The Kolb parked on the top of a lingering snow drift while I watch the evening descend on Kambalnoye Basin.




Lemon and Lime playing while Brandy feeds. The cubs were chasing each other around me in circles during this play.

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

For some time now, I have been meaning to talk about the relationship we have with the agency, Kronotskiy Preserve, with whom we have had our arrangement to work here for the many years we have been conducting our study. Considering the up and down cycles in our association with them, it seems remarkable that they have put up with us. Our first problem arose when I caught the director of this Sanctuary poaching here in 1997 with his buddies and a huge track vehicle that crushed the pines and alders as it traveled over them. I still have to look at those scars as I fly around the area. Our bringing this to the attention of other authorities ended up in even the big boss in Kronotskiy getting the axe.

Then, after he was replaced with a much more competent person, we were at odds with the new man for his first four years because we wanted to keep our cub reintroduction program going once we had proven to ourselves that what we did with Chico, Biscuit and Rosie was successful. We might have been impressed with what we had done, but the Preserve's "Science Committee" sure were not. The scientists, as our long term readers will remember, were adamant that we were creating horribly dangerous bears and there was a time when they threatened to come here and shoot our bears to make this area safe for people again. When they talked like that you can imagine the response when we asked them for permission to bring more here. We kept up our requests for four years before finally having to give up. By then we were so fed up we wanted to go home.

But going home was a problem. Poaching had pretty much stopped in the Kambalnoye area after they began to realize I would see them and tell someone, but poaching for salmon caviar north of here in Kurilskoy Lake caldera was picking up. Many bears were poached there as well and it was obvious that as soon as we left it would be business as usual and our bears would not be rewarded for their trust in man. It was quite a quandary.

There was never the money to have a means of protecting South Kamchatka Sanctuary. We stopped hassling the Preserve and began to work with them by funding a group of rangers and all that went with making them able to curtail a well entrenched poaching tradition. Our new approach at finding a way to work with these people has worked wonders. It is amazing to watch what is happening now.

Not surprising, it has changed our relationship with the Preserve. As an example, at this time I have been grounded from flying. At first I thought it must be a poacher with influence in high places that caused this to happen, but have found out that the Department of Air Transport people have yet to create a category for my type of small aircraft. This has been a goal in Russia for as long as I have been flying here and they have been turning there back to me and letting me carry on until now. I have been aware that it was a big problem and have sort of been waiting for something like this to happen. The idea I guess is not so bad -- to put some order into various agencies. I was hopping they would get busy and do the paper work first, but no, they seemed to be going to stop every one who was fudging the rules first. There are probably hundreds of small plane builders and pilots across this huge country who have been doing what I had done, but being a foreigner I kind of stand out like a sore thumb. What I started this paragraph to say was that now we have friends in the upper bureaucracy who are working hard to solve this for us. We seem to be regarded as part of the team. What happens about my flying here remains to be seen. I will keep you posted.

There has been no sign of Chico this year either, and Maureen and I are thinking she was probably killed by a bear the evening of August 25th 2000, shortly after Maureen and I last saw her. It did not make sense at the time and it does not now, because there were so very few bears around and those who were in the area were very well fed on all the pink salmon in Char Creek at the time. Also, we never have seen any sign of her being killed. On the other hand, it seems strange she would leave then and if she did leave, that she never came back. Only lately could I accept the probability of her death. I am confident that if she is dead she was not killed by a poacher unless it was sometime after her leaving and she had explored far from here. Of course she still could be alive. No one has studied how cubs disperse.

- Charlie