It’s similar to the first time a child is allowed to go to the mall on their own. Up until now, they always went with their mother. But now, old enough to go alone, the child stand there, dumbfounded by all the possibilities.

Substitute the mall for Jasper National Park (JNP) and the child with a bear and you have the situation currently facing several cubs in the area.

It’s the metaphor resource conservation manager Terry Winkler uses to describe two sub-adult black bears that have recently been kicked out by their mothers, and which JNP has received reports of seeming lost, and as the JNP website puts it, ‘not afraid and can easily get into trouble if food and garbage are not stored properly.’

“They give the appearance of wandering around, appearing disoriented. But I think even when you see a bear at the best of times they don’t seem very purposeful, they are sort of wandering around looking for food wherever they can happen to find it,” Winkler says.

For the young bears, they are faced with a whole new world of exploring and learning.

Typically a sow bear will have cubs every two years, and when that happens, the older generation of young bears are kicked out, forced to take on the park on their own.

Bears are very territorial, and the younger ones are forced to the perimeter of older bears’ home ranges, sometimes overlapping. Sometimes, if they overlap too much, the dominant, usually older bear, will chase away the young.

“They are smaller in size, they have less fighting skills, and all these things,” Winkler says. In some instances, a bear will kill another bear if it is hanging around in its territory. “That happens with a reasonable frequency. Bears as a rule will defend their territory, and quite often if they can avoid a fight, they will. And if they are fairly closely matched – if there is a mass difference in size then quite often the dominant one just intimidates the other one and the other one runs away because it knows it doesn’t have a chance of winning the fight.”

But many things can happen to a bear leading to territory vacancies. Vehicle accidents, train accidents, fights with other bears or animals, or just old age. As these occur, younger bears move in and take over the area as their home range. “Usually the young ones quite often get pushed around, and they move around until they find an area that’s been vacated by an adult bear,” says Winkler. “You’re sort of in that little corner, and you overlap and pickup that territory and that becomes your home range. And as I die, you move over to take over part of my territory later on.”

These two sub-adult bears that have been seen wandering the park do know what they are looking for: their mothers have shown them where the good berry patches are in certain times of the year, Winkler says, and where a good patch of grass is at another time of year. But once the mother has her newborns, she won’t tolerate her older cubs being close to the new cubs, and quite often pushes them away.

But all this bear activity, searching to find a home range and learn the ins and outs of living in JNP is pretty normal, Winkler says. “Basically for the two years of their life they’ve had mom show them everywhere.”

Now, they are just two sub-adult bears, trying to find their way around Jasper National Park.