Alaska Department of Fish and Game photo
The man who survived the bear obsession
In an illustration of how fleeting fame in these days of internet immediacy, bear man Charles E. “Charlie” Vandergaw died almost unnoticed in Anchorage last month.
Known to most, aside from family and friends, only as Charlie, the passing of one Charles Vandergaw enjoyed no greater notice in a city where Charlie had occupied the public spotlight a decade ago.
He was the talk of the town when he and that bear, one of dozens he “befriended” over the years, made the front page of the News. Deep down, Charlie knew people couldn’t truly befriend bears, but he also couldn’t overcome his urge to tame and train them.
That urge may be something evolution left embedded in us all, given the large number of once-wild animals humans domesticated over the centuries, from sheep to cattle to cats and the dogs that once threatened our ancestors as wild wolves. This urge lingers to this day in the compulsion to feed wild animals.
Most people stick to throwing popcorn to ducks or almost anything to seagulls. Charlie took the animal feeding way, way behind that.
No Timothy Treadwell
I first met Charlie face-to-face in the late summer of 2006, and I’d like to think I played some role in his surviving to the ripe old age of 86. When we met, he was a 68-year-old man playing dangerous games with black and grizzly bears in a remote area 50 miles northwest of Alaska’s largest city.
The games were getting only more dangerous by the year as Charlie aged. He confessed he had been several times injured by his bear “friends,” added that he’d always managed to get control of the situation and fend them off, but admitted that this was getting harder with age.
A former bear hunter who became a bear “whisperer,” as the national media said of the bear-eaten Treadwell, Charlie had by then begun to take extra precautions.. He’d put an electric fence around his cabin to ensure he had a bear-safe refuge if need be, and he had come to recognize that there were some bears beyond human control by voice, posture or other non-violent means.
Had Timmy Treadwell learned the latter lesson and incorporated the former safety precaution, he’d likely be alive today. Timmy, in Charlie’s view, was an incompetent and misguided boob from California.
Charlie was confident he was smarter and more capable than Timmy. I wasn’t so sure.
Two dead
Three years before Charlie and I met, I had been deeply involved in investigating the antics and eventual death of supposed “bear whisperer” Timmy and girlfriend Amie Huguenard in Katmai National Park and Preserve in remote Western Alaska.
An “amateur bear expert” in the view of The Seattle Times and The Malibu Times, 46-year-old Timmy was, in reality, a failed actor still harboring a burning desire to be a celebrity, and a man who had come to believe he could communicate with wild bears in the way others interact with their dogs. He was not the first to believe he had this gift, and he is surely not to be the last.
By the early 1990s, his focus had firmly shifted to the big, naturally well-fed, coastal brownies that live there in Katmai National Park. He was destined to spend 13 summers journeying north from California to hang out with these bears.
Treadwell’s Katmai antics with the grizzlies he treated as oversized pets, his photos and the film he recorded of their encounters, and his false claim to spending the summers in Katmai saving the bears from hunters and poachers played well in California despite the fact that there were no hunters or poachers in the national park.
Still, Treadwell managed to sell this story and make it his job as he traveled around the country giving bear talks.
Part performance artist, part bear activist, part bear educator and hugely capable conman, he also cultivated acquaintances with environmentally active actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Pierce Brosnan, among others, and in 1995 convinced then Malibu film producer Peter Dixon and his wife, Sarah, to produce a documentary titled “In the Land of the Grizzlies.”
“We were the first people he agreed to take into his world of bears,” Dixon said after Treadwell’s death. “Timothy had just finished his first or second summer with the bears and realized he needed exposure if he was to continue his odyssey….Of course, Timothy envisioned the film to be about him and his bears. That began a give-and-take minor conflict, (but) he was mature enough to realize that he wasn’t a media star.”
Treadwell was, however, working on becoming a media star. In the Land of the Grizzlies was eventually renamed “The Man Who Loves Bears” and aired on television as a World of Audubon Special. The Los Angeles Times described it as a film about “A Bear’s Best Friend: Timothy Treadwell says a grizzly saved his life – so he is trying to return the favor. Armed with photos and lectures, he has dedicated himself to their preservation.”
Times reporter Leslie Schwartz swallowed whole a Treadwell story about how a man “doomed to live a short life of drinking, dodging barroom brawls and drying out from time to time in the woods” met a grizzly bear in the Alaska wilderness that produced a “fleeting moment that was just magic” and turned Treadwell into “an expert on the world’s largest terrestrial carnivore, the Alaskan grizzly, which can weigh 1,500 pounds and kill a person with a single swipe of its massive paw.”
Bears are not carnivores; they are omnivores, and though they could probably kill someone with a swipe of a massive paw, the people killed by bears usually die while in the process of being eaten.
Timmy’s death
“Bears,” a bear biologist friend once observed, “don’t kill; they eat.”
It is not a pleasant way to go as Timmy himself would eventually discover, and as would be recorded on an audio-tape of his death found on a videocamera left running with its lenses covered the night he and Huguenard were attacked.
Timmy’s years of luck with Katmai grizzlies ended with his screaming at Huguenard to hit the bear with a pan, the only weapon of self-defense the couple had with them. Others more familiar with Katmai bears than Timmy would later say he made a colossal error in not leaving the Hallo Bay area at the end of summer when he usually did, but instead staying into the fall when some Katmai bears enter a potentially dangerous state of hyperphagia.
Timmy’s favored “weapon” – a song – proved useless against such a bear.
“Singing, ” the gullible Schwartz had earlier reported, “is the only weapon Treadwell uses to placate a bear that exhibits any of the 21 basic warning signs of anger – signs Treadwell has carefully memorized. In one close call, Treadwell tells (a) class (of Malibu school children), a young male approached him with his fur raised up in angry points on his back, snarling. But Treadwell managed to pacify the animal by singing a rhyme he made up on the spot.
“Remarkably, during this encounter, Treadwell maintained a steady enough hand to snap his camera. The result is a series of amazing pictures showing how the angry adversary was lullabied into passivity. In the final slide, the bear sleeps peacefully only a few feet away. And Treadwell tells the class that he felt so secure he laid down beside the bear to catch of few Zs of his own.”
In the wake of Schwartz’s Times story and the Audubon-backed movie, Timmy and friend Jewel Pavolak started a non-profit organization called “Grizzly People,” run out of a post-office box in Malibu, and in 1997, co-authored a semi-fictional book titled “Among Grizzlies: Living with Wild Bears in Alaska.”
Born Tim Dexter to middle-class parents in Long Island, N.Y., he had changed his name to Treadwell and claimed to have been reared by parents who “loved me and did the best they could” until he became a juvenile delinquent and his “home life disintegrated.”
“In my chaotic state,” he wrote, “abandoning my family was the best gift I could give them.”
After his death, his mother dismissed that as a self-serving fiction, saying that though Timmy and his family had their ups and downs, as families do, he’d always stayed in touch and they talked regularly.
His early life would also prove to have been pretty normal up through his college years at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., which he abandoned for California and a dream of becoming a celebrity.
In the years that followed, he never quite reached the heights of celebrity that he hoped for, but in 2001 he did make it onto The David Letterman Show to talk about his life while hanging out with the big “party animals” of Katmai that he was still allegedly protecting from non-existent hunters and imaginary poachers.
Charlie, a former bear hunter who spent most of his working life teaching science for the Anchorage school district and coaching wrestlers, was a far more grounded individual than Timmy. Charlie was confident the only reason the Californian ended up dead in the jaws of a grizzly because he was an incompetent nut-job.
But now I’m getting ahead of Charlie’s story.
Bear Land
My first encounter with the man I would come to know as Charlie Vandergaw came in the form of a photograph sometime in the early 2000s. A recently divorced woman one day showed up at the Daily News with a photo of her young son posing within touching distance of a black bear standing next to him on its hind legs.
She had discovered the photos in her son’s room and questioned him about it. He then confessed to visiting a “bear farm” with his father, the woman’s ex-husband.
She wanted to know if I thought it safe for her child to be hanging around with bears like this. I was then the outdoor editor of the Daily News and had been for almost two decades. I’d spent a fair bit of time around bears in that time and, unfortunately, became news myself when in 1992 I was forced to shoot a grizzly bear that ran over me, clawed me in the face, and sank its teeth into my leg.
Up until that happened, having faced down a number of bears, I was of the view that all bear charges would turn out to be bluffs if a man stood his ground and showed no fear. I still largely believe that, but there are clearly bears that beg to differ.
I told the woman I didn’t think it safe for her son to hang out with bears, advised her to tell her ex to put an end to it, and asked her if she knew the location of this “bear farm.” She said she didn’t, but thought it was somewhere north of Anchorage.
Thus began a hunt that would go on for years only to lead to the discovery that a whole lot of folks – among them Alaska public officials and politicians – knew of and had visited the farm. Charlie, as it turned out, had been feeding bears and cultivating them as “pets” for a long, long time, and inviting people to his cabin to watch the show put on by his trained animals.
As it turned out, the woman’s ex-husband and her son were just two among many Charlie invited to the farm. I didn’t get an invitation. But then again, I didn’t ask for one. I was confident it wouldn’t be extended.
When Daily News photographer Bob Hallinen and I showed up at Charlie’s wilderness retreat to investigate what was going on there, it was as uninvited guests. We came in a chartered floatplane that landed on a lake near his cabin.
‘Bear Haven’
Along with the pilot, we got out of the plane and started up an all-terrain vehicle trail to Charlie’s cabin. It became immediately obvious to me we were following a route heavily trampled by bears, and the beariness of the place became even more obvious when we reached the dug up, largely vegetation-free clearing around Charlie’s retreat.
As we stepped into that clearing, Charlie himself came marching over from his cabin with a black bear following along like a well-trained dog. Saying that Charlie was not happy to see us would be an understatement. I told him who I was, and his response was, “I know who you are.”
It was voiced in a most unfriendly manner just before he told us to get the hell off his property.
His face was red, and he looked ready to do battle. The pilot turned around and hot-footed it back to the airplane. Hallinen stood his ground behind me, not sure what to do, while Charlie and I engaged in what would be politely called a heated discussion.
I don’t remember what all was said, but I do remember Charlie stopping in the middle of this to bark “Don’t let that bear lick your lens!” at Hallinen, who looked more than a little uncomfortable.
My reporting from the time recounts Charlie saying “I’m not looking for notoriety. My talking to you is not going to solve any of the problems you’re going to create.”
I confess to soft-pedaling my response at the time by writing that I then convinced him that “his love affair with the bears had become so widely known it could no longer be hidden.”
What actually happened is that I rather pointedly told Charlie this: “I’ve seen enough. We can leave now, and I can go back and write a story that totally f—s you, or we can sit down and talk, and I will write a story that is as fair to you as it can be.”
Charlie at that point, gave in and invited us into his cabin. For those interested in the original story, an abbreviated version of it can still be found here: http://www.sitnews.us/0407news/042107/042107_shns_bearwhisper.html
What took place in Charlie’s cabin in the hours that followed that invite was one of the most interesting experiences of my life. Charlie opened his computer and began to show us his voluminous file of bear photos.
Some of the pictures bordered on unbelievable. In one, judging by the depth of vision found in wide-angle camera lenses, it was obvious he had to have been a couple of feet from a pair of mating grizzly bears. Their big, blocky heads filled the entire frame of the photo with none of the softening of an image you see in the background of a photo taken using a normal or long lenses.
To get these sorts of photos, Charlie very patiently explained, you needed to know the bears very well because not all bears will cooperate and not all bears can be trusted. Charlie himself was convinced he could always spot the ones that could be trusted.
I wasn’t so sure. Treadwell had thought the same thing right up until a bear ate him.
And the fact that Charlie had his cabin surrounded by that electric fence, which he admitted was there to create a bear-safe place if necessary, made me think that Charlie himself wasn’t wholly convinced he could always spot the bears that couldn’t be trusted.
Still, he insisted he was no Treadwell right up until Hallinen and I prepared to leave and Charlie broke down in tears on the deck of the cabin.
“Actually, it’s a sickness I have,” he said, before adding that maybe it would be better if he ended up like Treadwell.
I was troubled enough by that last statement that as soon as I got back to Anchorage, I called his daughter Leslie, then a principal working for the Anchorage School District, and told her I was worried her father might commit suicide and asked her to send someone out to the cabin to check on him.
I barely mentioned her in the story I later wrote, though I now admit to having been deeply troubled by the idea that a high school principal, who spent time with the bears at the bear farm as a kid, would fail to put an end to her father allowing other children to be brought there.
If adults choose to expose themselves to danger, it’s fine by me, but exposing children to danger is not OK, and bears are always potentially dangerous. They do not domesticate well, as an Animal Planet photographer later pulled out of a tree and dragged around the yard by a bear at Charlie’s would discover.
Photographer Richard Terry had been invited to what Charlie was calling “Bear Haven” after Charlie launched a public-relations campaign to save his farm in the wake of the Daily News story. Charlie thought he could pressure state wildlife officials into backing off the efforts they began to shut down the operation after that 2007 story.
Negotiations
In the wake of the original story, they talked to Charlie and agreed to overlook the massive bear-feeing operation he had been conducting in order to train his bears if he stopped the feeding bears, a violation of state law. Charlie agreed to stop, but didn’t.
He well understood some of the bears would eventually stop coming to the cabin if he didn’t feed them, and some might still come and then get unruly when they showed up only to find the free-lunch counter closed. He also had some delusions of turning the bear farm into a bear research operation.
Over the years, Charlie had spent thousands of hours watching bears and had some interesting observations on their behaviour. He argued that although wildlife biologists believe grizzly bears always dominant over black bears, he had seen the opposite in his yard. It led him to the conclusion the biologists had a few things to learn.
The problem with his reasoning was that food-conditioned animals behave differently from wild animals. I’ve seen little dogs become dominant over big dogs in many an American home. This is not seen in the wild. Wolves don’t cow-tow to coyotes or foxes. It just doesn’t happen.
There was no good reason for state wildlife biologists to partner with Charlie at what he was calling Bear Haven, and so they didn’t. But Charlie couldn’t let go.
Despite his agreement to stop feeding bears, the dog food kept flowing to the farm.
The state eventually found out about that, and in 2009 charged Charlie with 20 counts of illegally feeding wildlife. The state that year documented associates of Charlie purchasing more than 10,000 pounds of dog food, plus 844 pounds of WalMart cookies, to be flow to Bear Haven for Charlie to use in his continued food-conditioning of bears.
This was the beginning of the end for Charlie.
After the charges were filed, the state seized the Super Cub airplane Charlie had been using to fly the dog food out of Anchorage. That cut off his main means of access to his remote property. Charlie tried to fight the charges, but eventually gave up. State court files record that he pleaded guilty to one count of illegally feeding wildlife and paid a $20,000 fine.
The plea deal did allow him to get his Super Cub back. He was by then 72 years old and at age to retire as a bear trainer. There were reports of Charlie continuing to cavort with some of “his” bears in the years that followed, but the big, bear training operation he had run was over.
There was to be no Treadewellesque end to Charlie’s life. Instead, he spent his later years marketing photos and posters of his ursine friends from back in days at Bear Haven. His photography – some of which is very, very good – is now destined to prove his lasting legacy as one of Alaska’s once most notorious bear men with the title of “bear whisperer” waiting to be passed on to the next person with the crazy notion they can make friends of bears.
It is an alluring and dangerous delusion for some who spend time around those big “party animals” that sometimes look and act so much like dogs.
Although I recognize that more people are killed by Black Bears, Grizzlies IMHO are generally more dangerous than Brown Bears. They are less well fed and seem to be on edge and to a greater extent, unpredictable.
As I reread this, I laughed and thought, “All bears, like all humans, are unpredictable”.