For a dozen years, park rangers and bear biologists warned Timothy Treadwell that his up-close encounters with Alaskan brown bears were inexcusably dangerous.
For all of those years, Treadwell ignored the warnings, insisting that he had a special gift - that bears accepted, even welcomed, his presence in Katmai National Park.
"I love you," he chanted, as he set up a video camera inches from a bear. "I love you, I love you, I love you."
His films and books took Treadwell's encounters on the Katmai coast to a national audience and earned him appearances on the David Letterman show and Dateline NBC.
Other filmmakers followed his lead and began documenting their own up-close encounters with grizzlies in Alaska, Glacier National Park and Yellowstone. Tourists, many carrying Treadwell's "Among Grizzlies" diary, began asking guides to take them "up close" to bears.
This summer, Treadwell brought his girlfriend with him to Alaska, although she was noticeably frightened - on the video footage he sent home to southern California - by their nearness to the bears.
Again came the warnings from park rangers, game wardens and biologists. To venture so close to a wild animal puts both you and the animal at risk, they said.
Again, Treadwell waved them off, emphatic that the bears would do him no harm. And if they did, he said, he would be honored "to end up in bear scat."
Last Sunday, Treadwell talked by satellite phone with a friend back home in California, elated that he had been reunited with a female bear he called "Downey" and who had been missing at the salmon feeding grounds.
He was due back in Malibu on Tuesday. The summer's work, he said, had gone well. Winter was closing in.
When a bush pilot arrived at the camp on Monday morning, though, a big male grizzly charged the airplane, chasing the pilot back into the sky.
When he circled back, the bear was sitting on top of what appeared to be - and, in fact, was - human remains.
Treadwell was dead, as was his girlfriend, 37-year-old Amie Huguenard, having been mauled and partially eaten by bears. Soon after park rangers and Alaska state troopers arrived at the campsite, two bears were dead as well.
The ripples are just beginning to circle out from the coast.
"These are multiple tragedies," said Chris Servheen, grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the northern Rocky Mountains.
"Two people are dead, which is a tragedy, and two bears are dead, which is a tragedy," Servheen said. "And now this message has been sent all over the country that bears kill people, and that is a tragedy."
"People shouldn't see this incident as representative of the behavior of wild bears," he said. "There is a lot more to it than that. This whole incident could have been avoided; it's a tragedy all the way around."
Sterling Miller, a senior wildlife biologist for the National Wildlife Federation and a former Alaska Fish and Game bear biologist, was among those who cautioned Treadwell over the years.
"Everybody who is really knowledgeable about bears has long had concerns about Timothy Treadwell and the message he was giving to the public," said Miller, who works now in Missoula.
"Many years ago, I told him that if he were injured or killed, a lot of bears would be killed as well," he said. "But he just wouldn't hear of it. He was very naive."
In fact, Miller published a paper some years ago documenting that whenever a bear injured or killed someone in Alaska, there was a corresponding increase in bears killed "in defense of life and property."
"People get nervous," Miller said. "These kind of incidents make people edgy. They start pulling the trigger pretty quickly; they get a lot less tolerant."
Already, game wardens in Alaska are hearing the fallout, Miller said. "If Treadwell was attacked, people say, anyone could be attacked."
The drama of the maulings obscures the fact that Treadwell put himself - and the bears he so loved - in mortal danger, Servheen said. "We end up now with people who are unreasonably afraid of bears, who don't know the whole story."
And that fear works against efforts to protect and recover healthy populations of grizzly bears in the northern Rocky Mountains, he said. It has a negative effect on bears everywhere.
"We work so hard to get a good message out to people," Servheen said, "but it can be completely negated by something like this.
"And the tragedy is that two individuals are dead and it didn't have to happen."
The focus now should be on re-educating the public in appropriate ways to live and work in bear habitat - and in the inadvisability of the "up-close" approach promoted by Treadwell and others, said Chuck Bartlebaugh, director of Missoula's Center for Wildlife Information.
Bartlebaugh had been asked by Park Service officials to talk with Treadwell about his face-to-face encounters with the grizzlies, and Treadwell had agreed to stop distributing some of his closest-in footage.
But his work encouraged so many others to follow suit, Bartlebaugh said.
In a recent video for Disney Educational Productions, filmmaker Jeff Corwin climbed out of his tent and crashed through dense brush on a nighttime grizzly encounter, purportedly in Glacier National Park.
From no more than a few feet away, Corwin watched as a bear toppled a sapling and snapped off a branch, exhorting watchers to whisper, lest the bear become agitated.
Bartlebaugh recognized the bear in the film as a captive grizzly on a game farm between Kalispell and Hungry Horse, and worries that both children and adults who see the film will think it is safe to stalk and watch a bear at night in dense brush.
It is not.
Same came his concern for a British Broadcasting Co. film, "Grizzly Bears Face to Face," featuring filmmaker Jeff Turner on the coast of Alaska, standing a few feet from grizzlies as they fished for salmon.
In the film, Turner suggests that the bears are gentle creatures much like human beings.
They are not.
"Grizzly bears are wild animals," Servheen said, "and they need to be treated and respected as wild animals. We need to give them the space they need to go about their lives in the wild."
Humans cannot read a bear's mind, he said. "Bears have all these social signals they send one another about their willingness to be passive or aggressive. To think that we could be part of that is unwise at best."
"When people put themselves in a bear's space, when that space is violated, there is going to be a push back," Servheen said.
Close approaches cause nothing but trouble, said Charles Jonkel, a bear biologist and head of the Great Bear Foundation in Missoula.
Long a critic of unethical filmmaking practices, Jonkel said "up close and personal" encounters condition an animal and cause behavioral changes.
It also makes human beings "bear dumb," he said.
"It's an issue of habituation," Servheen said. "Whenever bears lose their normal avoidance behavior around people, the results are negative. You are teaching bears that they can be close to people, and that's an unwise thing to teach bears."
Sometimes, the habituation is to human food, Bartlebaugh said. "And a fed bear is always a dead bear."
Sometimes, the habituation is simply to humans and their residences, roads and movement on a landscape.
That's the kind of habituation Treadwell created on Kaflia Bay.
"Nothing good comes out of encouraging people to get close to bears," Bartlebaugh said. "We don't want bears to come close to humans, because the closer they come, the greater the potential for conflict."
It's not that bears are inherently dangerous either, Miller said. Researchers routinely work safely in the presence of bears.
But they respect the animals' needs and maintain an appropriate distance.
"Bears are wild animals and need to be treated as such and given the respect they deserve," Servheen said. "We need to let them be wild. To do anything less is disrespectful to the animals and unsafe to both humans and animals."
"A wild bear is a safe bear," he said.
Human beings, not bears, are the problem, Bartlebaugh said. In case after case, bears involved in maulings were either food-conditioned, habituated to humans, or crowded by a surprise or up-close encounter.
After all his summers in Alaska, Treadwell probably knew a great deal about bear behavior, Miller said. "But he filtered that knowledge through his own ideological prisms. He was convinced that bears are not dangerous."
"And most people recognize that bears are potentially dangerous and you need to respect them greatly," he said. "Which is not to say a bear is a savage beast who will attack you immediately or without provocation. That is not the case."
Investigators now know that Treadwell and Huguenard were attacked at night, Miller said.
Treadwell went outside the tent, and either surprised a bear or responded to a bear's intrusion on the camp. No one will ever know for sure.
He told his girlfriend to turn on the camera, and six minutes of the attack was captured on audiotape. (The lens cap was on the camera, so there was no video footage.)
Eventually, Miller said, Treadwell told his girlfriend that the bear was killing him and to hit the animal with a frying pan.
That's when Huguenard apparently left the tent, he said. Both were mauled and killed outside the tent.
The grizzly that chased the bush pilot on Monday was an animal Miller captured and marked after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
In the months after the spill, Miller and others were sent to document the contamination's effect on animals not only in Prince William Sound, but around the Alaska Peninsula.
The bears on the peninsula were not harmed, Miller said, and the animal was in good health when it attacked the filmmaker last week.
In and out of Alaska, the maulings have reignited the debate over the ethics - and danger - of Treadwell's up-close encounters, Miller said.
His supporters insist that Treadwell protected the coastal bears from poachers, a claim Miller discounted as "nonsense."
"There are no documented cases that I know of involving poaching of any kind in Katmai National Park," he said.
Jewel Palovak, program director for Grizzly People and the last person outside the park to speak with Treadwell, told the Los Angeles Times that he never encouraged others to do what he did.
"He recognized that he had a special gift or was lucky," she said. "A lot of people said he shouldn't do what he was doing, or it was crazy. But he proved them wrong for a long, long time."
This time, Servheen responded.
Getting up-close with grizzly bears is no different than driving drunk, he said. There are no lucky people. There are no "special gifts." There are only tragedies.
"The future of the grizzly bear will be built on the responsibility and ethics of the people who live, work and recreate in grizzly bear habitat," he said.
"The responsibility of the message we give people is key," Servheen said, "because the public gets information and takes that information as the truth. If the message is not responsible, the ramifications for the species are immense - for both species."
Reporter Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5268 or at sdevlin@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)