- Charlie Russell: 50 Years of Living with the Great Bears, Tuesday, April 23, doors at 6: 30 p.m., show at 7: 30 p.m., Chief Joe Mathias Centre, 100 Capilano Rd., North Vancouver. Advance tickets: $18.25/$23.75/$28.75 at ticketstonight.ca or 1-877-840-0457. Cash ticket sales at door will increase $2 per ticket.
WHEN Charlie Russell was living on the isolated Kamchatka peninsula in northeast Russia, he would start every morning with a very literal bear hug.
He rescued Sheena, a brown bear cub, from a squalid Russian zoo and, despite her traumatic first experience with humans, she grew affectionate with her adoptive guardian.
"She'd come every morning, put her paws around my shoulders and I'd hug her and put my face down along hers," says Russell.
"Then I'd jostle her and wrestle a bit and that was it. That was her start of the day, every day. She needed that."
Sheena was one of 10 brown bear cubs, either rescued from zoos or orphaned by hunters, that Russell adopted during the decade he lived in Russia's far east among the world's densest population of brown bears. For those 10 years, the Canadian naturalist and author spent winters at his family ranch on the edge of Waterton Lakes National Park in southwest Alberta. Come spring, he and his partner, artist Maureen Enns, would travel to their cabin in the Siberian wilderness where Russell continued his lifelong study of bear behaviour.
Today, the 71 year old is sharing all he learned in an effort to change the way humans manage bears. Russell challenges the widely held perception that bears are creatures to be feared and argues that humans can peacefully co-exist with bears, if we show them respect.
"Because of this idea that they have to be fearful we tend to treat them harshly with adverse conditioning," he says. "In some bears, this creates resentment. They don't basically like people."
On April 23, Russell is scheduled to speak at Chief Joe Mathias Centre in North Vancouver where he will reflect on his lifelong relationship with bears. He will share some remarkable photos and stories from his decade in Russia where he set out to explore two perceptions: 1) If bears ever stop fearing people, they will become dangerous; and 2) bears are unpredictable.
"I think that I would have died in the first month of those 10 years if (bears) had been unpredictable," he says.
Russell chuckles as he recalls another of his orphaned cubs, Sky, who he describes as "a real hellion." Her favourite activity was to zip back and forth between Russell's legs - a harmless game when she was a small cub, but Kamchatka brown bears can grow twice the size of the North American grizzly (a subspecies of brown bear). As time passed, Russell had to teach Sky to be gentle.
"So she'd come barreling at me and then slow up and then go through (my legs)," he says. "I would kind of leap frog over her by putting my hand on her back . but often I couldn't make it and I would tumble off."
Russell's interest in bears developed in the early 1960s when he accompanied his father, author and environmentalist Andy Russell, on a filmmaking tour of coastal B.C., the Yukon and Alaska. They were in search of grizzlies.
"What I saw was an animal that I thought was a peace-loving animal, even though all the stories we heard were all about ferociousness and this very dangerous animal that wanted to eat us."
Russell believes modern perceptions of bears have been perpetuated by hunting culture.
"You've got to make up the idea that they're very dangerous, very ferocious animals that need to be controlled and killed. Otherwise how could you feel good about killing the bears that I've just described?"
Russell has spearheaded bear conservation efforts, starred in PBS and BBC documentaries and authored a number of books about the Kermode spirit bears of B.C. and the brown bears of Kamchatka.
He raised his orphaned cubs to be self-sufficient adults. Even as full-grown bears, Russell says they would often seek him out to take a stroll or go fishing at the nearby lake. And every time he ran into Buck, one of his male cubs, the two would share in a special exchange.
"No matter where you met him, he'd sit down on his bum and let you walk up to him," Russell says, "then you put your hands up and he would do a high five with you with both of his big paws."
Some 400 bears lived in the valley around Russell's cabin. They would observe him interacting with his orphans and eventually, he says, the local females started to trust him with their own offspring.
"In fact, they would bring them to me and then abandon them with me to babysit," Russell says. "It was a very wonderful display of intelligent adaptability that they could trust me and get some freedom away from their cubs . and I could really rely that they would never hurt me."
Still, Russell always carried bear spray as a precaution. He had to use it just a few times when protecting his cubs from certain male bears that prey on babies. For the most part, the spray was an effective deterrent, but Russell recalls with sadness two incidents when he lost a cub. In one case, the baby was killed and eaten by a male bear in front of his very eyes. The other youngster succumbed to the same fate shortly after Russell left for the winter.
"It felt like somebody killing your child, really, it was terrible," he says.
The bears of the Canadian Rockies are more familiar with humans than their Russian relatives, and even Russell sometimes feels uneasy around the wild animals near his ranch.
"It's a big area and there's lots of grizzly bears and black bears and I feel a bit nervous because I know how these animals are treated in the management process," he says.
It has been a few years since Russell last returned to Russia, but he hopes that by sharing stories of the unlikely friendships he forged in Kamchatka, he can help people see bears in a different light.
"I'm over 70 years old now and I could study bears forever, but if I don't teach people anything then what good is it?"
