While it may be part of the circle of life, it’s definitely not a sight most people see every day. While on their way from Kelowna, B.C. to Grande Prairie, Alta. on Monday, an Ontario band came across a grizzly bear having his lunch on the side of the highway. And they caught it all on camera.
The Standstills, an Oshawa-based rock duo currently on tour with Our Lady Peace and I Mother Earth, came across the hungry bear feasting on a dead moose along the highway about three hours north of Jasper early Monday morning.
“At the top of this hill we could see something in the distance, which I thought, it just looked like an animal that was hit by a truck or something,” Jonny Fox, singer and guitarist with The Standstills, said Tuesday afternoon. “You could kind of see it moving but right at the side of the road.”
When they got closer to the animals, they couldn’t believe their eyes. So they decided to take out their cellphone and stream the experience live on Facebook for all their followers.
“This is what you get to see when you tour Canada,” you can hear someone say in the Facebook video.
“It’s a f***ing grizzly bear eating a moose,” Renee Couture, the band’s drummer, said in the video.
The video has been viewed more than 350,000 times since it was posted Monday morning. Fox said he and Couture were travelling with two others in the tour van and had been driving all night when they came upon the grizzly. While he admits they were all a bit groggy, they were stunned by the sight.
“It’s this massive grizzly bear. It’s just feasting on this moose – this dead moose – on the side of the road, and he’s just taking chunks out of this thing and it was just crazy,” he said.
“We were kind of like, ‘Did that just happen? What? What just happened?’ We just experienced this moment of this massive grizzly bear feasting on this moose at the side of the road and we were kind of a little bit in awe.”
“Later on we were really buzzing about it because it was just such a crazy thing to witness in the wild like that.”
This is just the latest in a string of dramatic nature scenes the group has come across during its cross-country tour. Earlier this year, The Standstills also captured cellphone video of a funnel cloud near Medicine Hat, Alta. They also stopped to feed some wild seals in Victoria, B.C.
“It’s pretty crazy, it’s pretty wild but definitely the bear eating the moose takes the cake,” Fox said.
The Standstills have teamed up with World Vision for this tour, raising money for a community in Zimbabwe. The Standstills, along with Our Lady Peace and I Mother Earth, play in Calgary Wednesday night and in Edmonton Thursday night.