CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Spirit Bears of the British Columbia Coast

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Along the rugged coast of northern British Columbia lives one of the rarest large mammals in North America. The Kermode bear, better known as the spirit bear, is not a separate species but a subspecies of the American black bear, and most members of the subspecies are in fact black. A minority, however, have coats ranging from cream to almost pure white. These bears are not albinos; they have the dark eyes, noses and paw pads of ordinary black bears. Their colour comes from a recessive gene, which means a cub is white only if it inherits a copy from each parent. As a result, two black bears that both carry the gene can produce a white cub, and a white mother may raise black cubs.

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White bears are found mainly on a handful of islands and nearby coastal valleys, where isolation has allowed the gene to become unusually common. On some islands, roughly one bear in ten is white. The English name comes from Francis Kermode, an early director of the provincial museum in Victoria, who helped bring the bear to the attention of scientists in the early 1900s. Coastal First Nations had known the animal for far longer. In one widely shared story, Raven made every tenth black bear white as a reminder of the time when the land was covered in ice and snow. For generations, some communities are said to have kept the bear’s existence quiet to protect it from outsiders.

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Researchers have found that the white coat may be more than a curiosity. In studies of bears fishing for salmon in coastal streams, white bears caught fish more successfully than black bears during the day, probably because a pale shape is harder for fish to detect against a bright sky. At night, the difference disappeared. Salmon are especially important in autumn, when bears must build up fat reserves before their long winter sleep. Like other coastal bears, spirit bears also play an important part in the life of the forest itself. They often carry salmon away from the water to eat in the shelter of the trees, and the remains they leave behind release nutrients that help the surrounding plants grow.

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In 2006, the spirit bear was named British Columbia’s official provincial mammal. A decade later, after years of negotiations involving First Nations, environmental groups, forestry companies and the provincial government, an agreement protected about 85 percent of the forest in the region now known as the Great Bear Rainforest from industrial logging. Today, small groups of visitors travel to the area each autumn hoping to glimpse a white bear, often accompanied by local Indigenous guides who share their knowledge of the land. Scientists and communities continue to monitor both the bears and the salmon runs on which they depend.