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Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka
An absorbing first-hand account of living with bears, from the acclaimed author of The Spirit Bear. To many people, grizzlies are symbols of power and ferocity -- creatures to be feared and, too often, killed. But Charlie Russell, who has had a forty-year relationship with bears, holds the controversial belief that it is possible to live with and truly understand bears in the wild. And for five years now, Russell and his partner, artist and photographer Maureen Enns, have spent summers on the Kamchatka peninsula, located on the northeast coast of Russia, and home of the densest population of brown bears in the world. Grizzly Heart tells the remarkable story of how Russell and Enns have defied the preconceptions of wildlife officials and the general public by living unthreatened -- and respected -- among the grizzlies of Kamchatka. In an honest and immediate style, Russell tells of the trials and successes of their years in the field, from convincing Russian officials to allow them to study, to adopting three bear cubs left orphaned when their mother was killed by a hunter (and teaching these cubs how to survive in the wild), to raising environmental awareness through art. Through a combination of careful study and personal dedication, Russell and Enns are persuading people to reconsider the age-old image of the grizzly bear as a ferocious man-eater and perpetual threat. Through their actions, they demonstrate that it is possible to forge a mutually respectful relationship with these majestic giants, and provide compelling reasons for altering our culture.
- GenresNonfictionNatureAnimals
357 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
April 6, 2023
5 shining stars - such a wonderful book with amazing stories, great information about bears and strong determination we can coexist with bears without fear! I love love love this book and the main message ❤️
May 1, 2023
Extremely well written book about the importance of harmonious interaction between humans and bears. Thought provoking and very entertaining story of raising 3 orphaned bear cubs to be respectful and friendly while becoming independent. Recommend highly to anyone interested in wildlife.
February 14, 2017
I purchased this book from a local thrift store because the premise of the book seemed interesting at the time. However, after reading the first chapter, I decided to DNF this book because I found it incredibly offensive.
Charlie Russell is a Canadian “naturalist” who has worked primarily as a advanture tour guide. As a guide, his job is to bring people without much backcountry experience into the wilderness and to show them wildlife in its natural environment. He himself has a fixation on bears, grizzlies in particular.
In the first chapter of the book, Russell describes how he comes to the realization that bears are hugely misunderstood by people. This I can agree with. Then he starts talking about all the experiences he has had being up-close physically and interacting with the bears (Grizzly and black). He prides himself as a person who is redefining human-bear relationships.
I find he practices incredibly troubling. To me, Russell exploits the natural curiosity animals possess instinctively by imposing himself (and his tourist clients) in the lives of wild animals. I think it is also very irresponsible of him to let people, who might not be as knowledgeable, believe that his practices are the way to interact with wildlife. Russell describes, at one instance, he and others had to restrain a female client from jumping off the boat to hug a grizzly bear. I couldn’t help but cringe when I read it. Although in his writing, his words show discouragement for this woman’s behaviour, his tone has an unmistakable pride in it. I believe Russell prides himself for being able to elicit such a primitive reaction out of someone.
I think Charlie Russell’s approach to establishing close interactions with wildlife is disrespectful of the nature and incredibly selfish. In my opinion, Russell abuses the innocence and curiosity wild animals have to bring himself fame and financial gain.
The rest of the book is supposedly about Russell’s involvement in living with three orphaned grizzly bear cubs for ten years in Russia. I couldn’t bring myself to read it.
I would say two good things came out of the experience of reading the first chapter of this book: 1. It solidifies my own belief in wildlife treatment, and 2. There is an absolutely stunning photograph of the Kambalnoye Volcano in the book.
Anyone who is interested to know the truly respectful way (and the only way in my opinion) of interacting with wild animals should read The Pipestone Wolves: The Rise and Fall of a Wolf Family by Gunther Bloch. In this book, Bloch speaks very harshly of the tourists, the photographers and even the park services’s inappropriate behaviours/actions towards wolves in Banff Natioanl Park. Bloch describes how those seemingly inconsequential interactions create huge stress and disturbance to the animals. He came to that conclusion by tirelessly observing the wolf family from a distance for years. I wonder what Bloch would say to Russell’s practices.
I cannot bring myself to discard the book in a trash can because of my love for books. This book will be donated back to the thrift store with a note in it, cautioning the next reader not to be so blinded by that warm and fuzzy feeling he or she might get from looking at those cute bear cub photographs.
Charlie Russell is a Canadian “naturalist” who has worked primarily as a advanture tour guide. As a guide, his job is to bring people without much backcountry experience into the wilderness and to show them wildlife in its natural environment. He himself has a fixation on bears, grizzlies in particular.
In the first chapter of the book, Russell describes how he comes to the realization that bears are hugely misunderstood by people. This I can agree with. Then he starts talking about all the experiences he has had being up-close physically and interacting with the bears (Grizzly and black). He prides himself as a person who is redefining human-bear relationships.
I find he practices incredibly troubling. To me, Russell exploits the natural curiosity animals possess instinctively by imposing himself (and his tourist clients) in the lives of wild animals. I think it is also very irresponsible of him to let people, who might not be as knowledgeable, believe that his practices are the way to interact with wildlife. Russell describes, at one instance, he and others had to restrain a female client from jumping off the boat to hug a grizzly bear. I couldn’t help but cringe when I read it. Although in his writing, his words show discouragement for this woman’s behaviour, his tone has an unmistakable pride in it. I believe Russell prides himself for being able to elicit such a primitive reaction out of someone.
I think Charlie Russell’s approach to establishing close interactions with wildlife is disrespectful of the nature and incredibly selfish. In my opinion, Russell abuses the innocence and curiosity wild animals have to bring himself fame and financial gain.
The rest of the book is supposedly about Russell’s involvement in living with three orphaned grizzly bear cubs for ten years in Russia. I couldn’t bring myself to read it.
I would say two good things came out of the experience of reading the first chapter of this book: 1. It solidifies my own belief in wildlife treatment, and 2. There is an absolutely stunning photograph of the Kambalnoye Volcano in the book.
Anyone who is interested to know the truly respectful way (and the only way in my opinion) of interacting with wild animals should read The Pipestone Wolves: The Rise and Fall of a Wolf Family by Gunther Bloch. In this book, Bloch speaks very harshly of the tourists, the photographers and even the park services’s inappropriate behaviours/actions towards wolves in Banff Natioanl Park. Bloch describes how those seemingly inconsequential interactions create huge stress and disturbance to the animals. He came to that conclusion by tirelessly observing the wolf family from a distance for years. I wonder what Bloch would say to Russell’s practices.
I cannot bring myself to discard the book in a trash can because of my love for books. This book will be donated back to the thrift store with a note in it, cautioning the next reader not to be so blinded by that warm and fuzzy feeling he or she might get from looking at those cute bear cub photographs.
July 25, 2011
The author(s) sentimentality wasn't really my thing, but he definitely made me rethink a thing or two. The book is well written and very interesting and I'd definitely recommend it. His ideas about electric fences make lots of sense.
November 10, 2010
Brilliant, this was one of the most amazing books I have ever read, I couldn't put it down. I've ordered the book so that I can have my very own copy.
September 6, 2017
January 21, 2017
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
Challenging the official mindset about grizzly bears is not for the faint of heart. But the fate of grizzly bears, also known as brown bears, may be changing for the better as the undeniable facts of this extraordinary story gain credence.
Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, a Canadian naturalist and his artist partner decide to act on their conviction: “…that the problems between people and bears are not rooted inside bears.” That, “…bears treated with kindness will respond in kind.” That “…bears would not be dangerous to people without cause; that it was possible, given appropriate manners, given the following of a few fundamental rules, to live so that bears would never harm you.”
Wildlife managers around the world during the years of Russell and Enns’ project covered in this book--1996 to 2000--assumed that public policy required keeping people and bears afraid of each other, i.e., “…that mutual fear was the only sensible relationship between humans and bears.” In late 2016, as I write this review, the two Canadians’ idea of peaceful co-existence is finally taking hold—although not without the usual holdouts.
Developing the protocols to support their hypothesis of peaceful co-existence with grizzly bears sends Russell and Enns to one of the wildest places in the world in terms of people, bears and political instability: Russia. The Canadians entered Russia at a time of huge upheaval, as the old Soviet Union melted down.
Russia was, however, “…a country with more brown bears than the rest of the world’s countries combined.” Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, the “Land of Fire and Ice” where the project begins in 1996 is “a place with many brown bears; a place where no people lived; a place where there had been little or no human interference.”
Russell writes, “If brown bears really were the unpredictable, dangerous beasts people assumed they were, Maureen and I wouldn’t have survived a week at Kambalnoye, let alone years.
Until Perestroika, only scientists had been allowed to work in this area. The Canadians were not scientists, but their project offered economic opportunity at a time when “The Russian government had stopped paying its employees, including many of our Russian friends. The power was off more than it was on…”
Russian bear biologist Igor Revenko, the Canadians’ highly entrepreneurial guide, fixer and friend—is the first to understand and support their project’s potential. Igor obtains permission for them to operate within his own research territory: the bear-rich, roadless, earthquake-prone, cyclone-prone and volcanic wilderness area deep within the South Kamchatka Sanctuary of the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Mindful of the prevailing scientific prejudices about grizzly bears in Russia as in the West, Igor portrays the project goals in a very limited fashion to the Russian officials who must approve it: “…to record bear behavior in film and video.” To this end, Russell’s gear is allowed to include a personal ultra-light plane that he had built and taught himself to fly while filming wildlife in Canada.
Surrounded by grizzly bears, so many that “It was common to see fifty of them in four hours of hiking” -- the Canadians build a cabin at Kambalnoye Lake, 120 miles from the nearest road, 20 miles from the nearest occasionally-human outpost, the Salmon Research Station at Kurilskoy Lake.
Russell and Enns are quite unaware of Igor’s deliberate omissions, although “In the chaos that was 1990s Russia, it was almost certain there were some who did not know about us and were being kept in the dark deliberately.” Others expected either the Ultra-light or the bears to bring a quick end to any questionable features of the project.
Instead, the project is expanded to include the raising of orphan grizzly cubs. This brings on increasingly Kafkaesque interactions with the Russian scientific establishment, and eventually attracts the attention of the military. Even Igor’s equivocal translations fail to satisfy the concerns of the project’s opposition.
Raising grizzly bear cubs in the wild was against the law in Canada or the USA, because: “The thinking is that you can not rehabilitate a brown bear cub without feeding it, and that you can’t feed a brown bear without making it dangerous to humans. The only person in the world who had been legally rehabilitating brown bears was Dr. Valentin Pazhetnov in western Russia.” Pazhetnov never meets with the Canadians and tries to undermine the Canadians’ project from a distance.
Merely by surviving their first season of building a cabin, living and hiking among this dense population of grizzly bears, however, Russell and Enns have in essence already “come up with a diplomatic protocol and some simple procedures that other people could easily and reliably follow when living around bears.”
Adding the cubs to the project would further demonstrate “that humans and brown bears can interact safely, given observance of certain rules of etiquette by the humans.” Moreover, “The orphan bear plan would yield results quickly. We couldn’t guarantee what those result would be, but we could guarantee the speed of them.”
Thus three small grizzly cubs are awaiting adoption out of their small and dirty zoo in Yelizovo when the Canadians return for year two of the project, the spring of 1997. In expectation of raising the cubs, the Canadians have shipped 1500 pounds of sunflower seeds to Russia along with the rest of the season’s gear.
Arriving in Russia with their seriously expanded cargo, Russell and Enns are aghast at the news that the Russian Science Committee now forbids them to go forward. Bad publicity surrounding the prior year’s death of world-famous bear photographer Michio Hoshino has un-nerved the Committee.
Hoshino was killed by a rogue grizzly bear at the Salmon Research Station 20 miles from Russell and Enns’ cabin—an incident which Russell describes with intimate knowledge as preventable, having shared a tent with Hoshino several days before his death.
Fortunately, the Canadians have adopted some of their Russian friends’ attitudes. They have “learned not to be panicked by every categorical statement we heard in Russia.” They don’t blink at their friends’ “seeming nonchalance when faced with loaded weapons.”
With a wink from the cubs’ zookeeper, they kidnap the three orphan bear cubs. Once these six-pound foundlings grew to an “unmanageable” size they would have been killed or sold to a “gall farm” for the slowest and ugliest of deaths.
Rosie, Chico and Biscuit are the three cubs whose behavior within this project may change everything for wild grizzlies. If the cubs are allowed to live, they still must speed-learn the survival skills that would take two or three years for a mother grizzly to teach them as she also protects them.
At this point the reader is not even 40% of the way through this 357 page book and can’t wait to learn which of the characters now dueling over the cubs’ survival will win.
On the positive side, and in addition to the irrepressible Igor, there is Tatiana Gordienko, the official who first realizes the full extent of the Canadian’s disobedience—and supports it. She pre-empts the opposition with a TV special featuring the cubs.
On the negative side, the actions of excruciatingly inept and loutish bear expert Vitaly Nikolaenko compete for evil intentions with the corruption of Valery Golovin, the official Director of the South Kamchatka Sanctuary—which includes the project site at Kambalnoye Lake.
Golovin is participating in a military-scale poaching party when Russell happens by in the Ultra-light. Horrified, he picks up Igor for a second look. Igor’s resulting film becomes evidence in a court case regarding official corruption and results in dismissal of Golovin and his boss, Sergei Alexeev. As you can guess, repercussions will follow.
The jealous Vitaly is embedded in Russell and Enns’ cabin as punishment for their original cub-napping. Vitaly is assigned not only to monitor the project but to decide whether it can continue into what would be the cubs’ second year, assuming that he and Russell find them alive after their first hibernation.
As you have guessed, the cubs do survive, and now they—and Russell--must survive Vitaly’s demands. For “Vitaly was counting on the bears becoming aggressive if their food was withheld. Then he would have something negative to report about them…” The ‘something negative’ might literally destroy his perceived competitor in bear research—Russell—and give Vitaly the visibility he craves.
Reunited with the cubs, Russell is convinced that they should be fed. Supplemental feeding would give them more energy to elude the male grizzly now stalking them—he has already eaten a wild cub. Vitaly is against any kind of supplemental feeding. On the other hand, there was a high risk of the cubs “becoming demanding and impatient while I was getting the food out.” So Vitaly relents, and Russell is allowed to ski out to the cubs with food in a backpack—the equivalent of hand-feeding, not a recommended human/bear etiquette.
The cubs are polite. They remain polite when Vitaly demands that this early supplemental feeding stop two weeks after it began. Two months later, in early August of 1998, Russell initiates a round of pre-hibernation supplemental feeding. He stops this on September 1st, to test the consensus of experts, that “our bears were well overdue for becoming dangerous and this action was supposed to guarantee the aggression.”
The cubs remain polite: “In their perception, it was as though a berry crop had dried up. Time to move on to something new. Their behavior towards us did not change in any way.”
Vitaly Nikolayenko was found dead of a bear mauling in early 2004, two years after Grizzly Heart was published. Two months earlier, in late fall, a 28-year old grizzly bear had killed Timothy Treadwell in Alaska. ,The circumstances of both deaths, both widely reported in the media, suggest that neither man had followed the six simple rules of ‘bear etiquette’ summarized by Russell and Enns at the end of this book.
The statistics regarding grizzly bear killings of humans—and vice versa—support Russell and Enns’ approach. The prize-winning documentary which updates Russell and Enns’ project in 2007 begins with this comparison: “In the past 100 years 91 humans have been killed by grizzly bears …but…200,000 grizzly bears have been killed by man.
In the four years of grizzly/human interactions covered by this diary-style book, Rosie, Chico and Biscuit and the cubs which follow them as the project continues never exhibit the vicious behaviors which Vitaly attempts to push them into, which he tempts by his own acts, and which others expect. Russell summarizes:
“In terms of our project, not only did the feeding program give us live bears to study, it provided very important proof that bears can be fed, in a carefully controlled way, without making them dangerous. If you took away everything else that we had learned and threw it away, that one point was enough to justify a change in how to deal with natural food shortages among wild bears.
These changes are already occurring: Roadkill is now helipcoptered up to grizzly bears as they emerge from hibernation in parts of Canada and Montana in order to preclude the bears from becoming roadkill themselves as they leave their dens in the mountains to forage in the foothills near highways and developed areas.
Even if one has never been interested in grizzly bears, Russia or the co-existence questions raised by Russell and Enns, this book is a page-turner. It is written in the form of diary entries from either Russell or Enns, depending upon which one is most involved in the action. Writing this review took extra long because in the midst of fact-checking, I kept pausing to re-read long portions--it is that engaging.
Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka, by Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, 2002, is now available via Amazon Kindle at $19.99. Used hardcover and paperback editions are also offered by third-party sellers on Amazon.
To learn more about Charlie Russell and his current outreach on behalf of grizzly bears, readers can go to his website, “charlierussellbears.com”. He will be speaking in Calgary in March 2017, in Grande Prairie, Alberta on April 22 at the Swan Festival; and in Faro, Yukon on May 5, 2017.
To view the documentary featuring Charlie Russell and the grizzlies in Russia, look for “The Edge of Eden: Living with Grizzlies” filmed and narrated by Jeff Turner. It more than deserves the awards accorded to it in 2007, and may change forever the way you view grizzly bears. As of this writing, it has been made available online via Culture Unplugged Studios (cultureunplugged.com) via this link:
“http://www.cultureunplugged.com/docum...”
To take immediate action on behalf of grizzly bears, check out The Vital Ground Foundation (vitalground.org), which seeks out the right places to enable grizzlies’ safe passage among the protected, private and developed areas of the their remaining habitat in the western USA. Vital Ground’s mission of connecting grizzly habitats includes grants to organizations which implement methods of co-existence with grizzly bears.
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
Challenging the official mindset about grizzly bears is not for the faint of heart. But the fate of grizzly bears, also known as brown bears, may be changing for the better as the undeniable facts of this extraordinary story gain credence.
Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, a Canadian naturalist and his artist partner decide to act on their conviction: “…that the problems between people and bears are not rooted inside bears.” That, “…bears treated with kindness will respond in kind.” That “…bears would not be dangerous to people without cause; that it was possible, given appropriate manners, given the following of a few fundamental rules, to live so that bears would never harm you.”
Wildlife managers around the world during the years of Russell and Enns’ project covered in this book--1996 to 2000--assumed that public policy required keeping people and bears afraid of each other, i.e., “…that mutual fear was the only sensible relationship between humans and bears.” In late 2016, as I write this review, the two Canadians’ idea of peaceful co-existence is finally taking hold—although not without the usual holdouts.
Developing the protocols to support their hypothesis of peaceful co-existence with grizzly bears sends Russell and Enns to one of the wildest places in the world in terms of people, bears and political instability: Russia. The Canadians entered Russia at a time of huge upheaval, as the old Soviet Union melted down.
Russia was, however, “…a country with more brown bears than the rest of the world’s countries combined.” Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, the “Land of Fire and Ice” where the project begins in 1996 is “a place with many brown bears; a place where no people lived; a place where there had been little or no human interference.”
Russell writes, “If brown bears really were the unpredictable, dangerous beasts people assumed they were, Maureen and I wouldn’t have survived a week at Kambalnoye, let alone years.
Until Perestroika, only scientists had been allowed to work in this area. The Canadians were not scientists, but their project offered economic opportunity at a time when “The Russian government had stopped paying its employees, including many of our Russian friends. The power was off more than it was on…”
Russian bear biologist Igor Revenko, the Canadians’ highly entrepreneurial guide, fixer and friend—is the first to understand and support their project’s potential. Igor obtains permission for them to operate within his own research territory: the bear-rich, roadless, earthquake-prone, cyclone-prone and volcanic wilderness area deep within the South Kamchatka Sanctuary of the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Mindful of the prevailing scientific prejudices about grizzly bears in Russia as in the West, Igor portrays the project goals in a very limited fashion to the Russian officials who must approve it: “…to record bear behavior in film and video.” To this end, Russell’s gear is allowed to include a personal ultra-light plane that he had built and taught himself to fly while filming wildlife in Canada.
Surrounded by grizzly bears, so many that “It was common to see fifty of them in four hours of hiking” -- the Canadians build a cabin at Kambalnoye Lake, 120 miles from the nearest road, 20 miles from the nearest occasionally-human outpost, the Salmon Research Station at Kurilskoy Lake.
Russell and Enns are quite unaware of Igor’s deliberate omissions, although “In the chaos that was 1990s Russia, it was almost certain there were some who did not know about us and were being kept in the dark deliberately.” Others expected either the Ultra-light or the bears to bring a quick end to any questionable features of the project.
Instead, the project is expanded to include the raising of orphan grizzly cubs. This brings on increasingly Kafkaesque interactions with the Russian scientific establishment, and eventually attracts the attention of the military. Even Igor’s equivocal translations fail to satisfy the concerns of the project’s opposition.
Raising grizzly bear cubs in the wild was against the law in Canada or the USA, because: “The thinking is that you can not rehabilitate a brown bear cub without feeding it, and that you can’t feed a brown bear without making it dangerous to humans. The only person in the world who had been legally rehabilitating brown bears was Dr. Valentin Pazhetnov in western Russia.” Pazhetnov never meets with the Canadians and tries to undermine the Canadians’ project from a distance.
Merely by surviving their first season of building a cabin, living and hiking among this dense population of grizzly bears, however, Russell and Enns have in essence already “come up with a diplomatic protocol and some simple procedures that other people could easily and reliably follow when living around bears.”
Adding the cubs to the project would further demonstrate “that humans and brown bears can interact safely, given observance of certain rules of etiquette by the humans.” Moreover, “The orphan bear plan would yield results quickly. We couldn’t guarantee what those result would be, but we could guarantee the speed of them.”
Thus three small grizzly cubs are awaiting adoption out of their small and dirty zoo in Yelizovo when the Canadians return for year two of the project, the spring of 1997. In expectation of raising the cubs, the Canadians have shipped 1500 pounds of sunflower seeds to Russia along with the rest of the season’s gear.
Arriving in Russia with their seriously expanded cargo, Russell and Enns are aghast at the news that the Russian Science Committee now forbids them to go forward. Bad publicity surrounding the prior year’s death of world-famous bear photographer Michio Hoshino has un-nerved the Committee.
Hoshino was killed by a rogue grizzly bear at the Salmon Research Station 20 miles from Russell and Enns’ cabin—an incident which Russell describes with intimate knowledge as preventable, having shared a tent with Hoshino several days before his death.
Fortunately, the Canadians have adopted some of their Russian friends’ attitudes. They have “learned not to be panicked by every categorical statement we heard in Russia.” They don’t blink at their friends’ “seeming nonchalance when faced with loaded weapons.”
With a wink from the cubs’ zookeeper, they kidnap the three orphan bear cubs. Once these six-pound foundlings grew to an “unmanageable” size they would have been killed or sold to a “gall farm” for the slowest and ugliest of deaths.
Rosie, Chico and Biscuit are the three cubs whose behavior within this project may change everything for wild grizzlies. If the cubs are allowed to live, they still must speed-learn the survival skills that would take two or three years for a mother grizzly to teach them as she also protects them.
At this point the reader is not even 40% of the way through this 357 page book and can’t wait to learn which of the characters now dueling over the cubs’ survival will win.
On the positive side, and in addition to the irrepressible Igor, there is Tatiana Gordienko, the official who first realizes the full extent of the Canadian’s disobedience—and supports it. She pre-empts the opposition with a TV special featuring the cubs.
On the negative side, the actions of excruciatingly inept and loutish bear expert Vitaly Nikolaenko compete for evil intentions with the corruption of Valery Golovin, the official Director of the South Kamchatka Sanctuary—which includes the project site at Kambalnoye Lake.
Golovin is participating in a military-scale poaching party when Russell happens by in the Ultra-light. Horrified, he picks up Igor for a second look. Igor’s resulting film becomes evidence in a court case regarding official corruption and results in dismissal of Golovin and his boss, Sergei Alexeev. As you can guess, repercussions will follow.
The jealous Vitaly is embedded in Russell and Enns’ cabin as punishment for their original cub-napping. Vitaly is assigned not only to monitor the project but to decide whether it can continue into what would be the cubs’ second year, assuming that he and Russell find them alive after their first hibernation.
As you have guessed, the cubs do survive, and now they—and Russell--must survive Vitaly’s demands. For “Vitaly was counting on the bears becoming aggressive if their food was withheld. Then he would have something negative to report about them…” The ‘something negative’ might literally destroy his perceived competitor in bear research—Russell—and give Vitaly the visibility he craves.
Reunited with the cubs, Russell is convinced that they should be fed. Supplemental feeding would give them more energy to elude the male grizzly now stalking them—he has already eaten a wild cub. Vitaly is against any kind of supplemental feeding. On the other hand, there was a high risk of the cubs “becoming demanding and impatient while I was getting the food out.” So Vitaly relents, and Russell is allowed to ski out to the cubs with food in a backpack—the equivalent of hand-feeding, not a recommended human/bear etiquette.
The cubs are polite. They remain polite when Vitaly demands that this early supplemental feeding stop two weeks after it began. Two months later, in early August of 1998, Russell initiates a round of pre-hibernation supplemental feeding. He stops this on September 1st, to test the consensus of experts, that “our bears were well overdue for becoming dangerous and this action was supposed to guarantee the aggression.”
The cubs remain polite: “In their perception, it was as though a berry crop had dried up. Time to move on to something new. Their behavior towards us did not change in any way.”
Vitaly Nikolayenko was found dead of a bear mauling in early 2004, two years after Grizzly Heart was published. Two months earlier, in late fall, a 28-year old grizzly bear had killed Timothy Treadwell in Alaska. ,The circumstances of both deaths, both widely reported in the media, suggest that neither man had followed the six simple rules of ‘bear etiquette’ summarized by Russell and Enns at the end of this book.
The statistics regarding grizzly bear killings of humans—and vice versa—support Russell and Enns’ approach. The prize-winning documentary which updates Russell and Enns’ project in 2007 begins with this comparison: “In the past 100 years 91 humans have been killed by grizzly bears …but…200,000 grizzly bears have been killed by man.
In the four years of grizzly/human interactions covered by this diary-style book, Rosie, Chico and Biscuit and the cubs which follow them as the project continues never exhibit the vicious behaviors which Vitaly attempts to push them into, which he tempts by his own acts, and which others expect. Russell summarizes:
“In terms of our project, not only did the feeding program give us live bears to study, it provided very important proof that bears can be fed, in a carefully controlled way, without making them dangerous. If you took away everything else that we had learned and threw it away, that one point was enough to justify a change in how to deal with natural food shortages among wild bears.
These changes are already occurring: Roadkill is now helipcoptered up to grizzly bears as they emerge from hibernation in parts of Canada and Montana in order to preclude the bears from becoming roadkill themselves as they leave their dens in the mountains to forage in the foothills near highways and developed areas.
Even if one has never been interested in grizzly bears, Russia or the co-existence questions raised by Russell and Enns, this book is a page-turner. It is written in the form of diary entries from either Russell or Enns, depending upon which one is most involved in the action. Writing this review took extra long because in the midst of fact-checking, I kept pausing to re-read long portions--it is that engaging.
Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka, by Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, 2002, is now available via Amazon Kindle at $19.99. Used hardcover and paperback editions are also offered by third-party sellers on Amazon.
To learn more about Charlie Russell and his current outreach on behalf of grizzly bears, readers can go to his website, “charlierussellbears.com”. He will be speaking in Calgary in March 2017, in Grande Prairie, Alberta on April 22 at the Swan Festival; and in Faro, Yukon on May 5, 2017.
To view the documentary featuring Charlie Russell and the grizzlies in Russia, look for “The Edge of Eden: Living with Grizzlies” filmed and narrated by Jeff Turner. It more than deserves the awards accorded to it in 2007, and may change forever the way you view grizzly bears. As of this writing, it has been made available online via Culture Unplugged Studios (cultureunplugged.com) via this link:
“http://www.cultureunplugged.com/docum...”
To take immediate action on behalf of grizzly bears, check out The Vital Ground Foundation (vitalground.org), which seeks out the right places to enable grizzlies’ safe passage among the protected, private and developed areas of the their remaining habitat in the western USA. Vital Ground’s mission of connecting grizzly habitats includes grants to organizations which implement methods of co-existence with grizzly bears.
September 11, 2019
The first chapter of this book really rubbed me the wrong way, and I almost threw it at the wall. Charlie Russell was an outfitter/adventurer/self-proclaimed-naturalist (with no actual credentials other than growing up in the bush) who thought he knew better than scientists on the subject of human/grizzly bear interactions. Some of the interactions he described in the first chapter, along with his arrogance, made me cringe. This book describes how he put his theories to the test in a remote area of eastern Russia, where the bears had had little contact with humans due to restricted access during the Cold War. I was skeptical, but he grew on me. I truly enjoyed his descriptions of the area, and the adventures that he and his partner had raising orphaned grizzly cubs. Some of his ideas did actually bear fruit, and he definitely did add to the body of knowledge about grizzlies. He and his partner found ways to safely exist in an area where bear encounters were daily occurrences, and actually made friends with some of the wild bears. In a perfect world, people and grizzlies probably could live peacefully as he envisioned, but this is not a perfect world, and I am not convinced that any of this was in the bear's best interests. I definitely learned a lot about bear behavior, which I hope I never have to put to use. One of the most fascinating things for me was actually nothing to do with nature, but rather the look at the chaos and corruption of post-Soviet Russia, as the project began just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. This turned out to be a much better book than I was expecting, but that first chapter still bothers me, and he never completely lost his arrogance.
November 15, 2021
This was a fascinating, gripping story. It had a slow start and took awhile to find its focus, but it turned out to be very engaging. I don’t know much about bears, hunting, or poaching, and this book gave me a lot to think about. The myths/facts section in the last chapter is a great summary and the simple protocols (also in the last chapter) was particularly helpful.
I love this quote toward the end of the book -“Through the Cold War, the Russian bear was seen as aggressive and unpredictable, potentially violent at any moment. It was easy for the world to use this portrayal of the bear against Russia, because that’s what people thought of bears…I launched the idea that the new vision of a bear espoused by our project and Maureen’s art was an animal that was reasonable, intelligent, predictable, and sensitive, an animal with whom it was possible to coexist peacefully provided you treated it with respect” (346).
I love this quote toward the end of the book -“Through the Cold War, the Russian bear was seen as aggressive and unpredictable, potentially violent at any moment. It was easy for the world to use this portrayal of the bear against Russia, because that’s what people thought of bears…I launched the idea that the new vision of a bear espoused by our project and Maureen’s art was an animal that was reasonable, intelligent, predictable, and sensitive, an animal with whom it was possible to coexist peacefully provided you treated it with respect” (346).
November 11, 2019
A very personal tale of interaction with wild animals. Written by two strong and fascinating people.
March 16, 2023
Grizzly Heart, by Charlie Russell, (as well as Grizzly Country, by his dad, Andy Russell), will give you a love and fondness and fear and awe of Grizzlies.
December 16, 2023
De eerste helft van het boek vond ik wat saai, duurt een tijdje voordat het werkelijk over de beren gaat. Maar vanaf de adoptie van de drie welpen is het een leuk boek.
March 27, 2014
This was given to me by a friend.
I hate it when people give me books. I mean, obviously I love books as gifts, but I HATE it when people lend me books that they think I would enjoy, because
a) I have a very peculiar reading rhythm and it could easily take a year or longer until I am in the mood for a specific book;
b) most people's reading tastes (well, most people I know in real life) are completely different from mine (no, I don't read YA. No, I don't want your John Greene. No matter how much you like it. The story sounds incredibly boring for anyone over the age of 25.)
c) I fell compelled to read those book fast, because it would be impolite to keep a borrowed book for more than two-or three weeks
d) what kind of people share their books anyway? Those are precious babies!
(ok, that's exaggerating a little. I would let people read my books, I HAVE let people read my books. I like to share the love. But still, precious babies. Besides, what if I LIKE the book? Then I want to keep it. It's like, a part of me. It belongs to me. It wants to stay with me.)
Anyway.
The friend who gave me this is actually a very good friend. And she wasn't too far off - I probably would have liked this book. It's about this guy who lives in Kamchatka (which is about as far away from Moscow as you can be while still being in Russia) with his wife and bears.
He's like the bear whisperer.
Which sounds and is interesting, and it's not too badly written. The only issue I have with this book is his relationship with bears. I have HUGE issues with anthropomorphizing animals. Bears are bears. Period. Bears are not bears who feel anything for you. They are not human. They don't feel like humans. ANYthing a bear does can be explained by "bear-behaviour". There is absolutely no need to pretend that the bear thinks or feels like a human, because it doesn't.
And it is my firm conviction, that we should appreciate and protect bears for just what they are - bears. (that goes for every animal of course)
They aren't worth more to me because you are trying to convince me that they are NOT vicious killers. Or course they are not! They are bears! they may kill you, or they may not. I really don't care, cause if they do, that's what bears do. And if they don't, that's what bears don't.
What I'm trying to say is that by focusing so much on the aspect of his "friendship" with bears, the author gives off the impression that only those bears that become friends are good bears, are bears worht protecting. And that's just wrong. We cannot let an animals ability to get along with humans determine if that animal is worth protecting or not. We HAVE to believe that the world is a better place if we protect all creatures, no matter how cute or peaceful or harmless.
And we have to act on that belief.
Sadly, many people don't. You'll always get more money for the protection of cute and fluffly tiger cubs or wise and majestic elephants than for the protection of that particular dangerous slimy looking sea creature whose name you can't remember and that you possibly stepped on last year in the carribean and it fucking HURT!
So I kinda get why the author does it. It's a concept that workds, for many people.
Didn't work me though.
I hate it when people give me books. I mean, obviously I love books as gifts, but I HATE it when people lend me books that they think I would enjoy, because
a) I have a very peculiar reading rhythm and it could easily take a year or longer until I am in the mood for a specific book;
b) most people's reading tastes (well, most people I know in real life) are completely different from mine (no, I don't read YA. No, I don't want your John Greene. No matter how much you like it. The story sounds incredibly boring for anyone over the age of 25.)
c) I fell compelled to read those book fast, because it would be impolite to keep a borrowed book for more than two-or three weeks
d) what kind of people share their books anyway? Those are precious babies!
(ok, that's exaggerating a little. I would let people read my books, I HAVE let people read my books. I like to share the love. But still, precious babies. Besides, what if I LIKE the book? Then I want to keep it. It's like, a part of me. It belongs to me. It wants to stay with me.)
Anyway.
The friend who gave me this is actually a very good friend. And she wasn't too far off - I probably would have liked this book. It's about this guy who lives in Kamchatka (which is about as far away from Moscow as you can be while still being in Russia) with his wife and bears.
He's like the bear whisperer.
Which sounds and is interesting, and it's not too badly written. The only issue I have with this book is his relationship with bears. I have HUGE issues with anthropomorphizing animals. Bears are bears. Period. Bears are not bears who feel anything for you. They are not human. They don't feel like humans. ANYthing a bear does can be explained by "bear-behaviour". There is absolutely no need to pretend that the bear thinks or feels like a human, because it doesn't.
And it is my firm conviction, that we should appreciate and protect bears for just what they are - bears. (that goes for every animal of course)
They aren't worth more to me because you are trying to convince me that they are NOT vicious killers. Or course they are not! They are bears! they may kill you, or they may not. I really don't care, cause if they do, that's what bears do. And if they don't, that's what bears don't.
What I'm trying to say is that by focusing so much on the aspect of his "friendship" with bears, the author gives off the impression that only those bears that become friends are good bears, are bears worht protecting. And that's just wrong. We cannot let an animals ability to get along with humans determine if that animal is worth protecting or not. We HAVE to believe that the world is a better place if we protect all creatures, no matter how cute or peaceful or harmless.
And we have to act on that belief.
Sadly, many people don't. You'll always get more money for the protection of cute and fluffly tiger cubs or wise and majestic elephants than for the protection of that particular dangerous slimy looking sea creature whose name you can't remember and that you possibly stepped on last year in the carribean and it fucking HURT!
So I kinda get why the author does it. It's a concept that workds, for many people.
Didn't work me though.
April 18, 2008
Wow! This guy has an amazing understanding of animals and nature. We could all learn a lot from him. I want to have bear friends too!
April 16, 2013
Amazing Book, Charlie knows bears, I could not put this book down, one of my all time favourites.
August 21, 2013
Loved this book. A true joy to read. Made me wish I were in the author's shoes. What an amazing experience Russell had with the brown bears of Kamchatka.
August 17, 2016
Fascinating story of a couple that challenged the conventional views on protocols for interacting with grizzly bears.
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