Brown Bear Chomps on Baby Ducklings, Horrifying Zoo Onlookers

A group of children visiting Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo inadvertently got a taste of the brutality of nature when a momma duck and her five adorable ducklings made the mistake of going for a swim in the bear enclosure. And to the horror of onlookers, one of the zoo's resident bears named Juniper made quick work of the ducklings, chomping them down like chicken nuggets.

The video, which was originally posted to TikTok last week, amassed over two million views before the account went private. However, the footage has since spread like wildfire all over the internet.

In the two-minute clip, Juniper, a two-year-old brown bear, could be seen sauntering into the pond within the enclosure before swimming straight at one of the babies, grabbing it with her long claws and biting its head clear off. "Oh noooo, Juniper!" a woman could be heard saying, as some of the children began banging on the glass in hopes to distract the apex predator.

"Hey buddy, can you leave him alone? Can we not?" asked the mother recording the video, to no avail, as Juniper swam towards a second duckling, which she likewise sucked down.

Eventually, near the end of the video, Juniper begins stalking the mother duck, but it's unclear whether she was the main course or managed to fly away.

"Bear was like, 'Sweet Uber eats is here with my nuggets,'" quipped one commenter, before the account was made private.

According to Seattle's local public radio affiliate KUOW, Juniper was brought to the Woodland Park Zoo in the summer of 2022 after being found abandoned and weighing just 89 pounds on an airport runway in Anchorage, Alaska. Wildlife officials believe her mother may have been hit by a car or killed illegally.

She was then flown to Seattle in a small steel cargo container on an Alaska Airlines flight, where she was eventually integrated into the bear habitat. There, she became best friends with a grizzly bear cub from Montana named Fern, who was seen in the background of the video and did not take part in the duck carnage.

For what it's worth, the woman who posted the video later updated her caption to assure viewers that her children were not traumatized by the incident. "We see wildlife doing their thing all over where we live," she wrote.