A video of more than a dozen bears (what is known as a sloth of bears) crossing a road and blocking several cars in the process was shared across social media in July 2025 as apparent evidence that "all of the grizzly bears started leaving Yellowstone Park."
The video, posted to the various social media pages of Scott Whitehead, who described himself as an "animal expert" in his profile bios, was viewed
However, the video of the bears was not from July 2025 and was not recorded in Yellowstone National Park. In fact, those bears weren't leaving anywhere; they were in an enclosed wildlife park.
Snopes used InVid, a video forensics tool, to isolate the video's keyframes for a reverse image search. Through that search, Snopes found an edit of the bear video posted to Reddit in February 2025. Another reverse image search eventually revealed the original source of the video, a TikTok video posted by @michellesijohn on Jan. 16, 2025.
In the caption of the video, @michellesijohn used the hashtags #bearcountry and #rapidcity. Bear Country U.S.A. is a wildlife park near Rapid City, South Dakota, in which visitors can drive through the park while the animals freely roam the space within it.
The bears' behavior in the video did not appear to be out of the ordinary for the animals in the park. A November 2017 YouTube video of a man driving through the park similarly showed a large number of the park's bears grouping together before some of the bears crossed the road together, blocking the man's car.
There was more evidence that the video was not recorded in Yellowstone in July within the contents of the video itself. While difficult to see in the more recent video posted by Whitehead, the original video clearly showed a fence in the background, indicating that the video was recorded in some kind of enclosure instead of a wide-open national park like Yellowstone. Additionally, videos and images on the National Park Service website show that the grass in Yellowstone is typically green during the summertime, unlike the grass in the video, which was brown.
There was no evidence that bears were leaving Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 2025. Snopes could not find any news stories about such an event in a Google search for the subject, which would likely be reported on by major news outlets due to the story's peculiarity.
Finally, Whitehead frequently posts false or misleading information in his videos. A few days before posting the video about bears, he posted another video with millions of views claiming that mountain lions were migrating from Yellowstone to Utah. But the video of the mountain lion in the snow that he used was actually recorded in Torres del Paine National Park in Chile.
A local news station in Seattle fact-checked one of Whitehead's videos in which he claimed that parasites were coming out of people's taps in January 2025.