Society has a visceral response to the bear: an immense awe composed of equal parts respect and admiration, tinged by realistic fear of the power and might exhibited by the majestic beasts. Perhaps our fascination began when President Teddy Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear cub at an arranged hunt, christening a child’s stuffed toy with his nickname forever; or maybe our love for the bear actually began millennia ago, when as early humans we congregated in caverns with the huge, wholly vegetarian cave bear. The bear’s appeal leads us to seek out the bear even as it tries to avoid us.
People gather in droves on the Katmai Coast in Alaska to watch bears fish for salmon; they ride Tundra buggies to observe polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba; they cause “bear jams” in Yellowstone and Glacier National Park whenever a shambling bruin emerges from the woods.
Most of us must never try to get close to bears; the dangers are simply too great. But there have always been exceptions to that rule, a privileged few who walk with bears almost as if they were one of them.
Lynn Rogers: Walking with the Black Bear
Minnesota wildlife biologist Dr. Lynn Rogers has walked with the common black bear (Ursus americanus) for over 42 years. Known as the “Bear Man,“ he has contributed immeasurably to our understanding of the social behavior and territorial movements of this type of bear, and has studied the effects of food supply on the population of bears. (He also feeds the bears snacks sometimes, a very controversial method frowned upon by other biologists.)
Rogers works very closely with the animals he studies, giving them names, and gradually gaining their trust. After a few generations of a particular bloodline get used to his presence, he can even approach and interact with mother bears tending their cubs, normally a dangerous prospect in the extreme. In 2009, he placed a camera in the winter den of one of “his” bears, a three-year-old female named Lily. In January, 2010, Lily gave birth to a bear cub; the birth was broadcast on the Web, and tens of thousands of people watched the amazing scene. Lily has her own Facebook page, where many people left supportive messages for her and her new cub.
Rogers wants to get people to understand how to coexist peacefully with the bear; so that all bears, not just “Lily the bear” and her cub, can continue to live as previous generations have, with adequate food and forest to sustain their existence. If the popularity of Lily is any indication, his message of tolerance is getting through loud and clear.
Ben Kilham: New Hampshire Mama Bear
Kilham, a naturalist and gunsmith in Lyme, NH, has been rescuing and raising orphan black bear cubs since 1993. He does not train them for work in show business, but rather for release into the wild. Thus he must spend countless hours with them in the woods, teaching them the same survival skills they would have learned had their mothers lived.
He has discovered that bears cooperate with one another, even exhibiting altruistic behavior at times, and show advanced signs of both problem-solving skills and empathy; he believes bears to be as highly evolved as humans, albeit on a slightly different evolutionary ladder.
He continues to track the bears once they are released; several of them have gone on to survive and raise cubs of their own. Because of the trusting relationship he has with the bears, he is able to observe obscure behavior, such as a mother bear gathering sticks and taking them into her den as toys for her cubs. National Geographic Explorer bestowed the title of “Mother Bear Man” on Kilham, a designation he more than deserves.
Nikita Ovsyanikov: White Bear Walker
Polar bears (Ursus marinus), unlike other types of bruins, are not omnivorous; their teeth and jaw structure indicate that they are built to be pure carnivores. They were often thought to be the most vicious of all the bears, and had been known to kill trainers who made a mistake in hand or voice signals while working with them. It would seem unlikely that a polar bear walker could possibly stay alive very long.
Yet a nature photographer with a Ph.D. in zoology manages to do just that. Nikita Ovsyanikov is a member of the Russia Academy of Science, but he spends a portion of each year living with the polar bears of Wrangel Island in the Arctic Circle. Since 1990, he has been photographing and observing them close up, reporting that they show different personalities, with some bears acting quite bashful and others every bit as ferocious as their fierce reputations would predict.
Dr. Ovsyanikov never carries a gun, though he does have a dog with him as he walks among the bears. He credits his survival to getting the bears to respond to him as though he were another bear. He claims that when people are mauled or killed by a polar bear, they have possibly unwittingly provoked the animal by a gesture perceived as threatening; failing that, the attacking bear may have been habituated to humans and therefore no longer knew how to behave as a wild bear.
In 1996, he wrote a book called Living with the White Bear. He also authors Internet articles and publishes his photos of the magnificent creatures. Through his writings and images, Dr. Ovsyanikov is certainly changing the way we think about the “most vicious” of bears.
A Caveat: Don’t Try This at Home
It is important to remember that the above researchers are highly skilled and have spent a tremendous amount of time learning to walk with wild bears. Other bear walkers have not been so successful: Timothy Treadwell was killed by grizzlies in Alaska on October 8, 2003; in July, 1996, wildlife photographer Michio Hoshino was mauled to death by a Russian brown bear on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia. Ordinary people must learn to preserve the bear’s habitat, but give the animal a wide berth, as it normally does us.
Luckily, thanks to the work of the above researchers and others like them, we can get to know the wonderful animal known as “bear” without crowding it or failing to render it the respect it so richly merits.
Sources
Goldenberg, Suzanne, “BBC ‘Bear Man’ Doc Explodes Honey Myth,” The Guardian, Oct. 27, 2009.
Kilham, Benjamin and Gray, Ed, Among the Bears: Raising Orphan Cubs in the Wild, Henry Holt, 2002.
Ovsyanikov, Dr. Nikita, “ Living with the White Bear,” International Wildlife, Jan. - Feb., 1998.
Schooner, Lynn, The Blue Bear, HarperCollins, 2002.
Amy Sillup - I have a B.S. in Chemistry from Delaware Valley College and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. I have worked as a ...
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