ULUKHAKTOK/HOLMAN - Robert Kuptana has been hunting polar bears for decades but last Tuesday was the first time he saw a brown bear running across the sea ice.

Robert and Agnes Kuptana pose with his suspected polar-grizzly hybrid bear. Robert Kuptana shot the bear May 11 on the ice near Minto Inlet, northwest of Ulukhaktok. - photo courtesy of Robert and Agnes Kuptana

"Why would a grizzly bear be hunting seals?" he said. "It's a land animal. They wait for fish in rivers."

The Inuvialuit elder was Ski-Dooing outside of Minto Inlet hunting for polar bears when he spotted the brownish-coloured bear in the midst of a group of a couple hundred seals half a kilometre ahead of him.

Alerted by the sound of the snowmobile, the animal began to run and Kuptana pursued.

He shot it once with a 7-mm rifle. That's all it took to bring the 700 pound bear down.

"He was looking at me standing up on his hind legs," he said.

Kuptana immediately thought it was unusual to find what could be a grizzly bear approximately 30 km from Victoria Island.

"Its fur is probably a little lighter," Kuptana said. "The back paws, the nails, they're short just like a polar bear. The front paws, they're long and huge. They're really different. Twice as big as polar bears."

Whether the bear is a grizzly or a grizzly-polar hybrid - dubbed grolars or pizzlies - has yet to be determined.

Speaking from his home in Ulukhaktok, Kuptana said they're sending the DNA to Inuvik to test to see if it was a polar-grizzly hybrid and any relation to previous bears that have been shot in the region.

"It probably could be a hybrid. It might have learned (to hunt seals) from its mum," he said. "Myself, I don't know anything about grizzly bears or grolar bears, but one of the guys that looked at it, he said he thought the fur was white like a polar bear."

Robert's wife, Agnes Kuptana, said they were excited to discover the anomaly.

"It's pretty awesome. It's one of a kind," she said.

On April 8, Kuptana's neighbour, David Kuptana, shot the first confirmed second-generation polar/grizzly hybrid.

Marsha Branigan, the Department of Environment and Natural Resource's manager of wildlife management, said after seeing photos, she was skeptical that Robert Kuptana's bear was a hybrid.

"The two (hybrids) that we've had so far are very blond looking, with mixed markings," she said. "If I had of seen that bear just standing there, I would have thought it was a grizzly bear ... he (Kuptana) hasn't heard of any grizzlies hunting seals but we have."

She said tests will be done eventually, but she's not putting a rush on the DNA results.

Andrew Derocher, a professor of biological sciences and a polar bear expert at the University of Alberta, said being able to tag and track a hybrid would offer insight into how they behave, for instance whether they hibernate like grizzlies. But since hybrids are so rare, he said it would probably be only chance that scientists stumble upon one.

"Right now they're a scientific natural curiosity more than anything else."

He said hybrids could be the result of climate change as grizzlies expand their territory further north.

"Evolutionary, it's an interesting question: what does this mean?" he said. "As grizzly bears move further north, all bets are off in terms of predicting the future of evolution."

Derocher said biologists estimate there could be as many as 50 grizzlies on Victoria Island, which is nearly twice the size of Newfoundland, so it could be more common for hunters to harvest grizzlies on sea ice. He said blond grizzlies are not unheard of in the region, either.