It’s official: Selfie Bear is the new Cocaine Bear. The latest ursus to captivate the internet is a Colorado bear who happened upon a camera set up in the woods to track wildlife and quickly became the primary subject of its documentation. As reported by the City of Boulder, the bear took 400 photos of itself — suggesting, at the very least, that it’s more social media savvy than the average bear.
As The Guardian noted in its report on the bear — known colloquially as “Selfie Bear” for obvious reasons — the wildlife camera was designed to photograph a variety of the wildlife in the area; in the case of this particular round of photos, however, over two-thirds were of the bear.
The bear took the photos in November of last year; if it returns to the site in the spring, it might well be a sign that bears have strong feelings on social media.
It’s also a strange case of life imitating art. In 1990, writer Terry Bisson won multiple awards for his short story “Bears Discover Fire,” which is about — as you might guess — bears discovering fire. (It also led to a collection of the same name.) Could a real-life discovery of fire be next? If the odyssey of Selfie Bear is any indication, it shows that bears can be surprising in all sorts of ways.
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