Grizzly Seasons : Life with the Brown Bears of Kamchatka

by Russell, Charlie; Enns, Maureen

• ISBN13: 9780679312215
• ISBN10: 0679312218
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-08-18
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart Ltd

Summary

A spectacular journey into the heart of bear country, with more than 175 full-colour photographs, from the authors ofGrizzly Heart. The moments of unexpected communion they've captured on film will change the way you think about bears forever. What if the thought of encountering a grizzly bear filled you with anticipation and wonder? What if you knew a bear her whole life, and the bear treated you as a welcome friend whenever you visited? What if bears themselves could be free to live as they were meant to, enjoying nature's splendour and not fearful of gun-bearing humans? Not everyone can live the dream, but at least two people (and many more bears) have. For seven years, renowned naturalist Charlie Russell and his partner, artist Maureen Enns, have spent summers in the remote wilderness of Kamchatka, Russia. Home to the densest population of brown bears in the world, the region is also home to Russell and Enns's unprecedented first-hand study of the kinds of relationships that can exist between bears and humans. The authors' first book together,Grizzly Heart, told the unforgettable story of their work with Kamchatka's brown bears. Now comesGrizzly Seasons, a stunning array of photographs of these captivating and elusive creatures. Central to their project are three bear cubs -- rescued by Russell and Enns from a squalid Russian zoo -- who are reintroduced to the wild and allowed to grow into the wild animals they were meant to be. We also meet other bears face-to-face, who over the years have come to accept, and at times even embrace, the couple's presence.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Discovering Kamchatka

Our First Year with the Cubs

Learning to Be Wild

Strong and Independent

A Protocol for Co-existence between Grizzlies and Humans

Acknowledgments

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

I can’t imagine a world without bears. For the past seven years my partner and I have been privileged enough to live for five months of the year in a remote wood-frame cabin we built in the South Kamchatka Sanctuary, Siberia. This varied and beautiful landscape is home to the world’s densest concentration of brown bears, formidable creatures who travel well-worn paths through the tundra from their winter dens down to crystal-clear waters that will become rich with spawning salmon.

For myself, a naturalist and guide born on a ranch in Alberta, I’ve spent over forty years studying the nature of bears and our human reponses to them. I have had the great fortune to have been joined in this, my life’s work, by Maureen Enns, an artist and photographer. Maureen’s first feelings were similar to those of most people, who feel fear and apprehension in the face of these giant, mysterious animals. But luckily, Maureen is the kind of creative, curious person who knows that understanding is the most important step towards conquering fear.

What Maureen and I felt instinctively was that bears were not as dangerous and unpredictable as their reputation suggested. We felt that a great part of the problem has been that, ever since humans became organized enough to do such things, grizzlies have been managed, almost exclusively, in a way that assumes these characteristics are absolute. In a sense, bears and people have been deliberately trained to fear each other, in order to keep them a safe distance apart. This policy has been particularly troublesome for bears, because grizzlies and humans both need the same type of productive land -- and the grizzly most often loses in competition for it.

We thought it would be helpful for bears if we did a study that would question the central assumptions about them. Whatever a grizzly is up to, its actions are considered threatening to humans who encounter them. But many years of watching them had suggested to us that they might really be peaceful animals, not vicious predators. That they occasionally strike out could in fact be a result of incessant human reactions to them based on fear. It is surely true that whenever such an attack occurs, it keeps paranoia simmering and reinforces the perception that bears are menacing by nature. Perhaps if bears were treated kindly, their responses to humans would be entirely different, and the cycle of violence could be broken.

Our study would differ from other biological studies, in that it would assume that these animals were intelligent and could have feelings similar to ours. Unlike scientists, we didn’t feel we had to justify this approach or worry whether our findings could be viewed as objective; we would simply see where it led. Beyond pepper spray–a well-tested and non-fatal means of deterring bears–and electric fencing, the only protection we would take with us was our combined experience and understanding of our subjects.

First, we had to find a place to conduct our study. In 1993 we began researching locations, and knew it was critical to locate a large chunk of wilderness where there were many grizzly bears that had had little, if any, contact with people. Our assumption was that all previous human contact with grizzlies, world-over, would have been in some way negative for the bears–we wanted to start with a clean slate. We also had to find a place where we’d be allowed to befriend them. Due to the concerns of wildlife officials, this requirement pretty well ruled out working in North America.

Coincidentally, the Soviet era had recently ended and less-populated areas of Russia were opening up to foreign visitors. Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east of Russia had been a particularly restricted place during the Cold War, due to its many military bases and its proximity to Alaska. Kamchatka was a majestic wilderness loaded with Asian brown bears, the same species as North America’s grizzly, and a study based there would be applicable to bears at home in Canada, as well as to bears in Alaska and the rest of the United States. In the summer of 1994, we ventured into the area to scout it out. While the Russian authorities had many well-defined and negative pre-conceptions concerning the questions we were asking about bears, we nevertheless managed, after a year and a half of negotiations, to secure permission to work in their country.

Kambalnoye Lake, where we’ve lived for the past seven summers, is at the very bottom end of the peninsula, in the South Kamchatka Sanctuary, and is one of the last great wildernesses in the world. We have never fully understood why we have been tolerated by our Russian hosts as long as we have in this strange and distant country, but the seventh year of our study has proven more enlightening than we had ever dared to hope.

We came to understand that the bears in our study area, whom we hoped would be innocent, in actuality had had encounters with poachers over the years, so they were very fearful of us at first. But they soon began to relax when they saw that we were not overly interfering with their lives. We never allowed ourselves to make mistakes, such as letting them into our food, because living well together required being hassle-free both ways.

In our second year in Russia, our project became meaningful in a whole new way: we were able to rescue three very small orphaned cubs from a zoo and bring them to our cabin, where we looked after them until they could be on their own. Since then we have remained a part of their lives. It was the first time such rehabilitation had been done successfully, that is, without the bears becoming dangerous to humans. Our work with the cubs has been -- and still is -- the most critical focus of our study, and has hastened the process of our understanding the subtleties of the true nature of grizzlies.

Typically, as our study progresses, we identify more questions needing answers. For instance, having to feed our cubs when they were young meant we were led into the thorny debate surrounding the issue. It is widely assumed that “a fed bear is a dead bear,” meaning that every bear that tastes human food becomes obnoxious. But we discovered it is possible to feed bears without them becoming dangerous, if it is done in a systematic and careful way. More work must be done in this area, but often bears starve from natural food failures, and hundreds could be saved by knowing how to feed them in an appropriate manner.

With the success of the cub reintroduction project, we’ve also recognized the importance of ensuring that the South Kamchatka Sanctuary remains a safe habitat for bears. It’s wonderful to experience the bears’ openness to our presence, but unless we are able to change human attitudes, our work cannot be considered complete. Our presence in the sanctuary has discouraged much of the poaching that was happening prior to our arrival, but we worry that when we complete our project, our study animals will be vulnerable again. We’ve vowed not to leave before more protection is in place, and for the last four years we have worked with Kronotskiy State Preserve to develop the area’s first ranger system. And to ensure the preserve has the resources to support such programs, we have funded the training of ecotourism guides in Canada, with hopes that the Russian people will learn how to capitalize on their incredible wilderness areas without destroying them.

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Excerpted from Grizzly Seasons: Life with the Brown Bears of Kamchatka by Charlie Russell, Maureen Enns
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