Charlie Russell

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Charlie Russell is a Canadian naturalist famous for his study of grizzly bears. He is the son of the well known hunter, guide, film maker, and naturalist Andy Russell.

Charlie Russell grew up on Alberta's Rocky mountains in the Pincher Creek area just outside of Waterton Lakes National Park. He has lived in the Rockies since he was very young, due to his father's fascination with nature, and grew up around a variety of wildlife, including bears. He has studied and mothered orphaned brown bears in Kamchatka, Russia. Russell's presence in Kamchatka has been sanctioned by the Russian government in an effort to stop the poaching that kills many bears in the area. Bears have become prize trophies for foreign hunters and bear body parts are in high demand by the Asian traditional medicine trade. Russell insists that bears are misunderstood and are not as dangerous to humans as is commonly thought. He sees his work more as sociological than biological. He has shown that bears are capable of having non-problematic relationships with humans as long as they are treated with respect. Russell and his bears have been the subject of the BBC documentary Bear Man of Kamchatka which has also been shown on cable TV in the USA and on Doc Zone in Canada, where it was renamed The Edge of Eden: Living with Grizzlies.

[edit] Bibliography

• Spirit Bear: Encounters with the White Bear of the Western Rainforest
• Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka
• Learning to Be Wild: Raising Orphan Grizzlies

[edit] Links

http://cloudline.org/ -- Charlie Russell's website