Grizzly Seasons: Life with the Brown Bears of Kamchatka

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 spraya well-tested and non-fatal means of deterring bearsand 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 bearswe 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 lRussell, Charlie is the author of 'Grizzly Seasons: Life with the Brown Bears of Kamchatka', published 2003 under ISBN 9780679312215 and ISBN 0679312218.