Drone buzzes bear with cubs in Yellowstone National Park

May 28-Don Johnson and his wife were watching a grizzly bear with two cubs romp through a field in Yellowstone when visitors started shouting, "Drone! There's a drone! Whose drone is that?"

Johnson was so focused on filming the bears with his camera that he didn't notice the small gray done whizzing and whirring around overhead. "I didn't even realize I was filming the drone until I looked at the video," said Johnson, a man from Idaho Falls who visits Yellowstone with his wife "every spare second we got."

He inadvertently filmed the drone incident on the evening of May 14 around 6:30 p.m. The bears were roadside near the aptly named Grizzly Lake Trailhead, on the side of the Grand Loop Road between Roaring Mountain and Obsidian Cliff in the Mammoth Hot Springs area of the park.

At one point, the bears loped away from the drone. It followed them before hovering above them. The bears paused several times, seemingly looking at the drone. One visibly spooked when the drone suddenly flew upward.

Johnson posted the video on Facebook, where it's been seen almost 150,000 times. "I don't even know that many people," he said.

Johnson thought he saw a ranger at the scene. But neither the ranger nor Johnson ever saw who was flying the drone. The pilot might have been over a hill, farther away from the main crowd gathered near Johnson. "I wish they would catch him," Johnson said.

Yellowstone National Park spokesperson Linda Veress said the park was unaware of the incident when contacted by SFGATE. "We do not have a report of this incident," Veress said in an email.

Flying drones is illegal in national parks and has been since 2014. Before they were banned, their use "resulted in noise and nuisance complaints from park visitors, park visitor safety concerns, and incidents in which park wildlife were harassed," according to a Park Service webpage. Before the ban, drones had crashed into the Grand Prismatic hot spring in Yellowstone, tried to land on Mount Rushmore National Memorial and gone over the edge into the Grand Canyon, among other incidents.

But the rules - which can lead to penalties of up to $5,000 and six months in jail - haven't stopped bad behavior in Yellowstone and elsewhere. A tourist was cited for buzzing an osprey nest with a drone in Yellowstone last summer.

Illegal drone activity was especially apparent in Yosemite National Park during the government shutdown in the fall of 2025. Tour operators and guides noticed multiple drones a day, as opposed to roughly one drone a week. Elizabeth Peace, a spokesperson for the Interior Department, disputed a shutdown-related increase in drone activity at the time.

The Interior Department previously told SFGATE that "in recent years, park officials have observed a rise in illegal drone activity, which they attribute to the increasing affordability and availability of consumer drones."

Harassing wildlife is prohibited in national parks, and it's illegal to be close enough to wildlife to disturb or displace them. Visitors should stay at least 100 yards away from bears, wolves and cougars and at least 25 yards away from bison, elk and all other wildlife. Yellowstone encourages visitors to report wildlife conflicts like the drone incident to a park ranger as soon as possible.

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This story was originally published May 28, 2026 at 10:45 AM.