A bear known to Alberta Environment and Parks as Bear 164 recently took a lickin’ and kept on tickin’. The 7-year-old boar was struck July 28 by a vehicle traveling roughly 62 miles per hour on the Trans-Canada Highway. Officials expected the bear to limp away and die in seclusion, but they were proven wrong.
“The vehicle, I believe, was undriveable after the accident,” ecologist John Paczkowski told CBC News. “We were fully expecting to go in and pick up a carcass.”
Bear 164 moved about 80 yards from the road and stopped, leading officials to think it had indeed died. The boar has been captured multiple times over the years, and as such wears a monitoring collar with GPS capabilities and a “mortality signal.” If he did not move for three hours, it alerted officials to his death.
However, no such signal was sent.
By the next morning he was moving away from the road. Three days after the accident, a conservation officer caught Bear 164 on video walking as if nothing had happened. At a veterinarian’s urging, officials recaptured him and examined him for injuries, just to make sure.
“We went over him twice head to toe with trained personnel, looking for any sign of injury, and we could not externally see any source of injury on the bear,” Paczkowski said. “I can’t imagine being hit by a car at 100 km/h and three days later walking around, and then three weeks later he looks to be in pretty good shape.”