A ratty-looking black bear
A retired school teacher has been feeding brown and black bears at a remote cabin site northwest of Anchorage. The bruins line up at dinner time and even permit people to pet them. Sows apparently allow the cubs to play with humans. Bears paw visitors with the friendliness of gigantic labradors.
Craig Medred’s story on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News — accompanied by a gallery of photos so bizarre that you might assume they were photo-shopped — describes the world of Charlie Vandergaw and the discomfort his behavior causes local wildlife managers.
Medred writes:
What goes on each summer at Vandergaw’s remote homestead is so far from the ordinary as to be almost unbelievable. Visitors tell of him petting black and brown bears, playing with grizzly cubs while sows stand by, sitting on bears and teaching them tricks. His own photographs show even more. They capture him easing to within feet of breeding grizzlies and nursing an injured brown bear.
It’s not difficult to take the wrong lesson from Vandergaw’s little Eden. The Mission that God gave bears is simple: Get as fat as possible before it snows. These intelligent omnivores ramble through the forest and shore in search of edibles and usually avoid people, unless they’ve learned to scarf down garbage, bird seed and pet food, or stumble into sudden contact.
Bears have evolved the capacity to tolerate one another for brief periods at sites with plentiful food. The phenomena of brown bears feeding at salmon streams only yards from each other, such as McNeil River and Pack Creek, occurs because they can all fill their bellies with protein with little effort.
On Alaska’s North Slope, brown bears and polar bears have converged to feed on carcasses of bowhead whales discarded by Native whaling crews. At salmon streams in Southcentral Alaska, bears will emerge from the brush to snatch spawners or guts even when scores of anglers stand nearby.
This is a game of odds, one that leads to maimed people and dead wildlife. A riled brown bear can erupt into motion at 35 mph. If it chooses, it can slash and kill a fragile human faster than it takes to read these words. While black bears can often be driven off by people, thanks to their lower position in the forest food chain, they are also capable of maiming or killing. (Black bears have been known to prey on people.)
Would you enter a yard full of gigantic free-roaming wild dogs? You might be able to walk the centerline of a freeway with high speed traffic hurtling past only inches from your body, but sooner or later, a car might veer.