I have read this forum for a while but this is my first time posting. I want to tell my story from last weekend to warn other hunters about this kind of activity and also to see if anyone has had a similar experience or has any more information.
I went out hunting this weekend with my hunting partner who drew a grizzly tag in 4-27. I had a black bear tag, and we were accompanied by two other friends that weren’t hunting but just carried bear spray and wanted to come along. Saturday went great, spent 30 minutes glassing a boar grizzly at 140 yards and my partner ended up passing to hold out for something bigger (he already has taken two grizzlies).
The next day we headed out fairly early to the same spot. Our excitement from the day before quickly changed when we were riding our ATVs up the logging road and we passed a small black Jeep SUV with Oregon plates driving down the road. When one of us stopped to chat with them, the driver said “Is there something exciting going on up there?” When our buddy responded by saying that we were bear hunting, he excitedly said “Oh, there’s bears up there?” and asked if he could follow us to see bears and take pictures. He pretended that they were friendly to hunters but it was clear that he was lying and that they were anti-hunters. They were told no and we continued on our way. We put a couple guys on a slide to glass and myself and my buddy with the grizzly tag jumped in his side-by-side ATV and went to check out another slide up another drainage. We quickly bumped into the same vehicle and we realized that they had turned around and followed us.
We pulled up next to them and asked what they were doing. They said that they were hoping to take pictures of grizzlies and wanted to follow us. We told them that we didn’t want them harassing us and following us with cameras. We told them we were hunting up here and we didn’t want them interfering with us. They continued to insist that they weren’t there to interfere with us but finally left when we made it clear that they needed to leave.
After that, we spent the day glassing slides and thought that all the anti-hunter nonsense was behind us. The slide that we were glassing was just beginning to be in the shade as the sun got lower and we were standing around our ATVs watching the slide with our binos when we heard an audible buzzing sound. We looked up and realized that there was a drone hovering above us. A DRONE. As soon as they knew that we saw the drone it zipped back down the road. We immediately jumped in the side-by-side and drove down the road. To our surprise, it wasn’t the same vehicle as before. It was a lifted dodge ram with a big spare tire on the roof. He already had the drone loaded up and was in the cab. He didn’t get out of the cab but poked his head out the window to talk to us. He was obviously another anti but gave us a story about how he was almost out of gas and was using the drone to see how far the road went. He admitted that he was with the other people that tried to follow us that morning. He wanted to go past us and sit on the same slide we were on. We made it clear that wasn’t going to happen and that he was interfering with a legal hunt, which is a crime. I got on my InReach satellite messaging device and texted a friend to call the CO. It took restraint to not punch him in his cowardly, lying face, but we took the high road and notified the CO and did everything by the book. Later that evening there was a third vehicle (a maroon Jeep SUV) parked down the road and they filmed us as we rode by.
This was clearly an organized group of anti-hunters. This happened in a very remote location in interior BC. If this happened here it really can happen anywhere that anyone is grizzly hunting in the province. We gave statements to the CO and he is out looking for them and he also notified the RCMP and gave them the license number of the guy flying the drone.
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