by Cat Urbigkit
The editorial continued: “As recovery efforts continue to succeed, bear populations will increase and bears will move into areas occupied by people and conflicts will increase. Unchecked grizzly populations in areas of high human density will compromise the value and tolerance people have for grizzlies. We know grizzly bears will require continuous management to ensure conflict with humans is minimized, and bear distribution and numbers align with social tolerances and biological suitable habitats.”
Avoiding Greater Yellowstone
Grizzly Conflicts
The US Fish and Wildlife Service recommends the following actions in close encounters with grizzly bears:
If you surprise a bear at close range, drop a nonfood item (like a hat or bandanna) on the ground in front of you and slowly back away. Speak softly and avoid eye contact.
Never run from a bear. Do not turn your back, but slowly and immediately leave the area if you can.
If the bear charges, remain standing. The bear may be bluff charging, which is a warning for you to leave the area.
Carry bear spray and spray the bear if it approaches too closely. If the grizzly bear does make physical contact with you after a surprise encounter, drop to the ground and play dead. Lie face down, leaving your backpack on. Cover your neck and head with your arms and hands, and curl up like a cannonball. Try not to move or make a noise. Once the bear moves off, remain where you are for as long as you can. Often a bear will move off a distance, but will return if it sees movement.
The National Park Service also recommends that if a grizzly bear approaches you in a persistent manner, with head up and ears erect, behaving in a curious or predatory manner, you need to be aggressive and fight back with fury if you hope to survive the encounter. Predatory bears do not give warning signals or use threat displays to attempt to scare you away, as a defensive bear will. A predatory bear will demonstrate its intense interest in you, often quietly, bearing in on you, eyes locked as it approaches. Predatory attacks end only when the bear is overpowered, scared away, injured, killed, or eats you.
Be aware of bear behavioral differences. If you believe that a bear is exhibiting predatory behavior, fight back as aggressively as you can. Use bear spray, rocks, knives, clubs, fists, loud noises, and firearms. Fight for your life!
If a bear attacks you at night in your tent, fight as hard and as loudly as you possibly can. Again, fight for your life!
The general rule of thumb for a grizzly bear attack is this: Play dead for a defensive attack, but fight against a predatory attack. The importance of knowing the difference between a predatory bear and a bear simply reacting to a surprise encounter cannot be overemphasized. Most of the time, a defensive bear will immediately initiate a charge, with head low, ears back, often veering away at the last second. In such surprise defensive encounters in Yellowstone National Park, bear–mauling victims who played dead received only minor injuries 75 percent of the time, while those who fought back received very severe injuries 80 percent of the time.
Footnotes
* Unless otherwise noted, all details of the grizzly bear attack on Erwin Evert are found in Investigation Team Report—Fatality of Mr. Erwin Evert June 17, 2010. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, July 16, 2010.
* Unless otherwise noted, all details of the Soda Butte attacks are found in Investigation Team Report—Bear Attacks in the Soda Butte Campground on July 28, 2010. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, August 13, 2010.
* Information about the death of John Wallace is from the Board of Review Report—Fatality of Mr. John L. Wallace from a Bear Attack on the Mary Mountain Trail in Yellowstone National Park. National Park Service, August 25, 2011.
Chapter 7
Habituation and Alaska Attacks
Timothy Treadwell’s adventures with bears were both unusual and ill-advised. The organization he helped to found, Grizzly People, called him the bear whisperer. According to the book he coauthored with Jewel Palovak (Among Grizzlies: Living with Wild Bears in Alaska), Treadwell had left his winter home in Malibu, California, to spend eight summers camped among the wild grizzlies of the Alaska coastline in Katmai National Park and Preserve. Katmai is one of the premier brown bear viewing areas in the world, with its population of more than 2,000 bears. There are several locations in that area where bears congregate to feast upon spawning salmon during a certain time of year.
Treadwell “immersed” himself among the grizzly population, lounging on the beach with bears as close as 15 feet, surrounding him on all sides. His thinking appeared to be that by emitting “unconditional love,” the bears would come to accept him. When confronted with a population of more aggressive bears, Treadwell dressed in black from head to toe, rolled around in fresh bear beds to alter his human odor, and crawled around on all fours in front of the bears in an apparent effort to make his human body appear more bearlike.
One night, after reading a book about bear hunting, Treadwell found a sleeping bear outside his tent. According to the book, Treadwell, who talked to the bears a great deal, told this bear: “I’m ashamed to be human! I want to be like you, wild and free, liberated from the wicked ways of people.”
In closing out the book, Treadwell claimed his greatest fear was that some people might attempt to copy his “past dangerous lifestyle” and be injured or killed in the process. He claimed to have changed his ways to a “much more conservative and respectful approach” when he returned to the area in 1996, backing off from his close observation of bears to a more remote way of studying them.
Treadwell did seem to want to become a bear, and in one of his last pieces of correspondence, less than a month before being killed by a 1,000-pound brown bear in 2003, Treadwell stated, “My transformation complete—a fully accepted wild animal—brother to these bears. I run free among them—with absolute love and respect for the animals.”
Treadwell, forty-six, and his thirty-seven-year-old girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, camped with the Alaska brown bears again in 2003—Treadwell’s thirteenth year of doing so. But this time, they stayed in the area later in the year. The frenzy of the migrating salmon was over—food was harder to find for the bears, and their behavior was more cranky and aggressive as the food source dwindled. Bears that had companionably feasted alongside each other just weeks prior began brawling, and the disputes involved increased aggression. Many bears began leaving the area, dispersing to find other food sources.
Treadwell watched and noted the increased danger posed by the bears, but still the couple stayed. The situation came to a head on October 5, 2003, when Treadwell and Huguenard were killed by a brown bear at their campsite. The attack that resulted in their deaths was not quick and merciful. It was brutal, tortuous, and long, documented in a six-minute audio recording of the event that was recovered by investigators after their deaths. It appeared the recorder’s batteries went dead before Huguenard died, as her cries and wails reportedly continued as the recording ended. The tape was found in a camera near their bodies, which had been substantially eaten and buried with debris by the bear. The lens cap was still on the camera, so there were no images on the tape.
Craig Medred, outdoor editor for the Anchorage Daily News, covered the Treadwell story extensively, and much of this account of that night was pieced together from Medred’s articles. It is believed that the attack began with Treadwell outside the tent at night. Treadwell called out to Huguenard, “Get out here. I’m getting killed.” The recording indicated that Huguenard went out to help Treadwell and was then attacked and eventually killed by the same bear. When a pilot arrived for a scheduled pickup of the couple to take them from the area for the season, he discovered the disheveled campsite and a large bear standing atop a dirt mound near one of the tents.
When a team of investigators arrived on the scene in a float-plane later that day, the men shot and killed the large and aggressive bear that rose from its food cache of human remains and approached them. As the team worked to document the scene and recover what human remains they cou
ld, they could hear bears moving around in the brush nearby. Eventually they shot and killed a second bear that approached too closely as they worked. The team left the scene as darkness began to descend, and bad weather kept them from returning for a day. When the incident team returned to the Treadwell campsite, they inspected the body of the large male bear that had been guarding the cached bodies of the two people and found human remains and clothing in the bear’s stomach. The bear was twenty-eight years old and weighed an estimated 1,000 pounds.
The board that investigated the two human deaths concluded that Treadwell had a long history of engaging in dangerous behavior while in the Katmai region, and that he had set up his campsite in a spot that would force bears to either wade in a lake or walk right next to the tent. Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Larry Van Daele was one of the investigators. He wrote that Treadwell’s “behavior around bears, his choice of a campsite, and his decision not to have any defensive methods or bear deterrents in the camp, were responsible for this catastrophic event.”
In that last piece of correspondence he’d written in the month before his death, Treadwell gave his view on the use of bear deterrents and defensive mechanisms: “People who knowingly enter bear habitat with pepper spray, guns, and electric fences are committing a crime to the animals. They begin with the accepted idea of bringing instruments of pain to the animals. If they are fearful, then they have no place in the land of this perfect animal.”
Treadwell’s philosophy led to the death of both himself and his girlfriend, and two of those bears that were so dear to him. If the couple had followed generally accepted safety precautions while in bear country, perhaps the attack and the resulting fatalities would not have happened. Instead, two human lives were lost, and two brown bears were killed as a result of the fatal attack.
GRIZZLY, BROWN, OR KODIAK?
Alaska’s brown bears, Kodiak bears, and grizzlies are all actually one species. Generally, Alaska “grizzlies” are those that live 100 miles or more inland, while coastal bears are called brown bears. Thanks to their rich diet of fish, coastal brown bears tend to be bigger than other grizzly populations. Kodiak brown bears are a different subspecies of grizzly bear that is geographically isolated on Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. Mature male bears in Katmai may weigh up to 900 pounds, while mature male grizzlies in Yellowstone may weigh up to about 700 pounds.
Rafter Assault
In July 2005, a Colorado couple was nearing the end of a ten-day rafting trip with their river guide in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge when they spotted a brown bear near the riverbank. Hoping for an opportunity to observe and photograph this majestic symbol of wild Alaska, they paddled slowly. Soon it became obvious that something was not right. There were bits of camping gear scattered on the riverbank where the bear lingered, and a few scavenger birds sat nearby. As they moved to retreat, the bear began approaching the raft, eventually chasing the raft as it traversed the shallow river for nearly forty-five minutes, according to the story relayed in the Los Angeles Times. The river guide notified authorities, and the bear was shot at the site of the wrecked campsite, where it protected its food cache. Rick and Kathy Huffman, an Anchorage couple, had been killed in their tent by the 300-pound, nine-year-old bear. They had kept a clean camp during their rafting trip, and officials could find no explanation for what had provoked the attack.
Savage Student Encounters
The National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) was founded in 1965 by climbing guru Paul Petzoldt and is headquartered in Lander, Wyoming. NOLS bills itself as a global leader in wilderness education, taking students of all ages on backcountry expeditions to teach outdoor skills, leadership, and environmental ethics. In the summer of 2011, a backcountry expedition in Alaska resulted in four NOLS students being mauled by a single adult brown bear—one of the few such incidents of multiple victims in a single mauling, and the first such attack by a bear on a NOLS excursion.
According to the NOLS report on the attacks, on July 23, 2011, seven male teenagers were hiking in Alaska’s Talkeetna Mountains, twenty-four days into a thirty-day NOLS course. This was the first day of a student-led expedition, in which students split into small groups for a three-day excursion without their instructors. The seven-member student group was two miles into its hike, and was traversing single file along a narrow creek, hiking in the shallow creekbed itself since it offered the path of least resistance through the tall brush. Practicing a bear-safety precaution, group members were calling out “hey ho” and “hey bear” as they hiked.
The student in the lead noticed a blonde-colored object off to his right as he passed by a rock outcrop. He turned to yell “bear” to the other students when he was attacked from behind, with the bear knocking him face-first into the water. His backpack remained on his back.
The next student in the line was 15 feet behind and saw the bear begin its attack. He turned and ran, but tripped and fell. He made it to the side of the creek, where he took off his pack and laid down in the bushes to hide. Three other students ran up the slope away from the creek, while two others started up the steep slope but one student turned back to the creekbed and was attacked by the bear. The bear quickly stopped its attack on the this boy, but when the student stood up, he was attacked again.
The student who had been hiding in the brush got up and was running toward the first victim when the bear attacked him. As the attacks continued, with some boys reporting being attacked more than once, a fourth student headed downstream, thinking he had escaped attack. He was wrong. The bear overcame him, and he fought back when attacked.
HOW EFFECTIVE IS BEAR SPRAY?
Tom Smith, Stephen Herrero, Terry DeBruyn and James Wilder coauthored a 2008 paper in the Journal of Wildlife Management titled “Efficacy of Bear Deterrent Spray in Alaska.” The paper examined pepper spray incidents involving three species of bears in Alaska: brown bears, black bears, and polar bears.
People were able to use bear spray to halt attacks as follows:
92 percent of the time when used on brown bears
90 percent of the time when used on black bears
100 percent of the time when used on polar bears
The paper noted that of all persons carrying pepper sprays, 98 percent were uninjured by bears in close-range encounters.
The authors concluded, “Bear spray represents an effective alternative to lethal force and should be considered as an option for personal safety for those recreating and working in bear country.”
The NOLS investigative report noted that the students who had escaped the attacks by fleeing up the slope described the bear as “startled and confused—it would attack one person then look around and chase and attack someone else it saw.” Although three of the students had bear spray, the spray was not used during the attack.
The bear fled the scene, and the students came back together to initiate emergency medical procedures on the injured students, activating an emergency location beacon to notify officials that assistance was needed. It had begun to rain, so the students set up a tent nearby to wait for assistance. The uninjured students moved the injured students into the tent, and all seven students stayed inside for the five hours before an emergency helicopter arrived. The Alaska state trooper on the scene determined that two of the students needed evacuation by medical helicopter. All of the students were evacuated from the area by helicopters.
Three of the students were hospitalized, and all recovered from their injuries. The bear involved in this mauling incident was not seen again. Wildlife officials speculated that the bear was an adult sow with a cub nearby, and that the encounter was as much as a surprise to her as it was to her victims. It has also been suggested that the bear may have been defending a food cache.
More Fatalities
The bad news continued in Alaska, with two fatalities in two months in 2012. In August of that year, Denali National Park officials announced that three days into a backcountry hiking adventure, Richard
White, forty-nine, of San Diego, California, was killed by a 600-pound male bear.
According to the National Park Service: “Three day hikers discovered an abandoned backpack and evidence of a violent struggle” along the river, and they immediately hiked back out to notify park service officials of the findings.
“Park rangers launched a helicopter and a fixed-wing aircraft from park headquarters that evening. At least one grizzly bear was still at the site, although there may have been multiple bears. The bear(s) moved away when the helicopter approached and landed. Two rangers on board the helicopter got out and confirmed the location of the victim’s remains. After a short time a bear returned to the cache site while the rangers were investigating the scene, forcing the rangers to retreat to the gravel bar. The bear then began to circle around them. Rangers fired two rifle shots at the bear, but the bear was not hit. The rangers were able to leave by helicopter as darkness was setting in.”
Alaska state troopers shot and killed the adult male brown bear that was defending the kill site along the Toklat River. The National Park Service termed the animal a “predatory bear.”
Investigators found White’s camera and reviewed the images it contained. The first photos of the bear were shot at a distance of 75 yards, and the bear had its head down in the vegetation. But the last photos showed the bear’s head was up, as the animal was looking at, and moving toward, the photographer. It is not known whether the mauling occurred within seconds, minutes, or hours after White captured the images of the bear. Evidence on the scene indicated the attack occurred near the river’s open, braided, gravel bar, and that the bear then dragged the remains to a more secluded, brushy cache site. Biologists estimated that about twelve grizzly bears had been residing in the vicinity of the kill site that summer.