Condolences to Charlie Russell

Condolences and well-wishes go out to Charlie Russell, one of the greatest pioneers of bear/human co-existence, whose son Anthony died peacefully of cancer the morning of July 4th. Thoughts and prayers go out to Charlie and his family in this difficult time.

The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams

In the past, we've given special attention to individuals like Doug Seus and Casey Anderson who have successfully raised, tamed, and befriended bears in captivity. In that spirit, it would be remiss of me to not give the famous Grizzly Adams his due for being perhaps the first person to pioneer such a feat. Although his methods of taming were not as kind as Seus's and Anderson's, the end result was no less extraordinary.

John Adams (aka James Capen Adams) was born near Boston, Massachusetts in 1812 but ultimately landed in California after being taken west by the Gold Rush. In those days, before the mass extermination of the large majority of the West's wildlife, California was home to thousands of grizzlies and Adams set himself up as a hunter and trapper. In 1853, he set out on an expedition to western Montana where he captured a yearling female grizzly which he named Lady Washington. At first, the little cub proved to be a violent and angry force to be reckoned with but, after rewarding her ferocity and ill-temper with a healthy dose of his own, she seemed to learn her place and, in Adams's words, "followed me like a dog." Over time, he trained her to carry packs on her back and pull a loaded sled. She even allowed him to ride her like a horse, shared his meals, and accompanied him on hunting expeditions in which she would cuddle with him to keep him warm on cold nights. Adams would later state, after she had stood defensively by his side during an encounter with a wild grizzly, that she was his closest companion and that "I felt for her an affection which I have seldom given any human being." Perhaps most remarkable was an incident in which Lady Washington began an "affair" with a wild grizzly that had been entering Adams's camp under cover of darkness. Adams disapproved of the meetings and the Lady apparently picked up on this, for she ultimately refused to leave behind her domesticated world in favor of the wild one, though she did ultimately give birth to a cub that Adams named General Fremont in honor of the American military officer.

In 1854, Adams captured a two-week old male grizzly cub from a den near Yosemite Valley. He named the little bear Ben Franklin (pictured with Adams in the illustration above) and set about on the same training and taming regimen he had prepared for Lady Washington. In 1855, Ben saved Adams's life by viciously attacking and fighting off a sow grizzly after it mauled the man. Both Adams and Ben suffered severe wounds in the encounter, including a head wound that would claim Adams's life in 1860. On several other occasions, both Lady Washington and Ben Franklin would fight valiantly to protect Adams from fierce grizzlies on hunting expeditions.

Other bears eventually came into Adams's life, including Samson, a monster weighing in at 1,500 pounds. Adams gave up hunting and began traveling with his animals as a type of living museum. He could often be seen walking the streets of San Francisco with Lady Washington and Ben Franklin loyally following behind, completely unrestrained. Ben Franklin died of an incurable illness on January 17, 1858 and The San Francisco Evening Bulletin ran his obituary under the heading "Death of a Distinguished Native Californian." Adams later relocated his animals to New York City and joined with P.T. Barnum. He died of illness in 1860.

Personally, I find these accounts extraordinary and, in light of what's been accomplished by Doug Seus, Casey Anderson, and others, I can't believe that it's just a fluke. There clearly seems to be something more complex than just base wild instinct inside the mind of the bear and these events more than speak to its existence. Could the fact that bears are closely related to dogs mean that they have many of the same attributes? I have been told of a study conducted by a biologist showing how grizzlies may have been the next species domesticated had they not been mostly exterminated, but I haven't been able to track down a copy. Honestly, I can't say that I'm the least bit surprised to hear someone make that claim. Having been face to face with grizzlies, I can clearly see those qualities in them...particularly in the right situation.

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In other news, I've written a photo and info book on Fortress of the Bear and it's available to read online. I was going to try selling some copies, but they're printing prices are so high and their bulk prices so outrageous that I would lose more money than I would make. It is, however, available to read at the following link: http://www.mixbook.com/photo-books/all/fortress-of-the-bear-7310670

Sources:

The Adventures of James Capen Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter of California by Theodore H. Hittell, 1860.

The Beast That Walks Like Man by Harold McCracken, 1955

Grizzlies and Grizzled Old Men by Mike Lapinski, 2006

Polar Bear Jail, a Revolution in Bear Management?

By now, some of you may have already heard of Manitoba, Canada's "polar bear jail", which is used to temporarily house bears that become a nuisance.

The town of Churchill is often referred to as the "polar bear capital of the world", playing host to a population of about 1,000. When the ice melts in spring and summer, the bears are cut off from the seals that make up their normal diet and they descend upon Churchill looking for a supplement.

When these bears get into trouble, they are captured and transferred to an abandoned aircraft hanger containing 28 individual cells, each about six square feet wide. Snow is pushed through the bars to supply them with water but they are given no food (polar bears typically fast on stored fat reserves during the summer just as black and grizzly bears do in the winter) and have no contact with their human captors. After serving a sentence that is often dictated by the severity of the "crime", the bears are released and usually take enough away from the experience to stay out of trouble from then on.

I think this is a great idea and I wonder why something like this hasn't been implemented in Alaska. It's certainly better and more humane than bullets and the best part is that with no direct human contact, the bears will not develop a heightened aggression towards people. Instead they would learn valuable, life-saving lessons. I think this could be a revolutionary idea in bear management and I would hope that wildlife organizations around the world will take the idea into consideration. How can we help promote this concept and persuade people to put down their guns and make more of an effort to save bears lives? If the polar bear jail continues to be an effective deterrent, maybe someone will start to listen.

A Word of Caution...

It's sad that this has to be said, but apparently it does.

I've been noticing a very disturbing trend among animal rights activists. I think this trend has always existed in some from or another but I've noticed an alarmingly consistent increase just in the past two years. That trend is extremism and it's getting out of control.

I first started noticing this last August when a young man was killed by a polar bear in Norway. His family and friends created a memorial page on Facebook where they could reminisce and share memories, but a group of bear advocates (led by a bear keeper and author whom I once had a tremendous amount of respect for) invaded the page and began tearing down the kid's memory, saying that he had no business being out there and "deserved to die" for "invading the bear's space." Those mourners who tried to be civil and explain that it was inappropriate to say things like that on a tribute site were viciously and venomously attacked. Fortunately, this wasn't tolerated and the offenders were reported and banned from the site. Needless to say, my respect for the person who instigated this has since turned to disgust.

Another account that irks me: in British Columbia some years back, a young boy was stalked, killed, and eaten by a black bear while playing in his front yard. The boy's mother was contacted by an organization claiming to be Greenpeace, who tried to bully her into telling the press that her son was at fault for intruding on the bear's space and that he provoked the attack. When she refused, they tried to get her to confess that she was careless with her garbage and that attracted the animal. She refused again (a later investigation reported that trash was properly disposed of and that there were no attractants) and the phone calls became threatening. Later, Greenpeace denied making the calls and it's suspected that smaller B.C.-based environmental groups were responsible. Having heard that, I now wonder how many bear attack stories have been distorted by such influences.

Thinking about this, part of me can hardly believe it. Could people so devoted to such a worthy cause be so spiteful and heartless? I'm not sure that I ever really believed that to be true until very recently.

In 2010, a young schoolteacher was attacked and killed by a pack of wolves in Alaska. DNA testing confirmed that wolves were responsible and they were later found to be non-rabid and in good health. Some evidence seems to suggest that the pack even surrounded her and cut off her escape before attacking. As you can imagine, the animal rights movement erupted. People struggled vainly to explain it away and even began calling it a propaganda conspiracy against wolves (seriously, what?). Even now, mentioning the girl's name to certain people and in certain places will get a load of profanity-laced venom spewed at you, as if she's committed some unforgivable sin. My efforts to debate some of these people on this incident and their weak, profanity-laced responses have finally brought this reality home to me and there have been a few occasions in which my own passion for bears has almost been soured because of it. Fortunately, I'm too deeply immersed in that work now to turn my back on it, but it has given me a more jaded perspective, as evidenced by the darker tone of some of my more recent posts. That's where my view still stands, even if only to ensure that I don't end up going down the same path. Romanticizing large predators is just as dangerous as demonizing them and there are a few people who need to realize this. Bears in general do not see people as prey, so those few who do have gone to a very dark place and do need to be removed as quickly as possible.

I know that most people reading this probably wouldn't be thoughtless enough to ridicule the memory of an attack victim in front of that person's family and friends (or in front of anyone), but I feel compelled to offer this as a warning all the same. It is the right of any human being to venture out into the wilds and enjoy what it has to offer. Sure, certain risks come with that and sometimes no amount of preparation is enough but no one deserves to be eaten by a wild animal and to say such a thing in front of that person's loved ones is not only morally reprehensible but also immature. It is behavior like that that turns people against environmentalists and makes conservation efforts even more difficult, just as extreme fundamentalists turn people away from religion. Be smart and use your head before you use your mouth, otherwise you're just going to dig yourself - and the bears - into an even deeper hole. Extremism is not the answer, unless your goal is to alienate as many people to your cause as possible.

I had hoped I wouldn't have to get on this soapbox - and I'll no doubt be criticized for doing so - but I can't remain silent on this issue anymore. Defending a creature that has no voice with which to defend itself is a high calling and one worth pursuing, but not worth abandoning one's moral and ethical standards (and respect) for human life over. Once we've done that - once we've given one form of life total value over another - then I think we've truly lost ourselves.

Edit: In a recent email from Charlie Russell, he had this to say about this scenario: "I love people who are passionate about things, but it is hard to be level headed about the things that you are passionate about. As you found out with the researchers bickering and bear lovers smearing etc, how does one work towards any kind of useful agreement that is helpful for the bear? People become zealots around wildlife issues and can get caught up in their ideologies which are usually a collection of dogmas that are distanced from the real world and for some reason being a scientist does not really help the situation. Even they splinter into different camps and then sub-sects because zealots themselves have difficulty coming to agreement over dogmas. We are in a big mess."

Charlie Vandergaw - The Man Who Lives With Bears

Browsing the web today, I found a great documentary about Charlie Vandergaw, who spent over twenty years living with wild black and grizzly bears at his remote Alaskan cabin - "The Man Who Lives With Bears". I really enjoyed the few insights into how he interacts and communicates with them rather than just showing us that he does. My only complaint is that's what I wanted more of.

I've spent all day trying unsuccessfully to download this, both to my hard drive and Real Player, so if anyone has any info on where I can get a hard copy (and where I can find "Stranger Among Bears", a mini-series about Charlie) please let me know. I would love to have this one!

You can watch it here: http://documentaryvideos.org/the-man-who-lives-with-bears/

Defending James Gary Shelton

With my hopes of visiting Glacier National Park this summer, I feel that it's potentially in my best interests to broaden my perspective on bears to the greatest extent that I can manage. I've written extensively about the individual personalities of bears and Glacier Park is one place where that is most evident, considering the lower food rations in Montana compared to the abundance of Southeast Alaska. To prepare, I'm absorbing enough information to reach the level of unofficial PhD and that requires me to re-evaluate sources of information that I previously rejected.

Chief among those are the books of James Gary Shelton, one of the most militant and opinionated bear researchers out there, and one of the most vilified by conservationists. I myself contributed to that with a scathing review of his book Bear Attacks: The Deadly Truth (Thursday January 28, 2010), which merely reflected my own point of view at the time. Now that I've learned so much more, and in keeping with the picture I've been piecing together in my recent posts, I've taken a more informed look at his work and found two surprising things: (1.) That I'm in agreement with many (though not all) of his points, and (2.) That thinking about his writing has answered a major question that I posed almost a year ago. Before we get into that, though, let's begin with some background.

Shelton started out as a hunting guide in Bella Coola, British Columbia in the 1960s, then, concerned that grizzly bear populations were threatened by overhunting, he became chairman of the Central Coast Grizzly Management Committee, a group devoted to bear conservation. Among other things, they put a number of restrictions on hunting laws that allowed bear populations to skyrocket in the late 1970's and throughout the 80's. In fact, the numbers became so high that they exceeded the local habitat's carrying capacity and the inevitable result occurred: predatory attacks on livestock that were soon re-directed towards people.

Last year I put together a post entitled The Great Bear Conundrum (Sunday March 6, 2011) which questioned the reasons for abnormally aggressive black bear behavior in northern British Columbia and interior Canada. Unlike many of their lower 48 cousins, these black bears not only defend their young as fiercely as grizzlies do, but they have also been responsible for some of the most chilling attacks ever recorded. Who can forget the attack at Liard Hot Springs, when one lone black bear killed two people and injured two others in one assault before being shot? Or, even more chilling, the three young men who were killed one at a time in Algonquin Provincial Park, their bodies stored as a food cache?

I was initially critical of Shelton's writing because it portrays bears in exactly this mercilessly savage light, but now I find it funny that it took me this long to realize that he lives in the heart of this highly volatile bear population and has written his books from that perspective. Knowing that, I'm writing this partly to make up for my earlier bashing of his work and partly to help people realize that he's only doing what almost every other bear researcher does: presenting his information as a reflection of the animals he knows rather than the species as a whole. I think what finally earned my respect was his acknowledgment of these differences. Commenting on Lynn Rogers and his work with the black bears of Minnesota, Shelton says that he has no doubt that Rogers is perfectly safe. He says those bears subsist on grasses, berries, and insects and that the habitat can sustain enough of these natural foods to keep them satiated, just as the coastal grizzlies of Alaska differ in temperament from their interior cousins because of the abundance of berries and salmon available to them. The black bears of northern British Columbia, however, must endure short, cool summers and harsh winters that don't allow for the growth of such prime vegetation. The result is an animal that must rely more on meat and that has become more carnivore than omnivore.

What irks some environmentalists the most about Shelton is his solution to the problem. First, Shelton controversially challenges the opinion that bear attacks are always the fault of the victims. He contends that sometimes it is the fault of the bear, because that is what opportunistic predators often do. I've come to agree with this thinking 100% (sure, the night of the grizzlies and my feelings on that probably have something to do with it), but it causes literal mouth-foaming from those who want to keep a perpetual halo over the animal's heads. Shelton believes that there are not always clear explanations or reasons for bear attacks and that safety advice is alarmingly incomplete and untrustworthy, though he does promote many of Stephen Herrero's (author of Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, THE top bear safety guide ever written) views. Shelton carries bear spray but advocates firearms and controlled hunting to promote fear of humans in the bear population. In fact, he has helped put hunting regulations in place that have not only brought the bear population down to a more workable level but that have brought down the staggering number of attacks as well.

So how does that fit with all of my previous assertions that hunting can actually make bears more dangerous to people? Can both be true? I've thought a lot about that and here's my theory: I think that bears that are normally shy and timid around people could certainly be made more aggressive by it, particularly in close encounters, while bears that are already aggressive - especially in the predatory sense - can only be made less so. After all, they've clearly learned that people are easy to hunt and easy to kill, so "striking back" will no doubt teach them to re-evaluate that assessment and, in Sheldon's case at least, it seems to have worked extremely well.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about holding two contradictory thoughts in your mind at one time. The study of bears seems to contain more contradictory thoughts than any other field I'm aware of. Bears are killers, bears are not killers; hunting makes bears more aggressive, hunting makes bears more respectful. All of these are true. The further I go, the more I realize what a thin line this is and how careful you have to be to not veer too far to either side. But I'm also realizing that that's a good thing, that a diversity of information, thoughts, and opinions can be useful if I'm walking through the mountains of Montana, or anywhere in bear country. Only then can I be most adequately prepared for any and all possibilities. The way I see it, I can only benefit from walking through those woods believing that nothing out there wants to kill me, yet knowing that somewhere out there in the dark woods...there may be something that does.

All's Quiet On The Ursine Front...

With all the bears away in hibernation, not much is going on in their world so I'm passing the time (and my own winter hibernation) by taking some of my writings here and adapting them into article form. I've already submitted one to Vital Ground for use in their newsletter, but that probably won't appear until next spring. Since then I've gotten a letter published in Alaska magazine and have sent them a query regarding an article that I want to write. That prospect is exciting and unnerving, as it will be a monumental task to accomplish with no lacking of pressure. I'm also thinking of a travel piece for Alaska Airlines magazine, a bear safety article for some hiking/outdoors magazine that I have yet to select, and - provided my trip to Glacier pans out this summer - an article about that for either Backpacker or Montana magazine. I may branch out into writing about other topics as well, but for now I'll stick with what I know.

Meanwhile, I'm re-reading each and every bear book in my library to keep it all fresh in my mind. This is my third read-through and is a daunting task considering the large number of books that I have on the subject, but I find that my knowledge deepens each time, particularly as my own thoughts and theories change. I've also expanded the collection, even reading controversial books that I once swore off, such as the works of James Gary Shelton, who is very opinionated but, I think, very right in some of his assumptions. There will be more on that later once I've finished everything. I'm now finding myself wishing that I had two copies of each book; one to keep neat and clean and one to fill with highlights, notes, and cross references. As it is, I don't have the heart to mark them up. Maybe on my next read-through, I'll keep a notebook on hand and do it that way.

So that's the gist of what's happening. Things are moving slowly with no clear sign of what's coming next, so hang in there and let's take the time to kick back and breathe while we can.