inside the trash can.

It got knocked out of the can and that was the one that the bear carried off, chewed on and dropped in the pond.

I assumed it was unrecoverable, that it had been crushed.

And besides, that pond is filled with debris from the bears, so it couldn't easily be found even if we could somehow dredge the pond.

But the team at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Centre did find it just a couple of days ago as I record this, when they drained the pond for scheduled cleaning.

they posted it to a friend of mine, Karen from the channel.

While the big protective case had been broken, it was a write off.

The camera itself was mostly in one piece, albeit a bit damp and with a shattered screen.

The memory card on it was still good and there is so much incredible footage that it really does deserve its own video.

To start off, there's this shot of Randy filling up the trash can and closing it, which honestly feels a bit sinister from that point of view.

Like Mafia movie, last thing the victim sees vibes there.

Anyway, the trash can gets rolled out and a few minutes later the bear approaches, pulls it on its side and starts what they call CPR behaviour to try and crack it open.

The bear's going to turn the can over again now.

So keep an eye out for the shadow of the claws.

That looks like something out of a horror movie.

The sticky pad that's holding the GoPro in place is somehow still working as the bear rips the can open.

Just going to give you a slow motion shot of those claws.

This is a wild animal that can tear you apart.

Literally, a bear can tear a person apart.

Do I need to say don't try this in the wild?

Like that's the whole message of the first video.

Do not risk making a wild bear even slightly more used to humans.

Ok, this continues for quite a while as the bear keeps rotating the can.

So the camera rolls around and gets covered in peanut butter and honey, which will be important shortly.

For a while the camera's not looking anywhere useful.

And then about 10 minutes later, the bear finally gets the can all the way open and and gets its food reward.

Eventually the bear spots that the camera has some peanut butter and honey on it.

It's not going to eat a lump of plastic like a camera.

The worst case I could think of would be if it chomped down and punctured the camera battery.

No one at the centre was worried about the bears.

Anyway, after that, the camera finally overheats and turns itself off.

A few minutes later, the bear carries it off to play with it in the pond.

Now, I knew the camera had overheated, which is why I said this, sadly.

But I was using the GoPro app on my phone, trying to turn the camera back on and it kept showing weird error messages.

So that's why I figured it had been crushed or otherwise damaged somehow and it was a write off.

A few minutes after it got dropped into the pond, something hit the shutter button and the camera had cooled down enough that it turned back on and recorded half an hour of murky water and bubbles before finally running out of battery.

But that's not the last file on the memory card because if you let the camera rest for a while, it might have just enough battery to record a couple minutes more.

It's very close up and it's accidental, but that is a selfie.

Here's a slow motion replay of that one horrible shot of the mouth.

According to the timestamps on the video, that's five hours later.

Checking against the centre's schedule, that means it's probably the same bear, remembering the camera in the bottom of the pond, picking it out, playing with it for a while and somehow managing to push the shutter button and then dropping it back in the pond.

And then four hours after that, one more file on the memory card.

Just a few seconds of footage of claws and the protective case coming off with the last gasp of the battery, which is probably where the camera actually got broken.

Those final shots, just the last two video files from in the pond, that footage was entirely created by bears accidentally.

I didn't set up the camera, I didn't start it rolling.

And so I'm pretty sure that for just those specific shots, just that final bit in the pond, I don't have copyright over that.

The bear made that on its own, which is frustrating.

I think I could probably make a lot of money licensing that, but

instead I've uploaded the RAW files to the Internet Archive.

And if you do use that in your own work, it'd be nice if you'd make a donation to the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery center, because they've got bears to feed.

And as for the GoPro, the screen is a bit cracked.

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A bear found my GoPro and took a selfie

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