Bear Killings in Russia | Outside Online

Outside Magazine December 2004

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A Message In Blood (Cont.)


	Memento mori: a Kronotsky Reserve biologist measures 30 years of Kamchatkan brown bear skulls, many of them poached (Gueorgui Pinkhassov)

THAT'S HOW WILDLIFE RESEARCHER Charlie Russell imagined it, anyway. But all he really knew was this: In a well-orchestrated operation that amounted to mass murder in the wild, as many as 20 Kamchatkan brown bears—or grizzlies, as the species Ursus arctos is known in North America—were shot in the area around his cabin on Kambalnoye Lake, in the 500,000-acre South Kamchatka Sanctuary, a state-run preserve that is home to the densest population of brown bears on the planet. Among the victims were several subjects of his groundbreaking and controversial research, a group of bears that had been studied as closely as the Rwandan mountain gorillas made famous by the late Dian Fossey.

Russell, now 63, discovered the massacre in May 2003. He returned to the lake, as he did every spring after spending the winter back home, north of Calgary, Alberta, to find one of the cabin windows pried open. Inside, hanging on the wall, was a small sack of lifeless, twisted flesh, as dark as burnt coffee. It was the gall bladder of an adult grizzly.

"At first I couldn't even look at it," Russell recalled. "I tried to pretend it wasn't there, that it wasn't real, that it couldn't be what I knew it had to be."

Dried and sold as an aphrodisiac and cure-all in Asia, Russia, and North America, bear gall has long been treasure for poachers. At the height of the black market, a few years back, 100 grams could fetch $3,000. (A dried gall bladder weighs roughly 60 grams.) But by 2003 the market was glutted, and the price had fallen to a dollar or

"Were we naive about the way things work over here? You bet we were," Russell said. "But the usual scientific question, the hit that we fed the bears and raised them to be killed—that's one I won't accept."

two a gram. To Russell, the economics did not add up; the slaughter didn't seem worth the poachers' efforts.

Other than a few bits of hide and hair in the snow, there were no signs. Then, slowly, clues began to surface: Two garbage bags full of empty food tins turned up hidden in the pines behind the cabin, then a bag of spent shotgun shells, which had been loaded with lead slugs. Finally, as the snow melted, heavy boot prints emerged, stamped into the previous season's first snowfall. Over the course of a few days, Russell surmised, a small group of men had used the cabin as a base. The bears had probably been easy to pick off as they made their last prehibernation fishing forays down to the lake.

Russell felt excruciating responsibility for the bears' demise. A filmmaker, rancher, and self-taught grizzly expert, he had first come to Kamchatka in 1994, with his personal and professional partner, Canadian artist and wildlife photographer Maureen Enns. They shared an audacious idea: Both believed that grizzlies were not innately dangerous and unpredictable; it was our fear, not their aggression, that was the problem. They set out to live among bears but, in time, ended up going further: The couple decided to raise three grizzly cubs in the wild—cubs that had been orphaned by poachers. They would teach them to live on their own, proving that bears could form long-term, trusting bonds with people.



	Kamchatka's rough-and-tumble capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (Gueorgui Pinkhassov)

From the start, Russell's plan stirred debate among bear experts. He was not a biologist—he gained his years of experience with grizzlies by shooting wildlife films in Canada—and to scientists, his methods had always seemed naive. They admired Russell's innate ease with bears, but many called him dangerous.

"He's not highly respected, even if he is liked," said Charles Jonkel, 74, a biologist who runs Missoula, Montana's Great Bear Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving bear habitat. "What Charlie does is not science. He knows that. It's got value, though. Over the years he's taught even the most diehard so-called experts to take another look at how we think about bears."

While a few North American programs aim to reintroduce black bears to the wild, no one has tried to do it with grizzlies. "It's problematic from a number of points," said Larry Aumiller, 60, director of Alaska's McNeil River State Sanctuary, home to the state's largest concentration of grizzlies. "First, how do you get the cubs? How do you raise them? These things are all fraught with problems. Then there's the question of why you would spend the energy and money on only three or four bears when you could focus those resources on a much wider population."

Russell didn't just take on the scientists. Over the years, as he became dismayed by rampant poaching in the South Kamchatka Sanctuary, his idealism evolved into activism. Stymied by official channels, he'd recruited and financed a small, well-armed force of rangers at the sanctuary's Kurilskoye Lake, a prodigious breeding ground for wild salmon—and thus a very attractive spot to bears. What had started as a personal experiment became a civic crusade, and it was this turn that likely led to the bears' deaths. Russell knew the rules of Kamchatka. He knew how corrupt its officials were, how venal the bosses who controlled its hunting territories—and how lethal their union could be for his bears.

"Our bears were murdered in cold blood," Russell said, home in Alberta for the bleak winter of 2003–04. There was no drama in his voice—just sadness, infinite and lonely. He knew how the grizzlies had been killed. It was the why that ruined his sleep. "The usual scientific question," Russell said, "the hit that we fed the bears and therefore raised them to be killed—that's one I won't accept. But were we naive about the way things work over there? You bet we were."

In the months following the discovery of the massacre, the crime remained shrouded in mystery. There wasn't even an official investigation. Names were whispered, of bosses angered by Russell's success, including the man who controlled nearly everything on Kamchatka. His name was uttered without introduction, like Bush or Putin: Kovalenkov. But there was no evidence. And in a region suffering from an interminable Soviet hangover, the deaths of a few bears didn't rank high on anyone's list of woes.

Half a world away, Russell was reeling from other blows. In October 2003, his friend Timothy Treadwell, 46, a controversial bear watcher from California who filmed the animals at close range, and Treadwell's girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, 37, were killed by a grizzly in Alaska's Katmai National Park. In December, another colleague, 60-year-old Vitaly Nikolaenko, a Russian photographer who'd lived among the bears of Kamchatka's giant Kronotsky Biosphere Nature Reserve since 1968, was killed by a rogue male.

Russell and Nikolaenko had been respectful rivals. He was closer to Treadwell, whom he and others had often warned about being too reckless among grizzlies. Treadwell, for example, refused to use pepper spray against aggressive males, a risk Russell deemed suicidal. "Charlie's out there," said Aumiller, "but he's not exactly in the Tim Treadwell tradition." Both men pushed the limits of human-bear contact, but Russell had always taken precautions—electric fences circling camp, pepper spray as a last resort—around problem bears.

Russell didn't like to think of himself as a sole survivor, pressing on, but he couldn't let go. So in May 2004, just as the Kamchatka bears were emerging from their dens, he decided to go back. He didn't expect to unravel the mystery. His aim was more modest: to pick up the pieces, to find some way to start again.

Enns, however, would not accompany him. "After our bears were killed, that was it," Russell said. She wanted no more of Kamchatka, and she decided to end her relationship with Russell as well. "My work on Kamchatkan bears continues," Enns said. "I'm doing a book about what I learned there. But I don't feel ready to go back."

"She needed to move on," Russell would tell friends in Kamchatka. "And I cannot. I cannot give up on this place, these bears. I will not give in, no matter what happens."

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