October 8, 2003
DON'T POKE THE BEAR!
A California filmmaker and book author who was famous for heading up to Alaska's remote Katmai coast to hang out with bears, fell victim over the weekend to the animals his website says he loved so much. Alaska State Troopers and National Park Service officials report that Timothy Treadwell, 46, and girlfriend Amie Huguenard, 37 (she's from Boulder, Colorado, by the way), were killed and partially eaten by bears near Kaflia Bay, about 300 miles southwest of Anchorage, over the weekend. People who study brown bears professionally -- namely scientists and NPS officials -- had warned Treadwell for quite some time now that he needed to be more careful around the powerful and unpredictable bears (which are closely related to Grizzly bears).
Treadwell's films of up-close encounters with bears brought him a boat-load of media attention. The guy would routinely get up close to bears and chant "I love you'' in a high-pitched, sing-song voice, and was the subject of a show on the Discovery Channel and a report on "Dateline NBC." Blond, good-looking and charismatic, he appeared on The David Letterman show and The Rosie O'Donnell Show to talk about "his" bears, which he even gave names to: Booble, Aunt Melissa, Mr. Chocolate, Freckles and Molly, among others.
What led up to the Alaska bear attack...
... as well as when it happened, is not exactly known (but I'm sure there will be a Jon Krakauer book on it soon enough). The bodies of Treadwell and Huguenard, a physician's assistant from Boulder, were discovered Monday by the pilot of a Kodiak air taxi who arrived at their camp to take them back into town.
According to various accounts, the pilot was met by a charging brown bear, which forced him back to his floatplane. Authorities said he took off and buzzed the bear several times in an effort to drive it out of the area, but it would not leave the campsite established by Treadwell and Huguenard. When the pilot spotted the bear apparently sitting on the remains of a human, authorities said, he flew back to the lake, landed, beached his plane some distance from the camp and called for help from troopers and the Park Service.
Interviews with sources who were on the scene, as reported by a newspaper, provided this account:
Park rangers were the first to arrive. They hiked from the beach toward a knob above the camp hoping to be able to survey the scene from a distance. They had no sooner reached the top of the knob, however, than they were charged by a large brown bear.
It was shot and killed at a distance of about 12 feet. The Andrew Air pilot, according to Bruce Bartley of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, was convinced the large boar with the ratty hide was the same animal he'd tried to buzz out of the campsite. The boar was described as an underweight, old male with rotting teeth.
Authorities do not know if it was the bear that killed Treadwell and Huguenard. They were to fly to the site on Tuesday to search the animal's stomach for human remains but were prevented from doing so by bad weather.
After shooting that bear, rangers and troopers who had by then arrived walked down to the campsite and undertook the task of gathering the remains of the two campers. While they were there, another large boar grizzly went through the campsite but largely ignored the humans.
A smaller, sub-adult that appeared later, however, seemed to be stalking the group. Rangers and troopers shot and killed it also.
Posted by Mikal at October 8, 2003 5:23 AM
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