by Cat Urbigkit
The report noted, “There were no warning or closure signs at the incident location when Mr. Evert approached this site where he was killed.” Evert had hiked about 1,700 feet off the main trail to the capture site, where he was attacked.
Bear managers ordered the newly collared male bear to be killed, and it was shot from a helicopter less than two miles from its original capture site. DNA tests later confirmed that this research bear had fatally mauled Evert.
Since Evert’s deadly encounter, the research team has modified its activities to include provisions for greater public notification of capture operations, including leaving the warning signs in place until three days after capture operations have ended. Yolanda Evert filed a wrongful death claim alleging negligence by the bear research team. A federal court judge in Wyoming denied the claim in 2012.
Research Bears
Bears recovering from sedation are known to be dangerous to humans; these bears are also in danger of attacks from other bears. Researchers documented one case in which a female grizzly bear recovering from sedation was charged and killed by an adult male grizzly. In another case, in September 1973, a wildlife manager was mauled and killed in Canada’s Banff National Park when he moved too close to an adult male grizzly that was recovering from being tranquilized. In this case, the bear had a history of feeding on human foods and garbage and was being relocated via helicopter. A Parks Canada photographer had accompanied the bear biologist and their pilot to get footage for an educational film. While the bear came out of sedation, both the biologist and photographer approached the animal closely. The pilot left the two men filming on the ground and flew over the bear in his helicopter to see if it was still affected by the drug. The bear charged the helicopter several times, showing it had recovered from the drug. The pilot landed again, and the photographer and biologist continued to approach the bear, within about 100 feet. The bear charged, taking down the biologist and quickly biting him to death. The pilot chased the bear off the man’s body with his helicopter and evacuated the unharmed photographer. They returned with armed guards within the hour, and the bear tried to attack the helicopter. The bear was shot and killed.
While bear handlers and researchers need to be sure a sedated animal is adequately recovering, they must also be aware of the danger as the bear does recover.
Habituation
Since 1973, grizzly bears in the lower forty-eight states have been protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. It is estimated the Yellowstone region contains at least 1,000 grizzly bears. Federal protection for grizzly bears has kept the animals free from human harvest or harassment, and has resulted in a population of large predators that have little reason to fear or avoid humans.
Bears that have lost their avoidance behavior toward humans are called “human habituated.” Although most wild grizzlies will try to flee when first encountering a human, some bears seem to get used to people and do not run away if no negative experience is associated with those first human encounters.
Bears that become food conditioned are those that are attracted to human food or garbage because they were successful in accessing such food in the past. A bear that receives a food reward will seek out such food again because of the positive reinforcement of the reward.
As we have seen with a variety of predators, habituation may lead to attraction. But it’s also important to note that there are human-habituated bears, and also those that seem to have a natural tolerance of human presence. Those that are naturally tolerant may not have ever had human contact in the past, while human-habituated bears have become so through repeated exposure to humans.
Bear managers view both human-habituated and food-habituated bears as presenting varied levels of danger to humans. Most food-habituated bears will eventually become aggressive in their efforts to access human food, and will damage property and injure humans in the process. For this reason, these bears are destroyed by grizzly bear managers.
Human-habituated grizzly bears are often seen along roads in national parks, especially in Yellowstone National Park, which receives more than three million human visitors each year. Grizzly bears foraging for natural foods and road-killed wildlife in Yellowstone will be seen by hundreds of human visitors as they drive by on the roadway. Many of these people stop to watch or photograph the bears they see, creating “bear jams,” where traffic stops because of the presence of a bear. Once a bear learns there are no negative consequences from continuing to do what it is doing, it will become accustomed (habituated) to vehicle traffic and the presence of humans. Some bear experts do not believe such habituation is a bad thing, instead believing that habituated grizzly bears may be less prone to aggressively attacking humans during surprise encounters.
In the past, Yellowstone National Park officials tried to reduce the risk of conflicts between humans and grizzlies in the park by attempting to harass or haze the bears away from roadsides. Rangers would fire rubber bullets or loud cracker shells at the bears to scare them away. But bears are smart, and learned to recognize park vehicles and rangers, and even the distance the bullets could be fired. The bears avoided these circumstances, but would not flee from other people or cars. Aversive conditioning simply wasn’t working, so Yellowstone officials changed the strategy from trying to manage the bears to managing the people who were encountering the bears.
Although Yellowstone officials have allowed grizzlies to become habituated to people, rangers now provide supervision and help to control human behavior during bear jams. Rangers hurry to the area where a grizzly has been spotted, and serve to control and educate the public about proper behavior around bears. Most importantly, rangers keep visitors from providing food rewards to the bears, which would create an extremely dangerous situation for both humans and the bears involved.
One of the outcomes of having bears become habituated to humans in Yellowstone National Park is that humans have likewise become habituated to bears. Instead of keeping a distance from this potentially dangerous wild predator, people crowd in closer and closer, determined to get better photographs and see the animals up close. The public must continuously be reminded about the danger of such behavior.
Park service officials believe that tolerance of human-habituated grizzlies may allow for a higher density of bears in Yellowstone, since bears can inhabit all parts of the park rather than avoiding areas near roadways and human developments. In addition, they believe that habituation may increase public appreciation and support for grizzly bears.
Yellowstone and other national parks with grizzly bears provide unique circumstances for both bears and humans, where there are strict controls on human behavior and development. Outside national parks, the situation is drastically different, and bear managers seek to keep grizzlies from becoming habituated to humans. Habituation in these areas may increase the likelihood of further human–grizzly bear encounters, and increase the risk that a grizzly will eventually maul or kill a human. Grizzly bear populations have recovered to the extent that the bears’ range has grown far outside the boundaries of national parks. About half of the human–grizzly bear conflicts in the entire Yellowstone ecosystem (including national parks, national forests, state land, and private property in parts of three states) from 1992 through 2000 occurred on privately owned property.
Not All Grizzlies Are Created Equal
While all grizzly bears should be treated with caution, some grizzlies are naturally more aggressive than others. Many attacks on humans by grizzly bears involve female grizzlies with cubs, and in most cases appear to be females responding reflexively to an intrusion, called a defense reaction. Researchers also believe there is an overall decrease in aggression among females as their cubs get older.
Surprise encounters with grizzly bears in the backcountry account for a large number of human injuries reported, with 97 percent of hikers injured by bears reporting surprise as the reason for the encounter. Most of the injured hikers reacted to the encounter by running or attempting to c
limb trees, and 80 percent of those receiving severe injures from grizzlies had fought back or resisted rather than playing dead.
There are numerous reports each year of elk hunters who surprise a grizzly bear on a carcass, or return to a cached game animal to find a grizzly bear has claimed it—and the result is the bears maul the hunters.
Older grizzly bears are a special consideration as well, since evidence indicates that very old bears are particularly dangerous to humans. There have been numerous serious or fatal maulings by old grizzlies. In 1972, two campers were attacked in their Yellowstone campsite by a twenty-year-old grizzly, with one of the men killed and partially consumed by the bear after it had rummaged around in the campers’ improperly stored groceries. An old and aggressive bear in a national park in Alaska ended up breaking into numerous campers and garbage trucks before finally breaking into a ranger’s cabin while the ranger was inside. And a young girl was killed and partially eaten by an old bear in 1967 in Montana’s Glacier National Park.
In a 1976 paper at the Third International Conference on Bear Research and Management, Herrero concluded that for older bears, “It appears that difficulties in securing adequate food to maintain a healthy body weight may increase foraging motivation so that human food or garbage may be aggressively sought. The possibility that some old grizzly bears under special circumstances may be potential predators of man is also suggested by the data.”
A month after Evert was killed by the drugged research bear in what appeared to be a surprise encounter, another series of grizzly bear attacks on humans took place outside Yellowstone National Park, but this is where the similarities end.
The Soda Butte Attacks
It was a dream trip for a forty-eight-year-old, stay-at-home dad raising his four children in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Kevin Kammer was on a fly-fishing adventure to the Rocky Mountains, camped just outside of Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 2010. He picked a campsite along Soda Butte Creek in a Gallatin National Forest campground, where he could hear the water loudly gurgling and running nearby as he lay in his tent. He knew he was in bear country because of all the signs posted, and he complied with the orders for proper food storage and keeping a clean camp.
He probably never heard the bear. He probably never heard the screams in the night coming from the two campsites upriver. Sometime around 2:30 a.m. on July 28, 2010, a bear attacked Kevin Kammer as he slept, pulling him from his tent along the noisy creek and killing him. By the time his body was found a few hours later, it had been partially consumed.*
Wildlife officials already knew that a bear had mauled two people in two separate campsites in the same campground during the night, and were working to wake everyone up and get them out since a dangerous bear was on the loose. It was during this process that Kevin Kammer’s body was discovered, and wildlife agents learned it was now a man-killing bear. What they didn’t know was whether it was a black bear or a grizzly bear, and they didn’t know if the bear was alone.
The Soda Butte Campground was nearly full that night, with twenty-four of the twenty-seven available sites occupied by campers—some in hard-sided campers, others in tents. The first bear attack occurred at Campsite 16, where Ron Singer was sleeping in a tent with one other person and a small puppy. About 2 a.m., Singer was former high school wrestler, began punching at the animal through awakened by the sensation that the tent was moving, and he soon felt the pain of something biting his left leg through the side of the tent. Although he couldn’t see the beast doing the damage, Singer, a the side of the tent, as his girlfriend screamed and hurried to turn on a light. The bear let go of Singer’s leg and disappeared into the darkness. Singer never laid eyes on the animal that had attacked him. The occupants of a neighboring tent came to Singer’s tent to apply first aid to his leg, and they soon heard a woman screaming from another campsite. Singer’s group loaded him into a vehicle and left the area, driving to Cooke City, Montana, where there was cellular telephone service and emergency responders.
Just minutes after Singer was attacked, a second attack occurred at Campsite 11, where Deb Freele of Canada was sleeping alone in her tent. She awoke to the feel of the bear’s teeth sinking into her upper left arm. The bear shook her briefly, and then let go of her upper arm, biting her lower arm. Freele screamed, but soon played dead, hoping the bear would leave. As the bear bit her on the leg before retreating, she could hear people yelling in the campground. She never saw the bear, which had mauled her through the side of her tent. Although she had bear spray with her in the tent, she never got to use it.
Other campers responded to Freele’s cries for help, loading her into a vehicle and taking her to Cooke City, where they soon met up with the injured Singer and his party. Both Singer and Freele were taken to the hospital in Cody, Wyoming. Both would eventually recover from the injuries received in the maulings.
Emergency responders arriving at the campground included officials with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, the US Forest Service, Yellowstone National Park, and the Park County Sheriff’s Office. Teams of law enforcement officers drove through the campground, waking campers to notify them of the dangerous situation and evacuating the campground. It was during this process that Kevin Kammer’s body was discovered.
Montana game warden captain Sam Sheppard received the phone call notifying him of a bear attack incident at 2:23 a.m., and he left his house fifteen minutes later, stopping to get a culvert bear trap on the way. Sheppard took authority of the incident command as soon as he entered the campground, and was soon joined by Montana game warden Jim Smolczynski. An initial security sweep did not reveal the presence of any bears, so Sheppard and Smolczynski began the process of investigating the scene at Kevin Kammer’s campsite, and were joined by Montana bear specialist Kevin Frey. They knew that a bear was responsible, but beyond that, little was known.
The investigators found bear hair and bear paw prints on the tent. The paw prints included both big bear prints and small bear prints, but were somewhat unclear. Piles of scat were also discovered, and included both small scat and large scat. Frey concluded an adult bear and at least one smaller bear were involved, although the species could not be determined.
The investigators, using a team of armed officers as security as they searched through waist-high willows, expanded the search area to include what was soon discovered to be a well-used bear trail located between the campsite and Soda Butte Creek. Smolczynski collected more bear hair along this route and found more small bear tracks near the creek.
The investigators found several bear guard hairs that were light-tipped with underfur, consistent with known grizzly bear hair. More tracks were found in the sand along the creek, with claw marks indicating that a grizzly bear was the species involved.
The investigative team returned to the campsite, and a series of culvert traps were set in hopes of capturing the offending animal or animals. Kevin Kammer’s tent was set up again in the location of the bear attack, and the largest bear trap was set just 6 feet away, with the rainfly from the tent draped across the trap, which was baited with meat. Two smaller culvert traps were placed nearby to capture smaller bears.
With the traps set, the investigators backtracked through the bear attacks of the night, arriving at Campsite 11, where Deb Freele had been mauled. Inside the tent, the team found a fragment of a broken bear tooth with a black cavity tract from the offending bear. A single bear hair was collected from inside Freele’s shoe, which was found outside her tent. The team then proceeded to collect evidence from Campsite 16, where the first attack of the night had occurred.
Just a few hours after the traps had been set and the team moved away to keep the campsite free of human disturbance, an adult female grizzly bear entered the largest trap and was captured. The team waited a few hours in hopes any smaller bears could be trapped as well, but soon gave up and immobilized the adult bear with a sedative so she could be examined. Samples were taken of her blood, hair, and tissue. Sheppard inspected t
he grizzly’s teeth and discovered that her upper right canine had recently been broken, and had a black cavity that appeared to match the broken tooth discovered in Freele’s tent.
Although it appeared the offending bear had been captured, the job was far from over. The smaller bear or bears had to be captured, and the investigators needed conclusive proof that these were the offending animals. The samples were sent to a wildlife forensics lab in Wyoming for immediate examination, and the female bear was left in the trap. Sheppard spotted three yearling bears in the timber along the creek. The team once again backed off, leaving the traps to capture the young bears.
By the next morning, two of the three yearling grizzlies had been captured, but one remained outside, bluff-charging the traps several times. The remaining trap was reset and the team retreated to resume their wait. The next day, the remaining cub was captured, concluding the capture effort. A few hours later, the Wyoming wild-life forensics lab notified bear specialist Frey that DNA tests results provided a conclusive match between the captured adult female grizzly and the samples collected from the three attack sites. While the evidence did not indicate the yearling bears had been involved in the attacks on humans, the bears had participated in feeding on the third victim.
All four bears were transported out of the area, with the three cubs eventually transported to a zoo, where human visitors would view them without knowing they had fed on humans before arriving for their lives in captivity.
The adult female bear was taken to a Montana veterinary laboratory, where she was given a lethal drug injection. Once the bear was dead, a research team conducted a necropsy, an intensive evaluation of her body. Tissue samples were taken for further testing, as was the bear’s brain so it could be tested for the deadly and dangerous disease rabies. The rabies test was imperative since there were two human victims who would have to be treated for rabies should the test come back positive. The test result was negative.