If you go down to the woods today, you are in for a big surprise…

The dramatic footage in the BBC video above documents on of nature’s great spectacle’s – hungry Grizzly bears feeding on the some of the hundreds of millions of salmon who return from the Pacific Ocean to the mountain streams where they were born. This amazing event has occurred every year without fail since time immemorial. Except this year.

Reports are starting to emerge out of the Pacific Northwest that this year the nears haven’t shown up.

According to reports:

Ian McAllister, Conservation Director of Pacific Wild, a non-profit conservation group on Denny Island, near Bella Bella, said he’s heard similar reports.

“I’ve talked to stream walkers [who monitor salmon runs] who have been out for a month and have yet to see any bears,” he said. “There are just no bears showing up. I hear that from every stream walker on the coast.”

Mr. McAllister said it used to be easy to visit salmon streams in the Great Bear Rainforest, a large area of protected forest on the central coast, and see 20 to 30 bears a day feasting on salmon.

“Now you go out there and there are zero bears. The reports are coming in from Terrace to Cape Caution … the bears are gone,” he said.

“And we haven’t seen any cubs with mothers. That’s the most alarming part of this,” Mr. McAllister said.

He said the problem is that chum salmon runs in the area have collapsed.

While there are strong runs of pink salmon into rivers on the central coast, chum, which are much bigger fish that spawn later in the year, are the key food item for bears preparing for hibernation.

Without an adequate supply of big salmon late in the year, said Mr. McAllister, bears do not have enough fat to survive the winter in their dens.

“The lack of salmon last fall, coupled with a long, cold winter, is what’s at the root of this,” he said.

“River systems that in the past had 50,000 to 60,000 chum have now got 10 fish,” he said. “The chum runs have been fished out. We’ve seen the biological extinction of a [salmon] species, and now we’re seeing the impact on bears.”

If these initial reports turn out to be accurate, there is absolutely no doubt that this is a man-made disaster. The salmon have been completely over-fished leading directly to the deaths of thousands of bears over winter in their dens.

There is very little we can do to fix this in the short-term. In the longer term, fishing and bear hunting in this part of the world needs to be seriously re-thought.

On a more personal basis, if you want to help, avoid eating pacific salmon – this will reduce the demand and hopefully help the numbers recover. A great resource if you like to eat fish but are concerned about global fish stock collapse is the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch. This is an online searchable database of sustainable seafood. It also has sustainable seafood recipes, downloadable pdf pocket guides and a sustainable seafood iPhone app!