Grizzly Bears and Charlie Russell
Charlie Russell lives with bears and they live with him. What does this mean? He walks with them, laughs with them, finds food with them, goes through tragedies with them. He listens to them, watches them have good days, and is with them on so so days.
For most of the year, Charlie lives in Alberta, Canada. Black and grizzly bears wander past his house, and he in turn wanders past and through their homes. They share the land in acknowledgement of equal respect for what each needs.
Beyond their peaceful co-existence and neighborly relationships is another, different world. The same bears with whom Charlie communes are hunted, pelleted by rubber bullets, and darted with tranquilizers. Sometimes, they are moved miles away or shot and killed because people do not see and understand bears the way Charlie does. But people are changing. A recent poll shows that 80% of British Columbia residents oppose grizzly bear trophy hunting.
Fear defines most bear-human relationships and this perception is fed by hundreds of years of myth. Bears are considered unpredictable and dangerous and as a result people try to make bears fear humans. Charlie doesn’t believe this and his experience is testimony.
Starting in 1994, Charlie lived intimately with grizzly bears in Kamchatka, Russia. On some days, he counted over 100 bears in the space of a few minutes. He specifically chose a wilderness area where few people had ventured over the past century. Bears had not been living with the constant threat of hunters, guns, and roads. It was there he tested his hypothesis that bears and people could live with each other peacefully, and found he was right.
Bears are not Unpredictable or Dangerous
By Charlie Russell
To understand and get an idea of what a mother bear might do and therefore what you need to do or not do, you have to spend some time looking at the world the way they see it. You see, a mother bear is in charge of taking care of cubs who are totally helpless—they are so helpless and loving that a person could walk over and pick one up. Cubs usually don’t run because it takes a while before they get real mobile.
When a hiker surprises a mother bear, the bear’s first reaction is how to protect her babies. Now, this is also where you have to take in consideration who the bear is, and what kind of experiences she might have had. Outside Glacier National Park, near where I live, the bears are on edge. That’s because people shoo bears, park personnel shoot rubber, and real, bullets –all with the intent to scare bears away. Wildlife management policy is to teach bears to be scared of people.
One time, I came across one grizzly female with two cubs down by the river. When she saw me, she got spooked, but then I started talking with her and begged her not to leave. I was so upset that she was so afraid—automatically so frightened that she felt compelled to leave even thought she needed food for herself and the cubs badly. I even got on my knees and pleaded for her to relax and come back.
She was standing cross-wind to me which meant she could not smell my scent. After a few moments of listening to me, she stopped and brought the cubs out back across the creek. Bit by bit the grizzly came closer and while I talked to her. She really looked like she was relaxing. Then she decided to figure out who this guy really was, and walked at right angles to smell me. She came across the water so that the wind was at my back. Then suddenly, she hit my scent and a ripple flashed through her muscles. It was like a club had hit her. She was instantly afraid. The mother bear tore back, picked up the cubs and ran away across the river. She was in absolute terror.
I felt like weeping. What was it in her memory that made her so scared by human scent? Was it something that she experienced? Did she witness her mother killed in front of her and smell the men who had killed her? Or even worse, have humans been so violent to bears that their fear of people has become genetic memory?
So in the case of encountering a mother bear on the trail, you have to take all this into account, and also realize that bears don’t have much human-free territory. They have very little time to get in all the food they can—salmon, berries, nuts—so that they will be able to survive winter in hibernation. Some bears, particularly the old ones who cannot find food as well as they did in their youth, just die in their sleep, or tragically, wake in hunger, wander out in the snow and cold searching for food, then die of exposure. Life is not easy for a bear. That’s another thing I learned. Bears don’t have the luxury of refrigerators and electricity that levels out the environment. Bears have to do and make do with what the environment let’s them do. No arguing with Mother Nature, there.
They don’t, and they shouldn’t have to, see that the trail is human property. We shouldn’t ask of bears what we don’t of ourselves.
More about grizzlies and Charlie Russell
Global TV interviwes Charlie Russell and Julius Strauss on "Grizzly Bear "Harvest". Watch the video.
Charles Russell and Maureen Enns. 2002. Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka. Random House.
Charles Russell and Maureen Enns. 2003. Grizzly Seasons: Life with the Brown Bears of Kamchatka. Random House
Charles Russell. 1994. Spirit Bear. Canadian Geographic and Key Porter Books.
Edge of Eden: Living with Grizzlies. 2007. Still Photo. (film)
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© 2012 Kerulos Center All rights reserved
"Science in service to animals"
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