Rare white ‘spirit bear’ caught on trail camera in Michigan woods, photos show

A hunting guide set out bear bait and a trail camera in the Michigan woods, but the beast that came wandering into view of the hidden lens was — even to a seasoned outdoorsman — stunning.

Photos taken by the trail cam and shared to social media show a bear with striking white fur, out of place among the green foliage and brown bark of summertime in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

“There’s been a white black bear on camera in the Yoop! Extremely rare, but ya never know what may ... (come) walking into your bait!” the guide wrote in the Sept. 6 post.

The post caught attention on social media, and the photos soon found their way to state wildlife experts.

“This is the rarest coloration I would expect to ever see in Michigan bears, or bears in most places in North America,” Cody Norton, large carnivore specialist for the state Department of Natural Resources, told McClatchy News.

The bear is a male and, based on size, he’s roughly 2 years old, Norton said.

“This is something we did not ever expect to see,” Norton said. “As far as I know, this is the only (white bear)” ever seen in Michigan, “or at least the only one that I’ve heard of.”

A snowy-colored coat is something typically associated with much larger and more dangerous members of the ursidae family — the polar bear — at home in places much farther north than Michigan.

But polar bears aren’t the only bears sporting white fur. A population of black bears with the same, or very similar, coloration as the Michigan bear are known to roam a large swath of coastal British Columbia.

There are about 250 white Kermode bears, sometimes called spirit bears — a name stemming from Indigenous folklore — in the region, according to Canadian wildlife authorities.

Between 10 percent and 20 percent of Kermode bears have white fur, Norton told McClatchy.

Despite the extreme contrast in color from other black bears, experts say a single DNA base pair is the only genetic difference.

Among the Tsimshian people native to what is now British Columbia, the story of the white bear started with a bargain between Raven, who created the world, and Bear, who serves as keeper of memory and dreams, according to the University of California, Riverside.

Raven wanted the earth to have a reminder of the “Long White Time,” a living testament to the suffering endured during an ice age now over. In exchange for a life of eternal peace, Bear obliged Raven and from then on, one out of every few black bears would be white, according to the university.

For Norton, the Kermode bears immediately came to mind when looking at the U.P. trail cam photos. The white coat, the subtle cream coloration around the neck and face all match up.

Could the Michigan bear have the same genetic mutation as the Kermodes?

“It would be impossible to tell just from photos,” Norton said. “Someday, if we were to get a genetic sample, it would be something really neat to look at.”

This story was originally published September 20, 2022 at 1:57 PM with the headline "Rare white ‘spirit bear’ caught on trail camera in Michigan woods, photos show."