Chico and Biscuit

Chico with the bear skull.

Tatiana Gordienko and Chico.

(Click on any Image to see a higher resolution version)

The weather finally cooperated and we were able to go south to Kambalnoe Lake yesterday. Last fall Maureen and I removed everything from the cabin for fear that it could be stolen during the winter. This trip I have taken the minimum amount of it back so I could get away with hiring a smaller Mi2 helicopter. It was a squeeze to pack it in and the pilot struggled a bit at take off. There were three of us: myself; Tatiana Gordienko, who is doing her PhD on our project, starting this year; and a very new ranger hired only a few days before Igor Kuleshov by the Preserve. He is recently from Moscow where he was driving a bus and lately was a bodyguard for a business man. He came to Kamchatka on speculation with no job waiting for him but got on as a ranger with Kronotsky, one of the biggest preserves in Russia. When he asked the director if they had any equipment he could take with him for the four or five months he was to spend in the wilderness; knife, axe, backpack and the like, he was told no. As for an advance on his 450 rubles a month pay,(US $16.) so he could buy some of these things himself, that too was denied. He had only 1000 rubles ($35) left over after buying a one way ticket to Kamchatka (7000 miles from home). He used these meager savings on a hotel room and had to sleep for a couple days in the street with little protection from snow and rain waiting for the weather to change and for the helicopter to take him away into the wilderness. He has never seen a brown bear in his life, has no formal training to be a ranger other than his dream to become self sufficient in the wild. When we go back to PK Igor will be dropped off at the ranger station at Kurilskoy Lake.

The plan is to stay a week to determine whether the cubs are still alive and for the Preserve the question has always been, if they are still alive, are they finally going to act like real bears and hurt or kill someone. For anyone knows, who has had the fortitude to have followed this web site from its inception, this has been an ongoing theme of the scientists from Kronotsky Preserve and probably others elsewhere. Almost everyone claims that it is just a matter of time before our once orphaned cubs will turn against us confirming once more that bears are unpredictable and can never be trusted. Especially ones who were fed by man as cubs and are now sub adults; teenage hoodlums by human standard. Since the idea first arose that something might be done for these unfortunate young bears, North America has had a law against rehabilitating orphaned brown bear cubs for the reason that it is deemed inevitable that bears who are ever fed by people are destined to demand food later in their lives and become dangerous. I believe we discovered a way to feed them without this happening and this possibility should be looked at in a scientific study to determine if it is indeed true. The confirmation that there is indeed a way would have great implications for bears. In Alaska many orphaned cubs are killed or condemned to a almost worse fate in a zoo. Last fall 18 starving grizzlies were shot at Rivers Inlet when they came into town looking for something to eat when no salmon came to the rivers to spawn. Could they have been fed corn or something to tide them over without later causing problems? I think so.

When I got out of the helicopter and looked at our cabin I knew that it had been broken into. A few of the shutters were off and the storage room/studio door had been left open. I thought it might have been the ranger who I was told skied to Kambalnoe Lake from where he is posted in the cabin at the mouth of the river. However, when I looked around I decided that a ranger would have had more respect for the place. Everything was strewn around, the linoleum was hacked by an axe as they split wood on the floor, the shutters were not put back on the door and one window, and the place was really dirty. Also a jerry can of my aircraft gas that I had hidden under the bench in Maureen's dark room had been taken. This looked more like the work of poachers with snow machines. It has always been our dread that this could happen. It is a long way from the nearest town but possible. That is why we have helped the Preserve with a anti-poaching fund the last few years and it seamed to be working.

We worked hard to get the place tidied up and everything in order, but there were few bears in sight. In fact we saw only one on a distant ridge. Igor watched it intently with my spotting scope. I did not sleep well that night due to the combination of a strong wind and thinking about the fate of our bears. They would definitely be easy picking if they had been out of their den with poachers staying here. There was one clue to their possible well being, however. Outside the cabin on a bit of tundra there was some fresh digging of roots and a bear track in the mud by the old cub house. Last year I had seen the same thing done by the cubs after the snow melted. The piece of tundra would have only been melted out of the snow for about week and the cabin had been stayed in perhaps a month previous. I hung onto the implications of those signs and finally fell asleep.

By morning the wind had dropped and the sun came out strong with no clouds to get in the way. The three of us ate breakfast and headed out along the lake towards Itelmen Bay to the east where I knew Chico and Biscuit had hung out this time the previous year. There are early grasses on a slope which catches the spring sun at a good angle and melts the snow before most other places. The lake is still frozen and we could travel on the ice if one watches the dark spots which indicates rotten patches. I was a bit glum as I watched the shore for signs of bear carcasses. We rounded the corner to where I could see up the valley off the end of the bay. I watched a raven settle on the snow and start to pick at something that looked as though it could have been a bone. Up the slope from the raven, about 400 meters from us, I spotted something move in the thick alders and by looking carefully I could make out a bear and just above it I spotted another. It took awhile for them to move a few feet to where I could see more than their vague shape but when they did I could determine that they were both quite light colored and one was darker than the other. I was now sure that it was our bears.

They came out of the bush and then spotted us out on the lake because we were grouped together closely and probably looked like one big animal. They started to run up the mountain so I cupped my hands and called as loud as I could, the same call that Maureen and I had always used to tell them that it was us and not their dreaded enemy who kept trying to catch them when they were younger. What we called was "hey little bears." It seemed silly to say it, now that they were so big, but it worked. They stopped running and Chico sat down. I called again and they started to come down the mountain. On the way, Chico stopped at a bush and stood up to rub her back on it and when they continued they disturbed the raven. My two companions lagged behind me, not quite being up to striding towards two grizzly bears, especially the first one you had ever seen except on a distant mountain. Tatiana has of course seen many bears but not our bears since they were tiny balls of fur.

The bears and I met at the bones. It was a skull, a couple other bones and a bit of hair, looking suspiciously like the remains of a poached bear. Maureen and I have only found two sculls in the four seasons that we have been here so to find one so soon was looking like my suspicions were correct. Right now, however, the important thing was that Chico and Biscuit had survived. We said hello. It was amazing to see how they had grown. Chico is especially fat and healthy looking, Biscuit a bit thinner. Chico came right to me and let me run my hand down the full length of her back. It has been seven and a half months since we said good bye. She lay down and picked at small bit of dried meat on the scull. Biscuit sniffed at my tracks, then rolled on some pieces of fur that were on the snow.

I signaled for Tatiana and Igor to come which they tentatively did. The bears checked out the two strangers and I was again amazed how quickly people understand by the bears reaction to them that everything is OK.

We all walked along the lake shore towards the cabin. There were some salmon that spawned and died late in the fall and were now melting out of the ice and the bears found them. This they have done since they were yearlings. It is not a big number but enough to make it worth while to patrol the lake once every couple of days until the ice is gone. The consequences of falling through the ice was much less severe for bears who have sharp claws and powerful shoulders to pull themselves back onto strong ice so we had to split up. Back at the cabin we watched as the bears continued around the lake and finally disappeared into the bay where we had found them. Now, as I think back and wonder about the possible events of the time that has passed since we were here, I was feeling like maybe there were no poachers this spring. The scull was of quite an old female bear and she could have died in her den and been dug out by a bear this spring. The rangers could have been the ones who stayed here and just were not careful. The lack of bears could be that everyone went to the east coast to dine on fresh grasses there because of the early spring. We have seen that happen once before. When I come back latter with my aircraft, I will talk to the rangers and decide from what they tell me, what went on. Maybe they were here with a snow machine.

- Charlie