Burnaby Lake Regional Park, Oct 2025
The forecast was cloudy with drizzle. I wasn’t feeling very ambitious, but still wanted to get out and shoot somewhere. So I decided to visit Piper Spit at Burnaby Lake. I go there from time to time because the birds and ducks change with the seasons.
It was a quiet morning. Usually a handful of people are around on quiet days, but only one other person was there when I arrived around 11 a.m., and he was on his way out. I had the place to myself.
Like always, I looked around to see which birds were present. There were the usual gulls, geese, and ducks, along with a bunch of noisy crows.
Then, I spotted a lifer – my first-ever Northern Shrike! I was thrilled, but it flew away almost as quickly as it appeared. Not much happened after that. I shot some wood ducks on the water and caught the resident eagle returning to its nest across the lake. By then, I was getting a bit wet and cold, and had thoughts of packing it in.
At around the two-hour mark, I was shooting a couple of red-winged blackbirds perched on the boardwalk railing. They kept moving from one side of the boardwalk to the other, and I kept repositioning myself to follow them. I was so focused on them that I wasn’t paying attention to anything else. Then I turned around and got the surprise of my life.
A bear was moseying along the water’s edge about 150 feet (46 m) east of where I was on the boardwalk. I gasped. I was shocked, and my heart was racing. I’d never seen a bear in the wild before. And a bear in the middle of the city? Vancouver Island, sure. But not here. All I could think of was that I was about to get some really cool shots.
At first, the bear was slowly strolling along the shore, sniffing the ground. I crouched down behind the boardwalk railing, trying to be inconspicuous, and started shooting away. A few moments later, the bear looked up at me, made eye contact, and paused. It seemed interested in me and started walking into the water in my direction. Head-on shots, I thought. Cool.
Then, suddenly, it charged at full speed. Water was splashing everywhere. Through my viewfinder, the bear now filled the frame. I went from excited, to curious about this bear running toward me, to terrified that it would reach me in a second or two. It dawned on me: uh oh! But my instinct for self-preservation didn’t kick in. I kept my finger down on the shutter. The photo below is from that moment. (Pardon the motion blur. My shutter speed was still set for bird portraits, not a charging bear.)
At about 50 feet (15 m) away, the bear pulled up and swam south. I watched with my mouth open as it crossed the lake. On the far shore, it climbed out dripping wet and disappeared into the grass.
I looked around for someone to ask, “Did you see that?” but there was nobody around.
Then it all started to sink in. I don’t know much about bears, so I googled “bears in Burnaby.” From what I gathered, it was a black bear, likely male. I was relieved it wasn’t a protective mother with cubs.
Just before I left, I took a photo of a sign I had ignored on the way in.
I never ignore warning signs anymore.
