Rare white 'spirit bear' seen in Upper Peninsula

It's not every day that one catches a photo of an extremely rare species, especially in Michigan.

Yet an individual in the Upper Peninsula caught a glimpse of a rare white "spirit bear" on their trail camera in early September, according to MLive.

This is the first time the bear has ever been spotted in Michigan history. It's a male bear standing at 100 pounds, with blonde coloring.

Since the bear has an all-white coat and cinnamon coloring on the back of its head and neck, it makes the bear a Kermode bear or better known as the spirit bear.

Kermode bears typically are found along islands in British Columbia and black bears are more so found in the eastern parts of the U.S and Canada, said Cody Norton, wildlife biologist and large carnivore expert for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

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"In the whole eastern U.S. and eastern Canada, the black color phase is definitely the most dominant, the most common that shows up in these populations where it's mostly all forested habitat," said Norton.

He explained where you will see other colored bears.

"If you go out west, like the western U.S, or western Canada, you got a lot of different color phases, like chocolate, cinnamon, blonde, that seem to do better in open habitats where they might help them with regulating their internal temperature," he said. "They're not as dark, so they don't take on as much heat from the sun."

In that same sense, some bears even become camouflaged in their habitats but the all-white bear is still a rarity.

"That's something that's usually pretty unique to a population of bears up in British Columbia that was kind of basically separated on some islands for a lot of time," he said. "We saw that those genetics kind of pop up in that population and become more common. But outside of that area, it's extremely rare for an all-white or almost all-white bear to show up."

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The trail cam was captured by a resident in the U.P. who would like to remain anonymous. The individual told MLive they were completely stunned at what they saw on camera and actually deleted images of it because they thought it was just their camera flash brightening up the fur of a common black bear in the dark photo.

Contact Chandra Fleming: cfleming@freepress.com

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Rare white 'spirit bear' seen in Upper Peninsula