Killer grizzly bear is captured by wildlife rangers

Wildlife rangers last night said they had captured the mother grizzly bear responsible for an attack at a campsite north of Yellowstone National Park, Montana, along with two of her three cubs.

The bear was lured into a trap fashioned from culvert pipe. Warden Sam Sheppard said he was confident they had captured the killer bear because it had come back to the same site where a man was killed and two others were injured.

He described the rampage as a highly unusual predatory attack.

“She basically targeted the three people and went after them,” he said.

Officials have said the bear will be killed. State and federal wildlife officials will determine the fate of the cubs. Mr Sheppard said they were unlikely to be returned to the wild because they could have been learning predatory behaviour from their mother.

The bear rampaged through the campsite in the middle of the night.

A woman who survived the attack in Yellowstone National Park said she was bitten on her arm and leg before she instinctively played dead so the animal would leave her alone.

Canadian Deb Freele said she was rescued by people from a nearby campsite after the bear left.

Ms Freele said from her hospital bed in Wyoming that she woke up just before the bear bit her arm.

“I screamed, he bit harder, I screamed harder, he continued to bite,” she said.

“I told myself, play dead,” she said. “I went totally limp. As soon as I went limp, I could feel his jaws get loose and then he let me go.”

She said the bear was silent.

“I felt like he was hunting me.”

The bear attack was the worst in the Yellowstone area since the 1980s, wildlife officials said.

One camper at the Soda Butte Campground said she heard the screams from two of the attacks.

“First she said, ‘No!’ Then we heard her say, ‘It’s a bear! I’ve been attacked by a bear’!” said Paige Wilhelm.

By that point, the bear had already ripped into another tent a few campsites away, biting the leg of a teenager who had been sleeping with his family. The camper who was killed was at the other end of the campground.

In 2008 at the same campground, a grizzly bear bit a man sleeping in a tent. A young adult female grizzly was captured in a trap four days later.

The region has hundreds of signs warning visitors to keep food out of the bears’ reach. Experts say that bears who eat human food quickly become used to people, increasing the danger of an attack.